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From Morondava our goal was Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park, a six- to seven-hour drive north. This UNESCO World Heritage site is made up of an almost surreal landscape of limestone karsts (essentially limestone plateaus) that have been eroded into caverns and fissures creating dramatic “forests” of sharp limestone needles. Utterly unlike anything we’ve seen before. On top of the unique geological formations the park has an unusually large number of endemic species of both plants and animals, some existing nowhere on earth but in these karsts.

One thing that these pictures can’t (or at least don’t) display is how almost stunningly sharp the rocks were. As we spent three days tramping around the park with Francia, our local guide, much of the time was spent either walking through forests or through caverns. When we were actually climbing on the “tsingies”, though, you had to be genuinely careful where you placed your hands; it wasn’t quite knife-edge sharp but the tops were extremely hard and genuinely sharp. Let’s put it this way: if ever you were to slip and fall while you were in the tsingies you would be in a world of hurt. At least one definition of tsingy is “where one cannot walk barefoot.” To say the least!

Which made one of the sights we experienced particularly interesting: a group of lemurs hopping across an expanse of tsingies. (Tribe of lemurs? Family? OK, I looked it up and on one site they’re called a troop of lemurs while two other sites call them a conspiracy of lemurs. I’m going with conspiracy.) Francia seemed genuinely impressed; she indicated you rarely see lemurs on the tsingies themselves.

Both getting to the park and then getting back to Morondava was quite the experience. As I indicated, it was something like a seven-hour drive up there, nearly all of it on gravel roads and much of it on roads in really rough condition. For a long stretch – a few hours – we seemed to be traveling in a caravan with maybe a dozen cards packed together kicking up an astounding amount of dirt. We had the windows open and after a while you couldn’t believe how dirty we were, just crusted in dust.

At one point, then, our car managed to break down, a broken fan belt or something. I figured that explained the caravan, as every single car in the group – even those in front of us – stopped to help. It took maybe 20 minutes to get us going again, with every driver there to help. My guess was that no one wanted to break down alone which explained the caravan. Wrong.

Just before leaving our lodge for the drive back people we’d met over our four-night stay explained that just the week before thieves had ambushed a driver taking German tourists up to the park. Apparently beat him pretty badly and robbed the tourists. So now drivers were traveling in a caravan. And as we learned on the return drive, with armed guards in the first and last cars. We happened to be selected as the last car so we traveled for a couple hours with an armed soldier riding shotgun. Literally. In the meantime as word got out about the robbery tourism was quickly drying up in the region which is a genuine tragedy for the people who make a living off the tourists.

And then eventually, after in this case maybe an eight-hour drive, we made it back to Morondava. For the return trip our driver had upgraded the car to one with AC so we could keep the windows closed; made a big difference. And this time back in Morondava I was feeling fine so I could enjoy our brief stop before a late afternoon flight to Antananarivo – visiting with friends we’d made in the park (a Bollywood director and his Bollywood actress wife!), a long walk on the enormous beach, lunch at a nice Italian restaurant. Genuinely pleasant. After another night in Tana we fly north to a beach resort which seems like a nice way to end our three-week trip through Madagascar.