Guides to northern Madagascar
Things worth knowing before you book anything, written from the roads we drive every week rather than from a brochure. We would rather you arrive knowing than find out.
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Driving in northern Madagascar: what nobody tells you first
Northern Madagascar has changed more in four years than in the forty before them. Roads that took two days now take four hours. But some things have not changed at all, and one of them decides how every day is planned.
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Park fees in northern Madagascar, and the November 2026 increase
Entry to a Malagasy national park costs 45,000 Ariary a day today. From November 2026 it roughly doubles, and at Ankarana it nearly triples. Here are the real numbers, where they come from, and what a normal visit adds up to.
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Flights to northern Madagascar: Sambava, Diego Suarez, Nosy Be
Three airports serve the north, and which one you fly into decides more about your trip than most people realise — because the distance from the runway to where you are actually going ranges from twenty minutes to most of a day.
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Cash in northern Madagascar: the price that sounds five times wrong
The single most useful thing to know about money in the north is not where the cash machines are. It is that a price said out loud may be quoted in a currency that stopped existing in 2005 — and if you hand over the number you heard, you pay five times too much.
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One day at Marojejy: what you can honestly do, and what you cannot
Almost nobody writes about visiting Marojejy for a single day, because the park is designed around multi-day treks. It is possible, it is worth doing, and it is exactly one thing. Here is that thing, with the numbers.