Madagascar’s West - Baobabs, Boats, & More
The western coast, featuring the iconic baobaos, the landscapes of the Tsingy, fauna of Kirindy, and the shipbuilders of Belo Sur Mer.
After more than 10 years I had the chance to return to Madagascar in August of 2026. Having only visited the small island of Nosy Be in the north back then (with my grandmother, one of our last trips together and also when I shot my first real timelapse I think), this time I wanted to explore more of the country. Madagascar is home to more than 30 million people, and roughly the size of France, making it the fourth largest island in the world.
It’s partly for this reason that even over more than 3 weeks you can barely scratch its surface. The amount of places to see, the difficulty of reaching many of them, and the lack of infrastructure, also plays a role.
Nevertheless, I managed to cover both a few bits of the eastern side, as well as the western part, the subject of this blog: dry forest, baobabs, difficult roads, limestone and the sea.
After a late arrival in Antananarivo (or Tana for short, although by now I can spell and say the capital’s name), I had a short night in a hotel near the airport before making my way back to the domestic terminal, with the goal to head west towards Morondava. Driving would have been possible, and certainly interesting, but it’s a good 15h+ and there were a few things that I wanted to prioritise. From Morondava’s small airport, my amazing guide Zo from Madafocus (which helped me organise the entire trip and did a great job at that) and I drove straight to one of these priorities: the famous Baobab Avenue. I have more to share about this place and its famous trees, but on this cloudy morning it was a crowded affair owing to a marathon taking place along the dirt road. Unexpected! We continued further north…
Along the Road
But didn’t get very far - every few hundred meters I saw another beautiful scene of local life, such as people fishing in the ponds dotted through the dry landscape, zebu (the local cattle) herders and their carts making their way between villages, and the local kids, a dozen of which would appear out of nowhere anytime you stopped the car.
Although their objective was often likely to get sweets or money, I had plenty of pleasant encounters with curious people, and the occasional opportunity to take some photos - the yellow multi-purpose mask called masonjoany serves as sun protection, skin care, and occasional beauty tool for women.
There is a reason why the landscape here is often dotted with Baobabs, but not much else - many of these trees are associated with ancestors and serve spiritual purposes, and hence cutting them down is prohibited according to the local fady - a kind of ancient moral guideline governing many parts of life.
The same cannot be said for much of the other flora, making it fall victim to the agricultural needs of the growing population.
Kirindy Forest
Which brings me to my first actual destination: this small lodge inside the Kirindy Forest, part of a wider protected area, ensuring at least partial survival of the aforementioned flora (and faun). This dry forest area has been mostly spared from deforestation, or regrown as secondary forest, so the vegetation makes it home to a number of Madagascar’s endemic animal species…
… many of which you can only see at night. Evening walks with the torch were the best way to spot the tiny mouse lemur (one of the smallest primates in the world) or these mesites, which cuddle up in the trees at night.
In the early morning hours on the other hand, we encountered the critically endangered Verreaux’s sifaka, one of western Madagascar’s lemurs, moving through the dry forest to lick dew from the tree bark.
The endemic crested coua also made an appearance, with its distinct red eye.
More common sights are these brown lemurs living in groups, foraging on the ground or leaping from tree to tree. Owing to the rangers and tourists walking through the forest regularly, some of them are quite habituated, arguably too much so: they will drink water from someone’s hand if offered.
After another night walk, we headed back out to the edge of the forest where we had scouted a few lonely baobab trees during the day… It was around new moon, and I obviously couldn't resist getting some photos of these giants with our home galaxy. That turned out to be a challenge owing to the fact I had destroyed my primary wide angle lens on the way to Madagascar with no chance for a repair or replacement, meaning a lot of improvising was required.
Despite some compromises, we had fun using a drone and the car lights to create some interesting compositions and effects with these incredible trees.
Back in the forest, we had another nightly quest: Kirindy is also home to the Malagasy giant jumping rat, a critically endangered rabbit-like nocturnal rodent found nowhere else on Earth. Having spotted its burrow during the day, we camped out at night with a flashlight, hoping it would make an appearance - result below!
Although interesting, none of these animals (or the nightly Baobab visits) were the primary reason I came to Kirindy. This is because it’s also home to a species that is much harder to spot in the wild - indeed the two previous days of searching didn’t yield any results despite extensive walks through the forest, beyond some evidence of the Number 2 kind that the animal had left behind… I’m talking about the fossa. You may have heard about Madagascar’s largest predator in the eponymous movie, but it’s otherwise not a particularly well-known animal.
Despite the struggle, the last morning (once more!) had good news in store, with a small disclaimer: Kirindy is maybe the best place to see fossa in Madagascar, but they are still quite shy - with an exception. There is one fossa which - just like the brown lemurs - has gotten used to human presence and uses the various sources of food and water around the camp every few days. Even so, it is never guaranteed to spot it, so when my guide came shouting for me to grab my camera just before we were about to leave, it was still a moment of joy.
The fossa look like a mix between small puma and a big mongoose, with a strong body and a tail as long as its body - it is neither: fossa belong to Madagascar's endemic carnivore family, the Eupleridae. They are excellent hunters and pursue lemurs through the canopy as easily as on the forest floor. It gave us a few minutes around camp looking for food and water, before disappearing back into the forest.
With a feeling of relief we made our way further north, towards the next national park. The drive was hot, dusty and bumpy, but made far more enjoyable by a few interesting stops on the way, such as at these baobab collections - the last survivors of what was once a dense forest. Of the eight global baobab species, six only occur in Madagascar.
They lose their leaves in the dry seasons, giving them the characteristic “upside-down” appearance.
River Crossings
Our 7h journey also included two river crossings - that sounds quite mundane until you realize there are no bridges here. Instead, the cars are driven onto floating barges anchored on shore, and then shipped to the other side.
This trip can only be made during the dry season, the roads are not passable after heavy rains and the boats not equipped to cross the rivers during high water levels. Even with barely any current flowing these days, I was surprised the small engine was able to push us across.
We did make it over both rivers, and I got the chance to document the journey from above, thanks to the very slow moving barges.
Rivers weren’t the only hurdle: close to our destination the car’s battery cables weren’t happy with the constant rattling from the bumpy roads, and some improvised repairs were needed to get us going again.
The Tsingy
So why would anyone make this rather cumbersome journey? Well, it turns out this part of the country is home to one of its most unique landscapes, and probably one of the most unique landscapes anywhere on earth. But before exploring that, we planned a small boat tour along the river.
The Manambolo river serves as the only way to reach two quite beautiful small caves, if you’re brave enough to crawl into and through the rather narrow entrance. Once more, the water level defines accessibility - they’re both flooded during the rainy season.
The Vazimba
Further upstream, our boat captain pointed to a ledge in the limestone rocks: an exposed tomb. The area surrounding the Tsingy limestone forest was historically inhabited by the Vazimba people, often considered the earliest known settlers of Madagascar.
Being one of their descendants, he will take you up the rocks on a narrow path to take a look at some of the centuries-old wooden coffins and bones - for a small donation, obviously. Many such tombs remain in use and sacred to local communities today - small offerings such as money and bottles with the local distilled sugarcane spirit called toaka gasy surround the site.
After returning, we visited the so-called Small Tsingy - a dark limestone formation just by the river crossing, which features an easy 1 or 2 hour hike. It offers a first taste of Bemaraha’s extraordinary limestone landscape, which we planned to see on the following day.
Some steep ladders, wooden steps, and a few stones affixed to the walls with nails help you navigate the razor-sharp rock formations. Tsingy is often translated as ‘where one cannot walk barefoot’. That didn’t stop the Vazimba who used to live here in the past, with evidence of those days such as ancient pieces of pottery still found among the crevices in the rocks.
At sunset, we encountered these young boys by the riverbed, where they just finished taking their herd of zebu for a drink and now made their way back to the village. These humped cows represent more than just livestock here, also serving as a store and sign of wealth for their owners.
Grand Tsingy
Although I realised the area has more to offer than I anticipated, the main attraction in Bemaraha’s UNESCO World Heritage Site are these amazing limestone formations - rightfully so, just look at this!
It’s a two hour drive from the village over very bumpy roads (who’d have thought..) before you enter the edge of the rock formations. From here, a walk through the forest and a number of smaller caves takes you to the steep edge of the rocks. Once more a mix of ladders and steps await, but this times ropes are involved - a harness is mandatory to make your way up here.
Views from the Top
The reason for the sharp edges and terraced formations is chemical (rather than mechanical, i.e. wind) erosion. Jurassic sea deposits created the limestone 170 million years ago, much later rain and groundwater dissolved it into the pinnacles, caves, and fissures we see today.
Our early start meant the closest living beings we encountered was an unusually round rock formation seen on the left here, resembling the Virgin Mary, and what I think was a wagtail sitting on top of the rock tips, adding a splash of colour to the scene. That said, the barren landscape is a bit deceptive - it is home to lemurs, chameleons, and more. Some species are in fact only found in this region, such as a type of forest rat we caught a glimpse of.
Further into the rock formations, the most exciting portion of the hike is probably this hanging bridge - thank god for camera wrist straps.
In order to leave, you squeeze your way through some very narrow canyons that get completely flooded in the rainy season, which continues to shape the landscape today - a surreal place.
You come back to the forest floor after another set of ladders, ropes, and steps.
As we arrived back at the parking, area few more cars had arrived - the early start paid off.
I opted for a quiet afternoon and we started heading back southwards towards Morondava the next morning.
Aside from the bumps, the trip was uneventful. That’s not a given: we encountered a few armed patrols on the way back, and learned they had been dispatched to look for a gang that robbed a car with local tourists the day before, taking all their belongings and disappearing into the landscape. While Madagascar is generally not unsafe, there are definitely areas and times where you need to pay attention.
On the way we stopped in the town of Belo Tsiribihina for its rather unexpected attraction: a restaurant called Mad Zebu, serving fine dining gourmet cuisine (at extreme prices for Madagascar levels, but rather affordable for Western expectations). The owner used to be a hotel chef in France and brought his culinary skills back to this rather remote place, where the church (as is often the case) is the best-maintained and largest buildings around. 85% of Madagascar’s population is Christian, but we also spotted a mosque.
Baobab Magic
We also stopped back at Baobab Avenue for sunset and would visit the area again for another sunrise, and another sunset after that. Beyond the famous strip of around 1km length, there are a few more interesting spots to explore around here, so the multiple visits were worthwhile.
One such spot is the “Baobabs in Love” - two trunks that have gradually grown around one another to form a natural spiral.
It’s easy to overlook, but the dirt path seen in many of the Baobab Avenue photos is indeed the actual road used by locals.
These two men were negotiating a price for live chicken transported on a bicycle, but as far as I could tell they didn’t come to an agreement.
Occasionally big trucks make their way through as well to transport goods or petrol towards the Tsingy area, but it’s more common to see wooden wheelbarrows or zebu carts - these men were kind enough to pose for me on their way through.
At the main section of the road, you can plant Baobabs or also buy the seedlings to take home. While they grow quite quickly when young, for these trees to reach the massive trunks often seen around here takes several hundred years.
If you venture a little bit away from the well-known part, you can observe locals going after their daily ritual, setting up fish traps in the ponds that remain during the dry season.
Beyond tourism and their spiritual meaning, Baobabs also play another role. When the rains come, the top branches will grow leaves and flowers and produce hard-shelled fruits used to make juice, syrups, and oils, often for sale on the side of the road.
As August is the end of the dry seasons, there were no leaves anymore, but a few of the trees carried some last flowers if you looked closely.
As the day ended, a gorgeous crescent moonset made for some of my favourite images of the trip. Baobabs are without a doubt among the country’s most iconic and most photographed sights, but it’s always fun to chase some new perspectives regardless.
One more nightly session followed to capture our home galaxy with the baobab avenue - a little more challenging as we had to “convince” the security guard to switch off a few large floodlights and the nearby settlements still added a bit of light pollution.
The low-lying land around this area is used for rice paddies, so you often see baobabs standing directly beside or within cultivated fields - this is also rooted in the importance of rice as the staple food in the country, owing to the influence of Austronesian settlers. As I learned with some astonishment, sailors from Borneo (!) are considered among the first humans permanently occupying the island, explaining some of their physical features and language traits as well.
Morondava & The Coastal Life
Back in Morondava, we had a couple of hours to explore the small city of less than 100,000 people - two of which were kind enough to pose for me.
It is home to a popular market street and a long beach stretching along the coast, where I got to watch a surprisingly professional football game. But neither of which is why we came back here - the goal was to explore the traditional fishing life on the south-western coast.
Betania
We began this endeavor by crossing the river mouth just a few minutes south of Morondava with a small boat (during low tide it is sometimes possible to walk), reaching the tiny coastal town of Betania.
It’s home to around 2000 Vezo (often translated as “those who struggle with the sea”), a subgroup of Malagasy people who occupy the south-western coastline, strongly connected to living from the sea: fishing, sailing and coastal life.
Living up to their name, the central theme of life was evident all around here - this includes for example the small canoe-like wooden pirogues seen in the aerial image above, but also much larger sail boats called botry, of which quite a few were under construction on the shoreline. We would get a chance to see much more of this over the next couple of days a bit further south, but had a first glimpse at these boats heading out to sea at sunrise today…
Belo sur Mer
After a good 5 hours on the road, once again crossing rivers, passing small settlements, and driving through salt flats, we finally made it to the village of Belo sur Mer. If you ask my guide, it may have been the blessing of this baobab with the local rum that ensured our safe arrival. Or maybe the fact he had a sip himself…
…either way, the stops on the way gave me the chance to take a few more portraits of the people occupying this sparely populated region.
Belo sur Mer is famous for its traditional shipbuilding. While I didn’t count precisely, I’d say there were at least 100 boats under construction, dotted around different parts of the village. Having said that, many of the skeletons may just be old ships whose deconstructed parts will find their way into new ones.
The tradition of building large wooden sailing vessels here goes back around 150 years, with skills introduced in the late 19th century by shipwrights from Réunion and passed down through generations of Vezo craftsmen. Of course the use of the smaller outrigger canoes is much older than that.
The boats take years to complete, and in many cases it is the ability for the owning family to afford the required wood that defines this timeline.
While it’s hard to say sometimes - and the lack of English doesn’t help - but I sensed a feeling of pride among some of the ship builders when I was looking to photograph their work, and using my guide to translate the questions on the process.
The techniques are passed down through generations and the seafaring education starts at the youngest age here.
Once built, the ships make for amazing sights in the open ocean, with their patchwork of sails allowing the Vezo people to reach distant harbors along the entire coastline, transporting goods back and forth to areas that are otherwise barely reachable.
An Unexpected Sailing Trip
The next morning, I wanted to see some of these boats with their sails hoisted and either arriving or leaving the harbor, so we left our (surprisingly nice!) beach lodge in the darkness. The hope was to catch them in the early morning at sunrise near the large inlet from the sea into the mangroves and towards the salt flats - it’s an amazing landscape, just take a look at the Google Maps satellite imagery.
As the morning light slowly crept in, there was barely any activity here though, but I did spot one boat at anchor in the distance being approached by a small wooden canoe with two men on it. After dropping one of them, the other then returned to the shoreline, and we walked up to him with the intention to figure out if and when more boats would arrive or depart. He couldn’t say, but told us they were planning to head to the salt harbor inland in 15 minutes or so…
It’s probably from many years of travel and developing at least a little bit of photographic instinct, that at this point I told my guide to carefully ask him if we could join for that trip, and take some photos. The man didn’t speak English, so I can’t know what actually happened, but it took barely a minute and he waved us on board the little pirogue to head to the ship. And so, without knowing where exactly they would go, how long it would take, and what it would be like, I ended up one of the ships I hoped to photograph only from afar.
A few minutes later a couple more people arrived, and the crew started raising the anchor and hoisting the sails to get the ship moving inland. They told us they expected it would take an hour or two to get to a small harbor inland, where they wanted to pick up some cargo later.
For now though, the hold was empty, but the white spots on the ground gave away what they were planning to transport: salt from the nearby extraction pans, destined for Morondava.
Almost an hour later though we had barely moved, and the crew was still scrambling with the sails.
While I don’t know much about sailing, I had a suspicion that their plan was disrupted, by the most obvious cause: The wind had subsided considerably, not to say, completely. That’s a problem when you don’t have an engine.
It seems the open ocean still provided enough wind to help both the smaller pirogues but also the larger sailboats to keep moving in the distance, but we were pretty much stuck.
When the wind doesn’t play along, you can’t do much other than wait - or, once the water is shallow enough during the receding tide, start pushing the boat with long sticks. The crew spent more than an hour doing just that, moving us just a little bit closer into the mangrove channel each time…
Luckily, this gave me plenty of time to take photos. I wasn’t able to figure out the exact family situation among the people on the ship, but beyond the men, this young mother and her child, alongside their two chickens, were also part of the crew.
They started to prepare rice and some vegetables for lunch while the men were working on navigating the ship just a little further inland…
After more than 4 hours, they succeeded and we finally ran aground in the mangroves very close to a small salt harbor. One of them kindly took me back to the mainland with the little canoe, after we took this drone selfie together. The wider area around the village is a UNESCO Biosphere reserve for its beautiful varied ecosystems hosting a wide range of animals, from dugongs and humpback whales to lesser flamingos.
My time on the boat - albeit a lot longer and with a lot less distance covered than anticipated - was one of the highlights of this trip, giving me the chance to observe and document the unfiltered life of the Vezo people. This black and white photo series is maybe one of my favorite image collections of the last years. It is often the unforeseen and asking just the right question in the right moment that gives you these experiences.
Although it was a little problematic for the crew, the low tide also produced amazing opportunities for photography, with abstract patterns, beautiful colors, and the occasional ship that ran aground, waiting for the sea to rise again - which happens incredibly fast here. The amplitude of the tide was over 3 meters during my visit, which means you can easily watch the water level rise and fall on the ground in front of you.
While some parts of town on the left are a little more modern by now - it has a few concrete buildings - many families live in very simple temporary wooden sheds on the outer peninsula, which gets cut off during high tide, and regularly floods completely when cyclones hit the area.
Things really came together during this part of the trip - I was even able to add my obligatory cat photo to the collection; although one might argue it seems doubtful that the cat was particularly excited about this opportunity.
Of course I also could not resist heading out at night for some more Milky Way images before our lunar companion would make that impossible over the next days. While there was a bit of light pollution from a few solar or diesel-powered lights in the village, the boats made for beautiful compositions.
The final morning gave me another chance at photographing a few more botry out in the open ocean by sending out my drone from the shoreline, before we left Belo sur Mer.
The Salt Pans
On our way we stopped at the salt flats just outside the village, where locals harvest the salt that is later transported by exactly these boats.
We found a worker who was willing to give us a tour, but to get closer, you need to cross a few channels on very shaky wooden planks.
Yours truly obviously didn’t manage to do that without ending up halfway in the muddy salty waters, but at least my camera somehow recorded accidental evidence of the fall.
The salt pans are an important part of the livelihood of the locals here. Seawater pushes through the mangroves into the flats, which are leveled and compressed using rollers like these. The water concentrates in evaporation ponds before crystallizing due to heat and sun. The workers then break up the salt layer and clean it before it gets packed and transported to the small nearby harbors.
While these are mostly traditional manual methods, the transportation part has seen a few upgrades recently - instead of zebu carts, we spotted a modern tractor helping them move the packed bags to the harbor, where the ships show up at high tide to collect and transport them up the coast.
A series of aerial images of the large salt pans covering the area. Owing to the weather, these are seasonal and usually active from May to December.
And with that, my time on the western coast of Madagascar came to an end. Another long drive to return to Morondava, and then it was time to fly back to Antananarivo, and explore - literally - another side of Madagascar. I had so many impressions from what is really just a small part of the country, but rest assured there is a lot more to come. Once I get around to the next post - subscribe below if you don’t want to miss it.
The western coast, featuring the iconic baobaos, the landscapes of the Tsingy, fauna of Kirindy, and the shipbuilders of Belo Sur Mer.