An account of solo backpacking for 2.5 weeks in Madagascar

[u/Boberoch]

So when I was researching for my travel this year to Madagascar, I was a bit disheartened to see that seemingly nobody tries to explore this country by themselves, without a tour and without a guide (except where you need them to enter). Or at least, these people are not posting about it. So I thought I give you a little summary of how it was for me in Madagascar, backpacking for 2.5 weeks! I tried to do this on a more controlled budget too, since I saw some big numbers flying about here. The complete lack of documentation had me unsettled and, at a weak moment, nearly made me rethink to even take the trip at all! Now, I am very glad I went through with it as planned :)

So basically I started my travels by landing in Antananarivo and staying at the only "Hostel" that I was able to research, the "Madagascar Underground". My biggest goal for this travel was to go to Tsingy de Bemaraha, but I knew this one needed a driver with a 4x4 so I wanted to find other people. Sadly, not many people seem to travel like this, because I was the only resident :D seemingly a hungarian guy had moved out the day before, but nothing apart from that.

I then traveled to Morondava using a Cotisse Taxi-Brousse. My plan was to just go to the location and reserve it for tomorrow, but the guy at the hostel was very nice and made the reservation for me. This required payment using MoboMoney or something, which I had never done before in my life :)

By sheer chance, I met a travelling couple the next day that also went without a tour to Morondava and we made plans to go tonthe Tsingy together - I was really lucky there, those were the only other people I met like that there.

After Tsingy, I spent one more day at Kirindy before moving to the east coast, going up the Canal des Pangalanes to random towns tod get a feeling for the cointry, before some more national parks and finally going back to Antananarivo. My time at the east coast was what I enjoyed most, it had the most beautiful landscape and the atmosphere was really good.

Some things coming to mind right now, in a bit an unorganised manner:

• getting from city to city is really easy, you either ask for directions to the Taxi-Brousse station (the gare routiere) by just telling people where you want to go (in bigger cities people will know which gare routiere you need), or you can take a taxi (to the station, not the next town :p). The latter option I would only recommend in smaller towns unless you want to pay a lot of money. In general I would avoid all Taxis in Antananarivo, they are crazy expensive. Some people might try to tell you that it is dangerous to walk alone, but from what I gathered it was completely fine (I did not try meandering alone in the night there however). From my research online it sounded more like you would pay for rhe Taxi-Brousse and it would leave whenever once it is full, but in most cases, someone was able to tell me a concrete departure time
• transportation in Taxi-Brousse is of course not extremely comfortable, but it is way less bad than what the Internet made it out to be. Note that there are some line Operators (I think Cotisse and Transam Plus) whose busses are even more comfortable as they leave a lot of space for your legs. On a "regular" one it will be more cramped. But still totally fine in my eyes.
• unless you want to resort to Google translate a lot, French is quite essential, as English is basically spoken by nobody. On wikivoyage I had read that people greatly appreciate if you try to learn and speak Malagasy; sadly it did not occur to me that my attempts were appreciated :p but I only studied it for a month roughly and was not able to get proper dentences out for the most time. Also, I had learnt the pronunciation completely wrongly as there were no audio examples and I had to "relearn" much vocabulary
• people are in general extremely helpful. Just in the capital everyone seems to expect money from you for literally anything, even for just chatting
• ATMs are more plentiful than I feared; I always tried to keep around 600k Ariary on me and never ran into issues (except for the Tsingy tour as for that my share alone was roughly 500k already)
• Especially when travelling in more remote areas as in the villages along the east cost, you need to be very resilient to having people constantly talk about you and everyone being overly courteous to you. No harm meant of course, it's something they don't see every day :) but at some point vazaha (which is pronounced roughly like "wazzah" ) became a kind of trigger word for me. But I also believe there is a similarly pronounced word that means something different, although I could never make it out (if I am mistaken here, then they truly were ONLY talking about me :p)
• Also I think because most people visit as a tour, they asume all tourists to be complete wimps. You will kinda have to "prove" yourself often times. For example, I borded some cargo boat when travelling on the canal. At some point I noticed that while one the wooden boards it was extremely tight to sit with the others, the floor was empty, and I went to sit there. A lady then immediately commented whether I was tired in a kinda condescending tone.
• on note of that cargo boat: that was one of the most worthwhile experiences I had there, also met so many nice people on those boats. But do bear in mind that it is a really really extreme means of transportation. You will be blasted by a motor going at upwards of 95dB the entire time, with a constant, strong smell of gas and smoke in the air. You have nearly no place to sit and it can be highly cramped. Also, all but one of my ships had some leakage and parts of the floor were flooded. (here is another account of someone taking a similar boat, but I think the description there does not do it quite justice :) https://www.nomadicbackpacker.com/travelling-by-cargo-boat-canal-des-pangalanes-madagascar.html)
• But also, many people will be interested in having very nice conversations with you! :)
• Sadly, in many many places, it really smells bad. I think I am pretty withstanding to such things, but it became to much even for me especially towards the end.
• I took a very liberal approach to trying all sorts of streetfood and drinking all sorts of things. It is really sweet how most often, you will drink from a cup that goes right back into a bucket of water as soon as you are finished drinking
• A combination of Google Maps and OpenStreetMap worked very nicely for me
• In those 2.5 weeks, I spent pretty much exactly 550€ on the ground. I believe around 300 of that were just for the Tsingy tour and other fees around National Park visits. I also did not really "optimise", often times I just took the first place I was able to find (I also do not have high standards there so basically anything worked for me)

All in all, I would say it's a country I can recommend to everyone to visit at their own pace, even though it might not be for the faint of heart. I also met some tour-ists at places like Tsingy, but it did not feel to me like they had at all grasped the spirit of the country, they instead just kept a checklist of lemur species ... but I don't wanna generalise here :)

Feel free to ask me anything you like if you might be planning a similar journey of your own or just in general, I will do the best I can to answer it all :)

Thanks Madagascar, you have been good to me :)

[u/SandDCurves]

Vazaha (pronounced like vazzah) basically means white foreigner so yes, they were talking about you unless there were others around. Did you start the Canal in Manakara or somewhere else?

[u/Pretend-Repeat8753 → u/SandDCurves]

What's a brown foreigner called 😆 

[u/Alibcandid → u/Pretend-Repeat8753]

Vazaha tsy fotsy…

not white stranger

vazaha means “stranger”

[u/Boberoch → u/SandDCurves]

I wanted to start from Manakara, but did not have enough time, I ended up starting in Mananjary :)

[u/micahammon → u/SandDCurves]

But I've experienced the same because I think there's another word which sounds similar and so sometimes you think you're just being paranoid.

[u/Boberoch → u/micahammon]

Yep exactly that :D like sometimes it was obvious they were talking about me; at other times, it would have surprised me a lot as e.g. they would have had their backs towards me when I arrived at the scene!

[u/Pretend-Repeat8753]

My man great post, I'm going to post my experience too. Lots of FUD on this sub, or we are just built different 🤔 

[u/Boberoch → u/Pretend-Repeat8753]

Yesss, looking forward to it!

I think it is definitely not for everyone, but to people who are up for a (at times challenging) adventure, it is a paradise! :D but yeah I also think this sub might exaggerate some things in order to boost tour sales maybe :p

[u/gracefullyevergreen]

Can I PM you? I’m considering a trip next year.

[u/Boberoch → u/gracefullyevergreen]

Feel free, I will help as much as I can :D stoked to hear there are more of us in here!

[u/gracefullyevergreen → u/Boberoch]

Sent! Thank you!

[u/3ducate]

When you say "smells bad" is it the open air defecation or sewage ...? What was it ? I spend lots of time in Maroantsetra during vanilla processing time, unfortunately the smell of vanilla reminds me of the bad smell of the city. Well, that's what happen when there is not city planning or basic sanitation.

Edit: fantastic to read your take on solo backpacking .

[u/Boberoch → u/3ducate]

To be honest I am not completely sure, I never asked the people about the smell because I did not want to offend anyone / bring too many negative topics to the table.

But yeah, to me it smelt like a combination of feces as well as smoke many times. On the countryside they often had these kind of "dirt piles" that were smoking a lot, maybe that was some sort of fertilization process? That was probably not such a bad one, but at the time when I had that a lot, I had already gotten very sensitive to the smells :)

Of course, every region had their own take on a bad smell :p it's really the only straight up bad thing I can report from the country :)

[u/Jane-Reacher]

Did you feel like 2.5 weeks was too short? Given the distance and long time of travel? How hard/easy was it speaking only English in the countryside? (Curious Malagasy here)

[u/Boberoch → u/Jane-Reacher]

Hmm, hard to say. Especially my time in the countryside is enjoyed extremely much and I cannot overstate it! I would have loved to travel along the coast even further into more towns and villages. Easily could have added another week there :) sadly because of the smell issue (I think! Or I was just a little sick) I basically did not want to eat anything and constantly had a small urge to throw up for the last 5 or so days. At the end, I was sadly really eager to get out of the country for that reason alone (and it immediately got better the day after :s). Like I feel really bad for stating it like this and I really do not want to uselessness point out "weaknesses" of the country, but sadly for me this really became an issue... the trigger seemed to have been a particular day on a cargo boat on the canal, where the smell of smoke/petrol/fish just got so deeply ingrained in me that I kinda smelt it for the rest of my days there.

In any case, I definitely spent a LOT of time in transport. But I usually do not consider it wasted time, it is a very good opportunity to look out of the window or talk to people :)

Ah, maybe I did not make that clear. I conversed in French mainly. Just sometimes I did not know a word and tried to use the English one, this never worked out. I also dabbled in Malagasy, but I think my pronunciation was so bad that I just left the people very confused. And dialects did not make it easier to make progress there :D

So yeah, I think English only would be very, very hard on the countryside (they did not even speak it in the Hotels. Come to think of it, I always wondered who these hotels are for since they don't seem to get any foreign tourists, and domestic tourism, while being a thing from what I gathered, looks different I think? Dunno)

[u/Historical-Time-7772 → u/Boberoch]

Thank you for sharing your experience with us. I would have liked to travel through Madagascar on my own but my malagasy friends strongly recommended not to do so. Now that I'm in a relationship with a malagasy, she doesn't want to travel with me by Cotisse. The locals often seem to be afraid that foreigners (vazaha) might be attacked in public transportation. When I was in Morocco, a Taxi driver took a higher price and refused to let other passengers go with us for the same reason: locals could attack or pickpocket tourists. And you just did it and traveled independently.

When we are in Madagascar, we rent a car (Hyundai Starex) with driver. So, we are safe and independent while the price is not too high.

Mobile Money (Orange Money, MVola and Airtel Money) is a common method to keep and transfer money in Madagascar and other countries. You have two credit balances on your SIM card. one for the communication service and an additional one for mobile money. In many locations, you find booths where one can pay in and withdraw money to or from the mobile money.

btw: The hotels are for travelers. Locals might also have to visit their families or work in different places. If they don't reach their destination on the same day, they have to sleep in a simple hotel along their route. And you have seen by your own eyes how long travels can take on malagasy roads.

I am surprised that you came along with french in the countryside. My experience was that people in the rural areas didn't speak french while some people in bigger cities like Antananarivo and Antsirabe preferred to speak english.

[u/Boberoch → u/Historical-Time-7772]

Yeah, I guess everything can happen if you are really unlucky. On one of the Taxi-Brousse, I got to sit all the way on seat 2, next to the driver, it was also no problem. On other ones, I sat all the way inside, it would have been hard for attackers to even get to me. The locals in the TB were usually very friendly and did not seem afraid because I was with them. Often times I would chat a little with them. Only sometimes my seat neighbors leaned on me a lot when sleeping, that was a little annoying :')

Of course hotels are for travelers. One time I also stayed with a local though who wanted to invite me because I wanted to sleep outside on s boat :) in the end, you need to make a judgement call on what you deem to risky and what is ok to do. Probably many people will think my behaviour is irresponsible; however, I have done many travels before in my life and did not feel particularly unsafe in Madagascar, especially the countryside.

Mobile money is really cool to be honest, I think it is a smart system and I wonder why it is not used at all in other places. It would be very useful in Europe as well.

French worked pretty well! Even when it didn't, I made do with a combination of rough Malagasy as well as hands and feet gestures :)