Journey 01 · Madagascar
Madagascar, Tenth Parallel South
Highlands to the baobab coast
Published 25 Jul 2025 · Travelled 20 Jun – 6 Jul 2025
- 8 moments
- 17 days
- 578 km
- Summer
- Madagascar
- 25mm · f/8 · 1/320
- 19.8700° S, 47.0330° E
- Near Antsirabe
- 08:50
- 16°C, cool, mist lifting
Everyone pictures Madagascar as jungle and beach, and the RN7 spends its first two days proving them wrong: terraced rice in every valley, red-earth villages, mist that burns off by nine. From the pass above Antsirabe it could almost be home — which nobody tells you — until a zebu cart rounds the bend and it can't be anywhere else.
- 40mm · f/5.6 · 1/500
- 19.8730° S, 47.0310° E
- Antsirabe
- 11:30
Every Malagasy town has a wall that everyone meets in front of, and in Antsirabe it is the Tiko sign, faded to exactly the right blue. I waited across the road while motorbikes and pousse-pousse men crossed the frame, and a man selling phone credit told me the sign has looked like that his whole life. Some landmarks are official. This one is earned.
the pousse-pousse men quoted me the vazaha price. fair enough
- 40mm · f/4 · 1/250
- 21.2620° S, 47.4190° E
- Ranomafana
- 10:15
- 21°C, rainforest drip
Hery stopped the car on a forest bend near Ranomafana, walked back thirty metres, and returned with a leaf, and on the leaf, a chameleon smaller than my thumb. A Brookesia — among the smallest reptiles on earth, and it lives here and nowhere else. It gripped a ranger's fingertip like a keychain of itself while I burned forty frames on something the size of a stamp.
04 · Taxi-brousse arithmetic
- 150mm · f/4 · 1/1000
- 21.8530° S, 46.8440° E
- Anja Community Reserve
- 09:20
- 24°C, dry season sun
The ring-tailed lemurs of Anja live under a granite dome and receive visitors like minor royalty. This one held its seat on the rock and looked slightly past me the entire time, in the way of someone important being photographed at a function. Those orange eyes read as judgement. Fair: I did take four hundred pictures.
Overheard · Morondava · 06:50
"You came all this way for the trees?" — "And the lemurs." — "The trees don't run away. Better business." He has sold coffee at the corner by the baobab road for eleven years and has never once driven out to photograph them. They will still be there, he says. He is more right than any of us.
- 12mm · f/8 · 1/640
- 20.2510° S, 44.4180° E
- 12mm · f/8 · 1/640
- 20.2510° S, 44.4180° E
- Avenue of the Baobabs
- 16:10
- 29°C, dry heat, gold dust
The famous kilometre is not a monument, it is a road people live on. In the afternoon the trunks stand like a colonnade someone forgot to build a palace behind, and between them the traffic is zebu, bicycles, women with loads balanced better than my tripod ever is. I photographed the trees, then turned around and photographed the road being a road.
- Avenue of the Baobabs
- 17:55
- 27°C, clear, the good dust
- Last frame
At sunset the tour vehicles arrive and it does not matter at all. The light comes in flat off the rice paddies, the trunks go from grey to copper in about four minutes, and eight hundred years of tree stands against the sky like something that has seen empires of tourists come and go. I made the picture I had crossed an ocean for, then put the camera down and just stood in it.
- 12mm · f/8 · 1/200
- 20.2500° S, 44.4190° E
The route
8 stops
Journey completed
Seventeen days, eight stories
- Frames exposed
- 2140
- Lemur species
- 9
- Chameleons Hery spotted from a moving car
- 14
- Punctures
- 2
- Favourite moment
- The last light hitting the baobab trunks and turning the whole avenue to copper
- Best food
- Zebu skewers and rice at a tin-roof hotely in Antsirabe, twice in one day
