Discover the magic of the National Park of Ankarana and witness the spectacular sunset at the Red Tsingy. In a day!!!
5:30 AM – Pick up at your hotel in Antsiranana / Diego Suarez with early departure to the south direction to Mahamasina (the entrance to Ankarana National Park). The drive takes about 4 hours out, with a longer 5‑hour return due to the detour for the Red Tsingy. Northern Madagascar shifts and changes quickly once out of Diego Suarez. The coastal feel of the city is soon replaced by dry savanna dotted with baobabs, red laterite soil and patches of forest.
Ankarana National Park is one of Madagascar’s great geological wonders, and one of the island’s richest wildlife dry forest regions. The park is home to its famed tsingy, massive limestone formations that are shaped millimeter by millimeter over millions of years by rainwater slowly dissolving and carving the rock into sharp tops, extensive fissures, subterranean rivers and secret caves. Different from the Red Tsingy, which we would visit later in the day, grey tsingy are actually ancient limestone rocks that have become extremely solid and sharp, creating a weird mineral landscape for much of the massif.
A guided hike through the park starts once you arrive in Mahamasina. Trails run through dry deciduous forest, narrow corridors of limestone and caves beneath the tsingy. In other parts, suspended bridges span deep chasms as huge roots of a fig tree seem to fall down through the rock towards underground water below. Ankarana has relentless vegetation and exposed limestone.
The reserve is also famous for its wildlife. Crowned lemurs and Sanford’s brown lemurs are usually seen close to the trails, while chameleons, geckos and endemic birds fill the forest surrounding the massif. Most of the year, the ground is parched still, but it gets very hot around noon in temperatures and inside those limestone shapes where the rock vibrates heat.
After the hiking and a brief rest close to the park entrance, it is time to drive back north towards the Irodo Valley, in order to get some perspectives on the Red Tsingy during late afternoon; when light becomes softer and colors reach an incredible depth.
What is more different than the grey limestone formations at Ankarana is the Red Tsingy. In parts of the site, this erosion has cut out delicate red lateritic soil and sandstone into a series of slender spires, mini canyons and jagged ridges that appear almost fictional against the broad dry landscape surrounding them. These landforms are new and remain incomplete each rainy season, as water carefully reshapes their raw earth one tiny bite at a time. Slightly smaller than Ankarana but no less stunning, the site is most impressive around sunset when the whole basin glows in shades of deep orange and rust-red.
In contrast to geologically aged well-formed limestone tsingy, the Red Tsingy is almost minimal, shallow and tentative in its appearance with an instability about it that makes it look like a land still being formed.
Back to Antsiranana / Diego Suarez in the evening around 8:00 PM generally depending on road and traffic conditions.
Linking two of northern Madagascar’s most surreal landscapes in one day, this excursion visits the massive limestone mazes of Ankarana National Park along with the delicate red formations in Irodo Valley. A geological, trekking and wildlife-driven overland adventure in the wilds of northern Madagascar ideal for travel enthusiasts.