12/2/2024 was our first full day in Madagascar. We arrived late last night after a long flight with a short layover in Paris. My first impression while landing was that I did not see very many lights and figured that it must have been due to cloud cover, but that was not the case – it turns out that Antananarivo has frequent power outages. After getting through customs, we found our driver waiting for us. His name is Charlie and he spoke very good English (having lived four years in New Jersey). We stayed the night at the Novatel Hotel – a four-star hotel which was very nice. Nevertheless, I still got less than 5 hours of sleep.

After an obscenely large breakfast, we hit the road to Andasibe. The drive is only 90 miles, but the drive took most of the day due to the roads.  The roads were mostly OK, except for when they were not. From time-to-time huge potholes would occur (sometimes it seemed like one endless pothole), and in some places the road was completely washed out. Regardless of this being the main highway from Antananarivo to the East coast of Madagascar, the road was very narrow and there was not a lot of traffic. Most of the traffic were trucks, and as the road had many curves, this slowed us down.

These are some the pictures while driving through Antananarivo:

Every low area in the countryside has a rice paddy that is farmed by the locals. Sometimes these paddies are large, but often they are very small.  Slash and burn is common in the countryside as farmers make room for crops by burning down the entire mountainside (apparently the ash makes the ground more fertile). The amount of poverty was staggering.

These are some pictures that we took of the countryside:

We made three stops along the way. The first stop was at a rustic coffee shop in the hills near Saha Maintsoanala. There was a river running through it and it was very scenic.

The second stop was a chameleon reserve that had all kinds of chameleons and amphibians that we could look at (and even let crawl on us).

The third stop was at a nice outdoor restaurant just outside of Moramanga, where we ate lunch. They also had a nice souvenir shop where we spent some money.

The roads deteriorated after Moramanga. After we turned off the main road towards Andasibe, the views improved significantly as we skirted the Andasibe Reserve. From Andasibe, it’s an 8 kilometer drive to the Vakona Forest Lodge where we stayed.

The lodge is incredibly beautiful (although the rooms themselves were very small and not very nice). But even though I had only visited the jungle on a handful of occasions, I have always loved it. I was in heaven now that I was staying in the middle of it!

At night, we went on a hike led by a local guide who was extremely smart and could find small creatures 10 feet off the trail that were camouflaged. I have idea how he did it.

After the hike, we returned to the lodge where we ate an exquisite dinner served by a doting wait staff. It was a surreal contradiction of extremes.