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Tsingy RougeMADAGASIKARA

Guide

Visiting the Red Tsingy: everything you need before you leave Antsiranana

Access, timing, what to bring, and the two mistakes almost every first-time visitor makes.

Ravaka Andriamanana

Head guide

· 7 min read

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There are places in Madagascar that stay with travellers, and the Red Tsingy is one of them. After two hours on the road from Antsiranana the landscape simply opens, and what is underneath does not look like the rest of the island.

Where it is

The site sits on the Sahafary plateau, about sixty kilometres south of Antsiranana in the DIANA region. You leave the RN6 at Saharenana and follow twenty kilometres of laterite track, with one ford across the Irodo.

Why it looks like that

Unlike the grey tsingy of Ankarana or Bemaraha, these are not limestone. They are sand, clay and iron oxide, compacted and then cut by runoff. That is why they are red, why they are rounded rather than bladed, and why they change shape every rainy season.

Every rain rebuilds the place. What you photograph today may not exist in March.

When to come

May to October is the dry season and the honest answer. Within a day, come at dawn or after four. Between ten and two the light flattens the strata into a single orange mass and the heat on the rim is genuinely unpleasant.

The two mistakes

  • Arriving at eleven, which wastes the light and the day.
  • Coming without enough water, on the assumption that sixty kilometres from a city means there is a shop.

Eating on site

The restaurant La Rouge sits eighty metres from the main viewpoint, on the terrace. Lunch is Malagasy, cooked on the plateau, and the welcome cocktail is offered to everyone who eats with us.

Also on the plateau