Safari to Bemaraha

exciting trails with bridges and ladders

Set in the west of Madagascar, the Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park is one of the most iconic locations in the country.

The area contains some incredibly dramatic and impressive tsingy (eroded limestone) landscapes, which are accessed via a couple of exciting trails, with metal ladders and rope bridges enabling you to get to otherwise inaccessible canyons.

There is some extremely rare and endemic wildlife here, including the strikingly white Decken’s sifakas.

The Bemaraha area is unusually difficult to access and a trip here requires at least five nights, two of which are break stops on the very long and bumpy drive from the coastal town of Morondava.

However this journey does pass right through the famous Avenue of the Baobabs and the overnight stops are in the Kirindy area, which is arguably the best location for spotting fossas.

Although Bemaraha is one of our favourite locations in Madagascar, it tends to feature in a very low proportion of trips, due to its remoteness.

The usual stay duration is 3 nights.

Seasonality

The Bemaraha area is only accessible during the latter part of the dry season, Jun-Oct, when the roads have had plenty of time to dry out and become passable. We may be able to squeeze trips into late May and early November if needed.

The average daytime temperatures reach 21C/70F, with the average nighttime temperatures being around 14C/57F.

Getting there

There are two very different ways to access the Bemaraha area …

By road

The Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park is really quite remote and undeniably inconvenient to get to by road. However this does serve to keep the number of visitors down, which is a bonus.

The coastal town of Morondava is usually accessed from the capital Tana, but can also sometimes be reached from Tulear, further south on this same western coastline.

The journey from Morondava to Bemaraha is a gruelling ten hour drive along dirt roads and with a couple of pontoon river crossings. Although it is definitely possible to stop at the Avenue of the Baobabs, there is definitely no time to make a worthwhile visit to Kirindy on the way.

Some people resolve this by overnighting in the Kirindy area in both directions. But the accommodation in that area is so poor that we tend to stay in Morondava at each end.

If you do want to spend a decent amount of time at Kirindy, then we add an extra night at Morondava and do it as a day trip from there. That does mean driving up and down the same two hours stretch of road (twice in each direction in total), but it beats overnighting at what are nothing more than pack-packer hostels (and we love a nice simple camp if it’s properly run).

Arranging the trip in this way can seem so counterintuitive when you look on a map, that we will add a few more words of explanation. The road journey between Kirindy and Bemaraha is extremely unpredictable. The road conditions themselves can be truly atrocious and vary month to month. There are two pontoon river crossings, where we are totally at the whim of the boat operators, who may or may not be there and ready when we pull in, or they may want us to wait for ages until other vehicles turn up to fill the craft. Furthermore, for security reasons, we have to avoid travelling at night, which means we really need to be pulling in at the far end before 1800 hrs if we can. On a good day you end up asking what all the fuss was about, but on a bad day you scratch your head and wonder how there can still be a place on this earth which is so chaotic.

By air

It is also possible to charter a plane direct from Antananarivo to Bemaraha, which is incredibly convenient by comparison and also cuts out the potentially more touristy areas around Morondava.

It’s unavoidably expensive (although less so for groups of four or more) and it does mean that you will not get to either Kirindy or the (generally over-hyped) Avenue of the Baobabs, but this is definitely our preferred option.

In this case the usual stay duration is two nights, since we have time for the Little Tsingy on the day of arrival, the Great Tsingy the next day and a boat ride in the morning before departure. So what would have been a 5-6 night road trip gets massively trimmed, hopefully leaving you room to include another magical location in your trip.

Where to stay

There are a handful of lodges in and around the village of Bekopaka, just outside the western gate into the national park. It’s a close call, but the best of these is probably Le Soleil des Tsingy.

We usually recommend spending at least three nights here, which gives you two full days to take in the main hikes. A fourth night would give you some welcome time to rest after the long journey in, as well as explore the village and other lesser known routes.

very inconvenient to access, unless you charter a plane