Mandrare River Camp

encounters with ring-tailed lemurs

Mandrare River Camp is located around 100 km to the northwest of Fort Dauphin in the deep south of Madagascar.

Set within a small area of forest alongside the Mandrare River, the lodge is centred on a modest open-sided mess, leading out to a campfire area.

Rooms

Guest accommodation at Mandrare River Camp is in seven large tented suites, each with a substantial stone-built bathroom to the rear and a verandah overlooking the river. Each tent can accommodate an extra bed for a child.

Activities

Mandrare River Camp provides access to the following activities …

• Walking safari
• Beach picnics
• Cultural visits
• Night walking safari

The Mandrare area used to feature in trips quite often, but when the sister lodge out on the coast closed down, the reasons to travel all this way south were halved.

These days, you need to be pretty obsessed with ring-tailed lemurs to travel this far out of the way.

The usual stay duration is 3-4 nights.

Seasonality

The best time to visit the Mandrare area is generally considered to be May-Oct.

Rainfall is pretty consistent year round, at a relatively low 100mm/4” per month, mostly consisting of short tropical showers between prevailing sunny conditions. There is slightly lesser rain Aug-Oct, but probably not sufficiently different to affect trip planning.

The main issue is temperatures. For most of the year the peak daytime temperatures are around 25C/77F, with nighttime lows around 16C/61F.

However during the Nov-Apr period these temperatures can climb to 30C/86F and 24C/75F respectively. It’s those higher night time temperatures, along with potentially high humidities, that can make the experience a little but less comfortable.

The ring-tailed lemurs usually give birth in Sep-Oct, so there should be some cute babies around in the following months.

Getting there

The good news is that if you are intending to stay at Mandrare River Lodge, they operate their own plane from Antananarivo direct into the local airstrip at Ifotaka on a couple of days each week, from where it’s a short drive into camp. On departure the plane goes first to Fort Dauphin (in case you are combining with sister property Manafiafy Lodge), before returning to Antananarivo.

If you are planning to stay anywhere else, then it will be necessary to use the usual scheduled services into Fort Dauphin and endure the potentially rough drive of around 3-4 hours to the Mandrare area.

There is presently no viable option to connect these areas to the rest of the country by road, it’s just too tough.

a very long way to travel for just one lodge