Schlagwort: Africa

Transport Malagasy

Transport facilities in Madagascar are quite quixotic, because there ain´t that many roads worthy of that name. Travelling Madagascar is a fascinating thing to do, but it´s also tough and time-consuming. Infrastructure would be too strong a word for the possibilities on the island. It´s mainly three so-called National Roads linking Antsiranana (Diego-Suarez) in the […]

Ambositra

Even if Ambositra (pronounced ambooshtre) might be no more than a halt in between for most Madagascar travellers, it´s definitely worth giving it a second glance. Ambositra is a small town halfway between Antsirabe and Fianarantsoa on the RN7 from Tana down south, and it got charms set in the middle of central Madagascan highland […]

Antsirabe

It happens quite often that one has to stopover at Antsirabe – the town “with a lot of salt” – if travelling southern, south-eastern or western Madagascar. Just 150 kilometres south of Antananarivo in the central highland, Antsirabe is not only statistically the coldest place on the island, but also an industrial and agricultural centre […]

The stars above Lac Itasy – Die Sterne über dem Itasy-See

If you are heading west from Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, the landscape becomes even more barren than it is around Tana. The Route National 1 is going up as far as 1.700m in altitude, and about 130km west of Tana, you are reaching the rough but beautiful volcanic area around Lake Itasy at approximately 1.300m. The […]

My heart is in the highland

The central highlands are Madagascar’s backbone, stretching along the eastern part of the island from the Massif du Tsaratanana – south of Ambilobe – all the way down south to the Andringitra Massif west of Manakara. In the southeast it is linked to the Massiv d´Antaivondro, a mountain range almost reaching Taolagnaro (Fort Dauphin) at […]

Antananarivo – Tana par plaisir

Antananarivo, Madagascar´s capital with two to three million citizens who just call it Tana, has been marked as the world´s third most polluted city just behind leading Baku/Azerbaijan and Dhaka/Bangladesh in a Forbes-ranking in 2008. But there must have been some improvements ever since then. When it comes to air pollution I´ve seen worse in […]

Arboretum Raponda Walker (Foret de Mondah)

We spent the last days of our journey through Gabon in Libreville, but we had planned one last excursion. This should lead us to the Foret de Mondah, a forest at the northern tip of the Libreville peninsula. Beyond that peninsula, there is already Equatorial Guinea. Parts of the Mondah forest had been cleared in […]

Return to Lopé – Rückkehr nach Lopé

We tried to reach Loango National Park from Mayumba in the south, but when we called there, they brusquely told us that they were fully booked and camping not allowed. That only made us shrug indifferently. Gabon doesn´t want tourists, we already got that! Wir versuchten noch, von Mayumba aus den Süden des Loango Nationalparks […]

Mayumba – The most beautiful beach in the world – Der schönste Strand der Welt

From Mouila, we took a shared taxi via Ndendé to Tchibanga in the south. There were three women and a man with us, and the youngest of the women was a shy adolescent without a decent passport. All she had was a permit to go from Mouila to her village. There was a direct way, […]