Our journey from Nosy Be to Antsiranana (also known as Diego Suarez or simply, Diego) was one seriously long travel day. We got up at the asscrack of dawn and were promptly picked up from our hotel and shuttled to the boat terminal at Hell-ville and lets just say, Hell-ville is a painfully apt name for this part of Nosy Be!
I know travellers do navigate this port and get on public passenger boats but I gotta be honest, unless you have a decent level of French language fluency, I truly don’t know how you’d do it. We had paid a bit extra to have a driver organise a private boat for us and for the extra bucks it was definitely worth it.
After about 30 minutes on the boat, we had arrived at the port of Ankify on mainland Madagascar. We had our local guide picking us up here which was good, but still quite stressful, we had porters loudly arguing and shouting over who would unload our suitcases and quite literally playing tug of war with Dad’s suitcase – to the point that it nearly fell into the bloody ocean!
What followed was a long and bumpy drive to this roadside restaurant next to the entrance to Ankarana National Park. It had been an exhausting 6 hours and we were definitely ready for lunch and an ice cold ‘coka’ (Coca-Cola).
Oh, and this next photo gives me the lols. We drove with the windows down most of the time due to the extreme heat and when you combine dusty roads with open windows you get a linen shirt that started out white and was rapidly turning brown.
After lunch it was time to venture into Ankarana National Park. We were given the option to do a short, medium or long walk – given the intense heat (was around 42 degrees Celsius/107 degrees fahrenheit) we opted for the medium walk, which was a good choice!
The walk itself wasn’t difficult but what was a complicating factor was a little thing called heat stroke. Now, as an Australian I probably should be immune to such nonsense, but alas I was not and the multiple vomits that occurred along the track courtesy of me were definitely not pretty.
But onwards we persevered!
The main attraction at Ankarana is the vast expanse of grey tsingy. A tsingy is a rare and naturally occurring formation of grey limestone rocks that form over millions of years. There are numerous tsingy in Madagascar, some are red in colour and some are light grey – the tsingy in Ankarana are very dark grey and thus absorb and exude a huge amount of heat – truly ideal when you have heat stroke – lel.
Despite me not feeling my best I couldn’t deny the sheer impressiveness of this spot.
After we left the tsingy and retreated to the lush shady part of the park, our guide started moving a lot more slowly and purposefully and seemed to very much be looking for something. After only a few minutes we were instructed to slowly and quietly follow him and our light-footed efforts were extremely well rewarded when we spotted this sweetie staring at us from up in a tree.
It’s amazing how much spotting some gorgeous wildlife can make any injury or ailment feel a whole lot better because suddenly I had significantly perked up; well, it was either the lemur or the drop in temperature that the shady forest provided, maybe a little of both!
We then spotted yet another gorgeous lemur through the trees! This sweetie was situated right in my eyeline which was all kinds of amazing. After posing for a few photos it climbed back up into the trees and it was time for us to start making our way back to the car, after all, we still had a long drive onwards to Antsiranana ahead of us.
Stay tuned for a not so great time in Antsiranana and a last minute change of travel plans!
Getting to Ankarana National Park: This NP is located a sort of halfway between Nosy Be and Antsiranana, it could be visited when travelling between the two places or is feasible to visit as a day trip from Nosy Be, although that would be one incredibly long day
Remember: Madagascar is infamous for its poor general infrastructure and bad roads are a common complaint amongst visitors – if you’re prone to motion sickness, pack meds and be prepared accordingly, and bring as much patience as you can muster – you will need it!
