Marojejy National Park

Marojejy rises from about 75 metres to 2,132 metres in a short horizontal distance, which stacks lowland rainforest, montane forest, cloud forest and summit scrub one above the other, and walking up through those bands in two days is the point of coming. The park's flagship is the silky sifaka, a white lemur numbering only a few hundred and found in this corner of Madagascar alone; helmet vangas, ground rollers and dozens of endemic amphibians live here too. Three camps at increasing altitude take walkers up the mountain, each simpler than the last, with guides and porters arranged at the entrance. The forest is genuinely wet and the trail is steep, root-tangled and slippery, so this is trekking rather than strolling. Reaching the summit needs a clear day, which the mountain does not often give.

History

Although a Franco-Anglo-American zoological mission surveyed other mountains of the region in 1929, Marojejy was first climbed for survey only in 1937, when L.-J. Arragon of the Service Géographique de Madagascar went up Marojejy Est without doing any field research. The French botanist Jean-Henri Humbert of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris explored the massif from 1948, spending five months between November 1948 and November 1950 collecting 4,039 herbarium specimens, and in his book of 1955 called it the most impressive range in Madagascar. Largely through his support it became a strict nature reserve in 1952, open only to research scientists, its boundaries were fixed by 89 markers under a decree of 1966, and in 1998 it was turned into a national park and opened to the public; in 2007 it became part of the Rainforests of the Atsinanana World Heritage Site (Wikipedia, Marojejy National Park).

Highlights

• Silky sifakas - the white lemur found only in this region.
• Stacked forest zones - lowland to cloud forest as you climb.
• Camp-to-camp trekking - three basic camps up the mountain.
• Endemic birds and frogs - vangas, ground rollers and amphibians.

When to go

September to December for the driest trails. Cyclone season from January to March closes the park in practice. Even in the dry months rain should be expected daily.

Good to know

The climb is genuinely hard: steep, muddy and slippery, with leeches after rain. Camps are basic wooden shelters and you carry or hire everything. Sifaka sightings are likely but not guaranteed. The summit is often clouded in. Guides and porters are compulsory and add real cost.

Nearby

Andapa lies southwest; the Sambava vanilla coast is east.

Key facts