Day 2: Antsirabe

We headed to the Taxi Brousse station in the south of Tana where busses for the South and West depart from. There are some important things you need to know before taking your first Taxi Brousse.

You should ask the driver/ticket seller to see the bus before purchasing your ticket. This will allow you to do three things: (1) Check to see whether the ride will be a comfortable one by seeing the inside of the bus, (2) check to see what condition the bus is in to assess whether your trip will double in time or not and (3) check how many people are already booked into the bus. The last is important as if you are the first to buy tickets from your vendor then you may end up waiting for over 3-4 hours as the brousse will only depart once full. The best way to pick a brousse is to select one of the newer, more comfortable ones that is almost full. It is also recommended that you ensure before buying the ticket that baggage to be put on the roof is included in the price and not an add-on fee.

Antsirabe is the starting point for many tours down the Tsiribihina and so this is the town we decided to stop in to book our tour. We stayed in the Lovasoa, a Norwegian Church Aid youth hostel which offered hot water, internet, and a comfortable dorm for a much more reasonable price than in Tana. Upon leaving the brousse station guides will surround you asking which tours you are interested in and all claiming to be in the Lonely Planet guidebook. (We had the Lonely Planet guidebook and could not find any of them, so be careful who you go with). Waiting to arrive in Antsirabe to book the Tsirbihina + Tsingy + Alle de Baobabs tour rather than booking from the UK really paid off. We managed to arrange a tour for around 260 EUR for 7 days and 6 nights whilst online prices from various western booking sites were asking for over 1300 EUR per person for the same package. It is important to note that the payment for the tour is required in advance as the money is used directly to carry out the tour. It is also worth mentioning that different people will get different deals for the same price so make sure that you know what is included in the tour being offered to you. We ended up using an outfit based at Chez Billy who offered food and water most days and agreed a deal that fitted our budget more than the outfit offered by our hostel, who were asking for over 400 EUR. Payment is in cash only and if you don’t have dollars or euros we’d recommend taking out money in Tana as the equivalent in local currency is roughly 1 million Ariary while most ATMs limit withdrawals at 300,000 per transaction and the ATMs in Antsirabe quickly run out of cash.

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