Ambohimanga dates from the 16th century and developed into the capital city in the 18th century. The walled city, with stone gates, three palaces, cemeteries and holy places, combines Malagasy and European architectural styles.
Madagascar: The Canal des Pangalanes at Manakara
Along the Canal des Pangalanes: A Morning Adrift near Manakara
I’d read somewhere, in one of those guidebooks I always buy and then mostly ignore, that the Canal des Pangalanes ran for something like 654 kilometres down the eastern flank of Madagascar, from Toamasina in the north all the way to Farafangana in the south. It isn’t really a canal in the sense I’d always understood the word, all locks and towpaths and men in flat caps walking horses along the edge. It’s actually a long, scrappy string of natural lagoons, rivers and man-made channels that the French, back in the colonial days, had linked together so that boats could get down the coast without having to brave the Indian Ocean, which along this stretch has a reputation for being thoroughly bad-tempered. I later discovered it had been the pet project of Joseph Gallieni, the French governor-general at the turn of the twentieth century, who’d had the whole thing dug and dredged into shape between about 1896 and 1904, largely off the backs of an awful lot of unpaid or badly paid Malagasy labour, as colonial infrastructure projects tended to be. These days it’s mostly used by local people for getting about and for fishing, and by the odd unsuspecting tourist, like me, who fancies a morning on the water without quite grasping the scale of what they’re dipping a toe into. We were only ever going to see a tiny, tiny fraction of it – a few kilometres at most, somewhere near the town of Manakara – but it felt like an adventure all the same, possibly because I’d had rather a lot of coffee that morning.
🚣 Meeting Benoit and Our Four-Man Engine
We were dropped at a rickety dock where our guide for the day was waiting. His name was Benoit, an amiable, softly spoken chap who struck me immediately as the sort of person who has never once been in a hurry and has never needed to be. He led us down to our boat, a wooden affair about seven metres long with a canvas awning rigged over the middle section, presumably so that pale, easily scorched Europeans like me didn’t turn the colour of a boiled prawn before elevenses. There was no engine. Instead we had four young local men who would be doing the actual work, paddling us up and down the waterway all morning while I sat under my little shade canopy doing absolutely nothing useful whatsoever, which is a role I have always excelled at.
🏘️ Washing Day on the River
We set off up a narrow arm of the waterway, past houses that backed straight onto the water, and it became quickly apparent that this stretch of river was doing several jobs at once. People were washing themselves in it, washing their clothes in it, and generally going about the business of being alive in it, all more or less simultaneously. Small children splashed about with the sort of easy competence that made my own childhood swimming lessons at the local baths in London look faintly embarrassing by comparison – I don’t think I managed a width without swallowing half the pool, whereas these children, some of them no older than four or five, moved through the water like they’d been born to it, which I suppose, in a manner of speaking, they had.
⛵ Fishermen Coming Home
Eventually the crew turned us round and we drifted back down towards the point where the river meets the open sea. This was where things got properly interesting. The local fishermen were coming back in from their early-morning trips, boats low in the water with the weight of the catch, each one fitted with an outrigger float and a sail stitched together, as far as I could tell, entirely out of old plastic shopping bags. I’m not exaggerating when I say these boats looked barely fit to cross a village pond, let alone the Indian Ocean, yet here they were, returning triumphant from a proper sea voyage. It must be an extraordinarily hard way to make a living, and a dangerous one too, though nobody seemed to be making any great fuss about it, which rather put my own occasional complaints about delayed trains into perspective. The mouth of the river was protected by a solid concrete breakwater, and once the fishermen got past that they were, I gathered, more or less home and dry.
🐟 The Fish Market on the Sand
Just inside the estuary there’s a beach where the whole catch gets landed, and it was absolute bedlam, in the nicest possible way. Women and children were down at the water’s edge helping unload the boats, wrapping fish up in banana leaves ready for the walk to market. The plastic sails cracked and snapped in the wind like little gunshots, which added a nice bit of theatre to the whole scene. Just back from the beach was a stand of trees giving some welcome shade, and under it a few local women had laid out blankets of handicrafts, hopefully eyeing up the tourists that guides like Benoit bring down to watch the fishing fleet come in. We did our usual shuffling, awkward routine of admiring everything extravagantly while explaining, not entirely truthfully, that we simply had no room in the suitcase for anything else. It never sounds convincing, and it never feels any better for the not sounding convincing either. People here get by on very little, and you always come away feeling a bit of a heel about the whole performance. Further under the trees a proper football match had broken out among the local lads, with what looked like no fixed teams and no fixed rules, yet somehow everyone appeared to know exactly what was going on, which is more than I can say for most of the football I watch.
🚣♂️ Singing on the Water
We climbed back aboard and the crew set to rowing hard, this time heading up into a much broader arm of the canal system, taking us past more of Manakara itself and under the town’s newish road bridge – new because the old one had collapsed, or partly collapsed, back in 2012, a fact Benoit mentioned with the sort of shrug that suggested this wasn’t the sort of thing anyone got terribly worked up about out here. We weren’t the only boat on the water that morning, and at one point another tourist boat pulled up alongside ours. What happened next was one of those moments you don’t expect and can’t really plan for: the oarsmen in both boats fell into the same paddling rhythm and started up a full-throated singing session, led by Benoit and the other guide, going at it for a good ten minutes before the two boats peeled off in different directions. I couldn’t understand a word of it, obviously, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was the sort of spontaneous, unselfconscious joy that I suspect a Londoner like me has more or less forgotten how to produce on demand.
⚰️ The Chinese Cemetery at Ampasimandrorona
We came ashore eventually at a small village called Ampasimandrorona, a few kilometres outside the centre of Manakara, and Benoit took us straight to the local cemetery, which, I’ll admit, delighted us rather more than it probably should have. Karen and I have always had a soft spot for wandering round graveyards, an odd hobby I’ll grant you, but this one turned out to be genuinely unusual. Not a single Malagasy person is buried there. Almost everyone in the ground is Chinese, labourers who were brought over in the early twentieth century to work on the digging of the canal and, later, on the construction of the Fianarantsoa–Côte Est railway, a notoriously difficult stretch of line built through the 1920s and 1930s, much of it hacked out of steep, humid forest by hand. Malaria, dysentery and sheer exhaustion took a heavy toll on these imported workers, and this quiet, overgrown patch of ground by the ocean is where a good number of them ended up, a very long way from home. Tucked among the Chinese graves were a handful of largely unmarked plots belonging to Senegalese soldiers, tirailleurs sénégalais, who had fought on the French side during the suppression of the Malagasy uprising of 1947 to 1949. It was a strange, sobering little corner of the world, and not at all what I’d been expecting from a morning boat trip.
🕊️ The Martyrs of 1947
A short walk from the cemetery stands a rather more prominent monument, a memorial to the Malagasy rebellion, and Benoit filled us in on the history as we stood there. On the night of 29 March 1947, several hundred Malagasy fighters, armed mostly with lances and machetes rather than anything resembling modern weaponry, attacked the French military garrison at Moramanga along with the coastal towns of Manakara and Vohipeno. It was the start of a full-blown uprising against French colonial rule, and against anyone thought to be too friendly with the French administration, and it spread rapidly across large parts of the island over the following weeks. The French response, once reinforcements arrived from the metropole by May, was brutal and thorough, and the rebellion was eventually crushed, though not before enormous loss of life on the Malagasy side. Madagascar finally won its independence from France in 1960, and seven years later the country’s first president, Philibert Tsiranana, formally established the 29th of March as Martyrs’ Day, originally a solemn day of national mourning for those killed in the uprising. Over the decades it seems to have shifted in tone somewhat, becoming as much a celebration of the freedom eventually won as a commemoration of the price paid for it, which strikes me as a rather graceful way for a nation to mark such a difficult chapter of its own history.
🌿 Vanilla, Sold Slightly Under Duress
From the memorial Benoit led us a short way to a family smallholding growing vanilla, which felt a little less like a spontaneous detour and a little more like a well-worn stop on the tourist circuit, though I don’t say that unkindly. Madagascar, as I vaguely remembered from somewhere, produces something like the vast majority of the world’s natural vanilla, and the crop is a genuinely enormous part of the local economy along this coast. We had a good look round the vines, twisting up their support trees in the heat, and because we were the only visitors there that morning the pressure to buy something was considerable. We caved, as we usually do, and came away with a small amount of vanilla pods as gifts, feeling simultaneously fleeced and entirely happy about it, which is a very particular and very British sort of contradiction.
🌶️ Spices, a Wobbly Canoe, and Some Medicinal Bottles
Our next stop was across the river, and the larger boat that had brought us this far had apparently vanished, meaning a rather smaller and considerably less stable canoe was required to get us over. Benoit took the paddle, but Karen and I insisted on helping, which turned out to be far more strenuous than it had looked from the comfort of our shaded awning earlier that morning. Once we’d scrambled ashore on the far bank, Benoit led us into a wild, sprawling plot of land where a local family grew, alongside the usual vegetables, a proper spice garden: cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, cloves and turmeric, all crops that have done rather well for themselves in Madagascar’s tropical climate since they were first introduced by various waves of traders and colonists over the centuries. There was nobody about to begin with, so Benoit simply took it upon himself to give us the guided tour, pointing out each plant with evident pride, until eventually a man materialised carrying a box of small glass vials filled with concentrated spice extracts. We bought a couple of bottles, telling ourselves they might come in handy as makeshift medicine further along our travels, which is the sort of justification I find myself making rather too often on trips like this.
🥥 Lunch Under a Coconut Palm
By this point it was firmly lunchtime, and we were collected by van and driven to a glorious stretch of sandy beach on the Indian Ocean, where our oarsmen from the morning, now transformed into caterers, had laid on a proper feast. A table and chairs had been set up in the shade of a coconut palm looking straight out to sea, and I don’t mind admitting it was about as close to paradise as I’ve ever sat down to a plate of food. Course after course appeared, all of it good, and for a while nobody said very much at all, which for me is always the sign of a genuinely excellent meal.
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🏫 Benoit’s School
Lunch finished, it was time to say our goodbyes to the oarsmen and head back into Manakara itself, where Benoit had one more thing he wanted to show us. It turned out that guiding was only his day job, so to speak, and that alongside it he taught English part-time at a local school, entirely self-taught, by his own cheerful admission, and with a grasp of the language that was enthusiastic rather than polished, though frankly his English put my complete absence of any Malagasy to thoroughly deep shame. Karen was keen to see the school, and Benoit was clearly keen to show it off, so off we went. We were introduced to the headmistress, whose own father had founded the school many years before, and she talked us through the challenges of local education, funding chief among them, before taking us round three classrooms, one for each year group. Benoit got the children showing off their English, and Karen followed up by coaxing a few more words and phrases out of them, the older classes noticeably more confident than the younger ones. It was a genuinely lovely hour, and before we left we handed over a small donation, which felt like the very least we could do given how thin the funding for education clearly runs out here.
🐟 The Market, Which I Did Not Enjoy
From the school Benoit walked us through the streets and into Manakara’s main market, a hot, low-ceilinged, thoroughly chaotic warren of narrow aisles selling more or less everything you could think of. Stalls piled with meat and fish, thick with flies, did rather more to convert me to vegetarianism than any documentary ever has, and I say that as someone who already eats very little meat. It was not, on the whole, a pleasant experience for the nose or the stomach. Partway through we came across an elderly woman dancing to music being played by an even more elderly man, and I assumed at first this was simply a happy local eccentricity, until it became clear this was in fact a performance, very much expecting payment. Naturally, being the only tourists in sight, we were roped straight in, Karen doing the actual dancing while I, sensibly I thought, handled the financial side of things. Escaping the market back out onto the open street afterwards felt like coming up for air.
🚌 Back to the Hotel
And that, more or less, was that. We were driven back to the hotel with a long travel day looming ahead of us, tired, a little sunburnt despite the awning, and thoroughly satisfied with a morning that had somehow managed to squeeze in fishermen, singing oarsmen, a colonial-era cemetery, a rebellion memorial, vanilla vines, a spice garden, a beach feast, a school full of children practising their English, and a market that nearly finished off my appetite for the rest of the week.
🤔 Reflections
Looking back on it, what struck me most about the morning wasn’t any single thing so much as the sheer density of it all – how much history, livelihood and everyday life was packed into such a short stretch of water. You set off expecting a pleasant paddle and a few nice photographs, and instead you come away having brushed up against French colonial engineering, forced labour, a nearly forgotten uprising, and the quiet, unglamorous graft of people who fish dangerous seas in boats held together with plastic bags, simply because that’s what needs doing. I’m not sure I’ve entirely processed all of it even now. What I do know is that Benoit, with his rough-and-ready English and his genuine pride in his school, his history and his home patch of river, did more to bring Madagascar to life for me in a single morning than any guidebook I’d lugged halfway round the world ever managed. And I still feel a bit guilty about those vanilla pods.
Planning your visit to Manakara
Manakara is a laid-back port town on Madagascar’s south-eastern coast, sitting at the mouth of the Manakara River where the Canal des Pangalanes finally meets the Indian Ocean. It is the kind of place that feels genuinely off the grid — a town divided by water, shaped by fishing and French colonial history, and left largely to its own unhurried rhythms. The town splits into two distinct halves: a weathered colonial quarter of wide, unpaved streets and faded but occasionally brightly painted buildings dating from the early twentieth century, and a busier, more workaday side where the market, the canal and daily life overlap. The beaches are wild and palm-lined, but strong currents and the presence of sharks make them better for watching than swimming.
Manakara is the administrative capital of the Vatovavy-Fitovinany region and home to around 40,000 to 50,000 people, the majority of whom belong to the Antemoro (or Antehimoro) people, an ethnic group of partly Islamic origin whose cultural presence is visible in the number of mosques dotted around a town of this size. The Antemoro are also known for a distinctive hand-made paper craft, produced from the bark of the avoha tree and decorated with pressed flowers and petals — a tradition that has been practised here for centuries and remains a living part of the local economy. Daily life revolves largely around fishing: pirogues head out before dawn, often as far as fifteen kilometres offshore in search of shark and swordfish, and return by mid-morning to be met by women who sell the catch on the spot or carry it to the central market.
The Canal des Pangalanes, a roughly 600-kilometre chain of natural lakes, lagoons and rivers stitched together by French colonial engineers in the early twentieth century, runs through and alongside the town before continuing northward up the coast towards Toamasina. The canal was built to link Madagascar’s east-coast ports and supply routes, and the Chinese labourers who came to work on both the canal and the railway are commemorated in a small coastal cemetery just outside the town. Today the canal is the setting for a constant, unhurried ballet of loaded pirogues carrying goods, fish, passengers and vanilla pods between the fishing villages strung along its banks, and a pirogue trip along it is the thing most visitors remember longest.
🗺️ Where It Sits
Manakara lies on the south-eastern coast of Madagascar, roughly 700 kilometres south-east of the capital Antananarivo and about 158 kilometres from Fianarantsoa in the highlands. It sits at the eastern end of the Fianarantsoa–Côte Est railway — the only functioning passenger railway in Madagascar — and at the southern end of the navigable section of the Pangalanes Canal. The town is served by National Road 12, which runs north along the coast towards Mananjary and south towards Farafangana and beyond.
🚂 Getting There
By Train from Fianarantsoa
The journey most visitors make to Manakara is by train, and it is the one most people remember. The Fianarantsoa–Côte Est railway, universally known as the FCE, is a narrow-gauge line established in 1936 that descends roughly 158 kilometres from the highlands down to the coast, snaking through dense rainforest, crossing 65 bridges, plunging through 48 tunnels and passing waterfalls and remote villages that have no other link to the outside world. The journey takes anywhere from eight to twelve or more hours depending on the day, and the timetable is famously irregular — mechanical delays and schedule changes are the norm rather than the exception, and patience is the single most useful thing to bring aboard. A single train operates the line, running down one day and back up the next, with departures roughly twice a week in each direction. Tickets are purchased at the terminus stations in Fianarantsoa or Manakara. The experience of watching the landscape shift from highland rice terraces to rainforest gorges to coastal palms, with villagers boarding and alighting at remote halts along the way, is unlike anything else in Madagascar.
By Road
Manakara can be reached by road from Antananarivo via the RN7 south to Ambohimahasoa, then the RN25 east through Ranomafana to the coast, and finally south on the RN12 to Manakara. The total distance from Antananarivo is around 700 kilometres. Road conditions vary considerably by section and by season — the highland stretches are generally manageable, but the coastal roads can deteriorate significantly after heavy rain. A four-wheel drive vehicle is a practical advantage for the full journey, particularly in the wet months. Journey times from Antananarivo are long and best broken with a stop in Fianarantsoa or near Ranomafana National Park, which sits conveniently along the route.
Taxis-brousse cover the route in stages, with connections through Fianarantsoa and Ranomafana, though total journey times by shared minibus can stretch to fifteen hours or more and conditions on board are basic.
By Air
Manakara has a small airstrip — notable as one of the few places in the world where a railway line crosses an airport runway — with occasional domestic services from Antananarivo. Connections are infrequent and schedules subject to change, so air travel is worth checking but cannot always be relied upon as a primary route. Most visitors who fly into Madagascar arrive at Antananarivo’s Ivato International Airport and then travel onward overland or by the FCE train.
🚶 Getting Around
Manakara town is small and largely walkable, with the market, the canal waterfront, the colonial quarter and the beach all within reasonable reach of each other on foot. The streets are wide and mostly unpaved, and the pace of the place makes walking the natural way to move around. For slightly longer distances within town, pousse-pousse rickshaws are the dominant local transport and are easy to find; bicycle hire is also available, and the flat terrain makes cycling a pleasant option.
Exploring the Canal des Pangalanes requires a pirogue, and these are arranged through guesthouses or local guides rather than any formal booking system. Guided pirogue trips of varying lengths head out along the canal to nearby fishing villages, past scenes of net-fishing, pirogue construction and daily waterfront life that have changed little in generations. Longer canal journeys northward towards Mananjary are possible for those with more time, taking several days by pirogue through the fishing communities along the way.
The beach and the river mouth area are a short walk or rickshaw ride from the town centre. A local guide is worth having for anyone wanting to explore the canal villages properly or to navigate the less obvious parts of town — the reward is access to a quieter, more genuinely local side of Manakara that is easy to miss on a self-guided wander.
The Best Time to Visit Madagascar
🌴 Best Time to Visit Madagascar by Season
Madagascar’s climate is shaped by its size, topography, and position in the southern hemisphere, meaning seasons vary significantly between the east coast, west coast, and central highlands. Understanding these regional differences is key to planning the ideal trip.
☀️ The Dry Season: May to October
The dry season is widely regarded as the best time to visit Madagascar for most travellers. Running from May through to October, this period brings clear skies, lower humidity, and cooler temperatures that make exploring rainforests, national parks, and coastal areas far more comfortable.
May and June mark the start of the dry season and are particularly pleasant — temperatures are mild, the landscape is lush from the preceding rains, and crowds remain relatively manageable. By July and August, which coincide with European school holidays, visitor numbers peak, especially in popular destinations such as Nosy Be, Isalo National Park, and the Avenue of the Baobabs. These months offer superb wildlife watching: lemur activity is high, baobab sunsets are spectacular, and humpback whale viewing off the west and south-west coasts reaches its prime between July and September.
September and October round out the dry season beautifully. The heat begins to build towards October, particularly in the south and west, but conditions remain ideal for trekking, diving, and exploring the spiny desert. Wildlife remains active, and orchid blooms begin to emerge in the highland areas.
On the east coast, the dry season offers relief from the region’s typically high rainfall, though brief showers can still occur. This is one of the best windows for visiting Masoala Peninsula and Ranomafana National Park without the risk of prolonged downpours.
What to pack: Lightweight long-sleeved shirts, breathable trousers, a light fleece or layer for highland evenings, waterproof hiking boots, wide-brimmed hat, high-SPF sunscreen, insect repellent with DEET, polarised sunglasses, a reusable water bottle, and binoculars for wildlife spotting.
🌧️ The Wet Season: November to April
The wet season runs from November to April and brings heavy rainfall, high humidity, and cyclone risk — particularly along the north and east coasts. While this period is not generally recommended for first-time visitors or those seeking comfortable overland travel, it has its own rewards for the prepared and adventurous traveller.
November sees the gradual return of rains, though the first weeks can still offer bright spells, especially in the west and south. Temperatures climb sharply, and the landscape begins to transform dramatically as vegetation bursts into life. For wildlife enthusiasts, November and December are remarkable months — chameleons, frogs, and insects are at their most abundant and active, and newly born lemur young cling to their mothers in the forest.
December through February marks the height of the wet season. Rainfall is heaviest on the east coast and in the north. Cyclones are a genuine risk from January to March, and some roads — particularly in remote areas — become impassable. Many lodges and camps in the north close or reduce services during this period. However, the west and south remain drier and more accessible than the rest of the island, meaning destinations such as Tulear, Ifaty, and Morondava can still offer rewarding visits.
March and April see rainfall begin to ease, though conditions remain warm and humid. April in particular is a transitional month — a preview of the dry season to come — and can offer excellent birding as migratory species begin to depart.
What to pack: Quick-dry clothing, a packable waterproof jacket, waterproof trousers or over-trousers, waterproof dry bags for electronics and documents, rubber-soled sandals or waterproof trail shoes, insect repellent, anti-malarial medication (consult a travel health clinic), oral rehydration salts, a lightweight compact umbrella, and extra sealable plastic bags for camera protection.
🌸 Shoulder Seasons: April to May and October to November
The shoulder months sit on either side of the dry season and represent excellent windows for those seeking to avoid the peak-season crowds whilst still enjoying largely favourable conditions.
April to May offers the transition from wet to dry, with the landscape at its greenest and most dramatic. Roads are clearing, lodges are reopening, and wildlife remains active following the breeding season. This is one of the finest periods for birdwatching, as resident species are in full breeding plumage and the last migratory visitors linger before departing.
October to November is similarly rewarding. The dry season’s lingering calm combines with the first bursts of new growth, and many animals are engaged in pre-breeding activity. The whale-watching season is drawing to a close, but lemurs, chameleons, and reptiles are particularly visible. Temperatures are warm but not yet oppressively hot, and the south and west are especially appealing.
Accommodation availability is generally better during shoulder months, and prices are often lower than at the July–August peak. Roads are in reasonable condition, and most national parks and reserves are fully operational.
What to pack (April–May): Layers for variable temperatures, light rain jacket, hiking boots with grip for muddy trails, quick-dry clothing, insect repellent, sunscreen, a wide hat, and a compact umbrella for lingering showers. What to pack (Oct–Nov): Light breathable clothing, sun protection, reef-safe sunscreen if visiting coastal areas, insect repellent, a light cardigan for highland evenings, and a dry bag for boat excursions or early whale-watching trips.
🐋 Wildlife and Regional Highlights by Season
Madagascar’s wildlife calendar adds another layer to seasonal planning. Humpback whales migrate through Sainte Marie and the south-west coast from July to September, making these months unmissable for marine enthusiasts. Lemur species such as the indri and sifaka are best observed from May to October when their territorial calls echo most frequently through the forest. Chameleons and frogs, by contrast, are far easier to find during the wet season from November to April when they are breeding and highly active.
The south and west — including Isalo, the Tsingy de Bemaraha, and the Avenue of the Baobabs — are at their finest in the dry season. The east coast and its rainforests, including Masoala and Ranomafana, are accessible year-round but are most manageable from May to October. The highlands around Andasibe and Fianarantsoa offer rewarding visits throughout the dry season, with pleasantly cool evenings that make them a refreshing contrast to the coastal heat.
🌟 Overall Best Time to Visit Madagascar
If there is one window that stands above all others, it is July to September. The dry season is in full effect, rainfall is at its lowest, and the island’s finest experiences converge: humpback whales breach off the west coast, lemurs call across national parks full of crisp highland air, and the Avenue of the Baobabs glows at dusk under cloudless skies. Temperatures are cooler than much of the year — particularly refreshing in the highlands — and infrastructure is fully operational. For those who find July and August too busy or expensive, June and September offer almost identical conditions with noticeably fewer crowds. Travellers seeking great value, lush scenery, and exceptional wildlife who are willing to accept some unpredictability will find April and May a compelling alternative — the shoulder season at its best. Madagascar rewards careful planning, and whatever time of year you visit, it remains one of the world’s most extraordinary destinations.
More to Explore
