October 22nd to November 5th 2023
We had spent a long time researching and planning our two week trip to Nosey Be and Northern Madagascar and I was quietly confident that my detailed itinerary with all the necessary contact details for hotels, tours, guides and transport would be enough to ensure we had a good trip despite having no Malagasy and limited French. If you think the same then a word of warning, it isn’t that easy and I would recommend finding yourself a good guide. Thankfully we had Djamel.
Our trip started with a visit to the Sunrise Centre, a Malagasy Charity for young adults in Nosey Be with disabilities which is also a registered UK Charity, if you have the time and inclination I would recommend a visit here to meet and greet the children and families involved.
It was through the Sunrise Centre that we linked up with Djamel, a young Christian teacher, support worker and guide with excellent English. Djamel sorted out our travel teething problems, finding a good Tuk Tuk driver, getting a local SIM card, and doing a tour of all the local ATMs to collect the Malagasy Ariary we needed to get our proposed itinerary started. Money is quite an issue when travelling in Madagascar, apart from the best hotels people are not interested in euros, dollars aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on and ATMs are hard to find, often closed and always short on funds. Djamel took the stress out of these situations.
We started off using Djamel to facilitate the tours we had planned from Nosey Be, a visit to Kombo to see the lemurs, snorkelling off Tanikely and swimming with turtles off Nosey Sakatia.
Djamel sorted out the travelling, buying the tickets, getting us to the right place at the right time, sometimes onto a smaller more intimate boat rather than the usual tourist one and then arranged for lunchtime fish BBQ’s prepared by local cuisiniers on the beach. He made sure we had the time and space to be independent, checked we were happy during the day and made the itinerary happen. Every evening he came back to our hotel with us in the Tuk Tuk to check we had had a good day and what we wanted to do next.
I suppose we hoped Djamel would help us get the ferry from Nosey Be to Anfikey and might even help with transport arrangement to Diego Suarez in North Madagascar but when he offered to accompany us and to use his contacts to sort out the ferry to the mainland and organise a driver and car for our entire itinerary we jumped at the chance.
This was a big trip for us and we didn’t want it spoilt by having to spend a sizeable proportion of everyday finding out how to make things happen and quibbling over prices, we could see it wasn’t as easy as we’d thought it might be. Even with Djamel there is a Malagasy price and a tourist price, understandable given that we are talking about one of the poorest countries in the world and we are the rich white tourist whether you like it or not. Having said that no-one likes to be taken for a ride and a good guide can keep the touts at bay and make sure the tourist price remains within the realms of what is reasonable.
Djamels contact and our driver on the mainland was Paulo. He had a 4WD truck, didn’t speak English but was a great character and a fabulous driver and boy do you need a fabulous driver on those roads! We travelled directly to Diego where we stayed at Le Jardin Exotique which I would recommend.
Djamel organised and accompanied us on our mainland trips to the Emerald Sea and Trois Baies and again organised seafood BBQs at midday. If you like fish you cant get it fresher, we even went out with the captain to catch it! We had a day to ourselves in Diego although by this time we had got to know Djamel so well that we did invite him round in the evening to watch his favourite team on our hotel room TV. We already knew this was no ordinary guide and we would miss him along with the sea, sand, climate and mangoes when we left.
On our way back to Anfikey we visited the Red Tsingsy and stopped over at the Montagne d’Ambre National Park, Ankarana Special Reserve and the plantations in Ambanja. Djamel organised local tour guides for these areas and acted as English translator. We returned to Nosey Be for the flight home, tired but exhilarated. Everything had been amazing but we could not have done it without Djamel. We will remain in touch and I’m sure we will be seeing him again on our next trip to this amazing country.
Barbara and Alan R. (England)
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