One road, a whole island's worth of country
Madagascar barely has a road network, but it has the RN7: a thousand kilometres of cracked tarmac running southwest from Antananarivo through highland rice terraces, rainforest, granite domes and semi-desert until it hits the Mozambique Channel at Toliara. It is the backpacker route on the island, and doing it by taxi-brousse — the battered shared minibuses that are Madagascar's circulatory system — is the whole experience. Give it three weeks. Travel between April and November; the January–March cyclone season turns everything to mud.
Budget picture: a full-length taxi-brousse fare from Tana to Toliara costs around 100,000 ariary (roughly €20) if you did it in one brutal 20-hour push, but you won't. Broken into hops it's €3–8 a leg. Simple rooms run €8–15, meals of rice and zebu €1.50–3. Park fees are the real spend: 55,000–65,000 ariary entry plus an obligatory local guide at each one, and the guides are consistently excellent.
Antananarivo, briefly
Tana is steep, chaotic and worth one day: climb to the Rova palace ruins for a view over twelve sacred hills and a lake shaped like a heart, then get out. Taxis-brousses south leave from the Fasan'ny Karana station — go the day before, buy a seat (pay for two if you value your hips), and ask for the front row.
Antsirabe and the highlands
Four hours south, Antsirabe is a faded thermal-spa town where brightly painted pousse-pousse rickshaws outnumber cars. Use it to visit the crater lakes of Tritriva and Andraikiba by bicycle, and to watch workshops turn zebu horn into spoons and old car tyres into sandals. The highlands here are all terraced rice and red-brick two-storey houses — Madagascar looks more like upland Southeast Asia than Africa, which makes sense once a guide reminds you the Malagasy sailed from Borneo.
Ranomafana: rainforest and mouse lemurs
Six winding hours on, the road drops into cloud forest at Ranomafana National Park. On our morning walk the guide clocked golden bamboo lemurs — the species whose 1986 discovery created the park — feeding on cyanide-laced bamboo shoots that would kill you or me. Do the night walk along the road edge too: chameleons asleep on twig-tips and mouse lemurs with headlamp-orange eyes.
Fianarantsoa and a detour worth taking
Fianarantsoa is the highland's second city and the pivot point of the trip. The old upper town is quietly beautiful at dusk. If the famously unreliable FCE train to the coast is running, it's one of the world's great rides; otherwise push on, ideally via the vineyards and the trekking villages of the Betsileo country around Ambalavao, where the Anja reserve delivers ring-tailed lemurs sunbathing on boulders at close range.
Isalo: the island's canyon country
Half a day further, the highlands collapse into the Isalo massif at Ranohira — eroded sandstone the colour of rust, fan palms, and natural swimming holes. The classic full-day circuit through the Namaza canyon ends at the Piscine Naturelle, a black pool under a small waterfall where you swim off three weeks of road dust. At sunset everyone gathers at the 'window of Isalo' rock arch; go slightly left of the crowd and you get the same burning sky alone.
Down to the coast: Toliara and Ifaty
The last stretch crosses spiny forest — octopus trees, baobabs, heat shimmer — before the sea appears. Toliara itself is a transit town; jump straight into a pickup north along the sand track to Ifaty and Mangily, Vezo fishing villages behind a lagoon-calm reef. Snorkel trips by sailing pirogue cost about €10, July–September brings humpback whales, and the reef beers at sunset cost less than a euro. After a thousand kilometres of red dust, floating in that warm blue feels like the country's reward for doing it the slow way.
