Soleil des Tsingy

the best lodge in this remote tsingy location

Le Soleil des Tsingy is located in the Bemaraha area of western Madagascar.

Set in the village of Bekopaka to the west of the Tsingy de Bemaraha Reserve, this lodge is the best of a rather simple set of properties in the area.

Let us be clear, when visiting the west of Madagascar, the accommodation options are somewhere between basic and workable. This means that, even in relatively high cost trips, you will need to be at least forgiving, at worst quite hardy. This is not an easy area through which to travel.

The lodge is set on a large and rather pleasant plot (where Peter’s mouse lemurs can often be seen), tucked away in a quiet valley to the northeast of the main village.

It’s centred on a main building with bar and dining areas, leading out to a large infinity swimming pool, from where there are lovely views.

Rooms

Guest accommodation at Le Soleil des Tsingy is in 17 detached bungalows, each measuring 55 square metres, with a fan (but no air-conditioning) and private terrace with views.

Activities

Le Soleil des Tsingy provides access to the following activities…

• Hiking in the tsingy areas
• Canoe safari
• Cultural interaction

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 2-3 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.

very inconvenient to access, unless you charter a plane