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• Meet the island’s tribes
• Visit four national parks
• Tour sapphire mining villages
• Stay in beach and lakeside hotels

The strange serenade of forest lemurs and 2,000 years of tribal heritage await on the unique island of Madagascar.

The world’s fourth largest island is home to an incredible array of wildlife that has evolved from 80 million years of isolation in the Indian Ocean.

Guests on the new Madagascar: The Lost Continent tour visit four national parks and a reptile reserve, with the chance of seeing lemur species including the golden bamboo, ring-tailed, diademed sifaka, the chic black-and-white ruffled, Verreaux’s sifaka or ‘dancing lemur’, and the large indri, with its remarkable ‘singing’ call, which lives just a few feet into the trees.

Guests may also see colourful chameleons, frogs, crocodiles and birds such as the coloured nightjar and ground roller, plus extraordinary plant life from epiphytes – which derive nutrients from the air – to hundreds of species of orchid and statuesque baobab trees.

Saga guests can meet the Tanala forest tribe, who survive by hunting and fishing, visit the Betseleo tribe who live in a rice-growing region and manage a wildlife conservation reserve, and the Bara people, farmers of zebu cattle, who bury their ancestors’ bones in a mountainous, exposed area of the Earth’s crust in Isalo National Park.

The adventure takes in sapphire mining villages and towns such as Ambositra, a centre of woodcarving, Ambatolampy, the ‘capital of aluminium’, to witness the processes involved in making pots and pans, and Antsirabe, a health retreat with natural thermal springs, and home to workshops creating jewellery, sweets and decorative artefacts.

The tour begins in the capital, Antananarivo, where the five-star Hotel Carlton has an outdoor swimming pool, fitness club and a casino. All meals are included, and further accommodation includes the stilted houses of Le Lac Hotel, near Fianarantsoa, set in Sahambavy Lake and surrounded by a tea plantation, and the beachside Les Dunes d’Ifaty, within a serene tropical park, overlooking the Mozambique Channel. 

For details call free on 0800 056 0464 or visit saga.co.uk/Madagascar

14 nights from £2,999 per person departing London Heathrow with Ethiopian Airlines on October 25, 2019 and March 13, April 10 and May 22, 2020. Price includes VIP door-to-door chauffeur service, return flights, airport taxes, accommodation, 12 breakfasts, 11 lunches and 12 dinners, porterage, tour manager, optional travel insurance and additional cancellation rights, or a discount if passenger has own insurance. 

Editors:

Saga is a specialist in the provision of products and services for life after 50. The Saga brand is one of the most recognised and trusted brands in the UK and is known for its high level of customer service and its high quality, award winning products and services including cruises and holidays, insurance, personal finance and publishing. Visit saga.co.uk