CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Antananarivo it runs 985 km to Toliara; allow about 16 h 08 of riding. On the way it passes Antsirabe, Ranomafana, Fianarantsoa and Isalo. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,800 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Antananarivo, which everyone calls Tana, is built on a long ridge and a dozen hills in the middle of Madagascar's highlands, at about twelve hundred and eighty metres, and it looks like a city from another century. Red-brick houses with steep roofs and narrow balconies climb the slopes in terraces, rice paddies fill the valleys right up to the edge of town, and on the highest hill stands the Rova, the old royal palace, whose granite walls were rebuilt after a fire in 1995. In the morning, the city is wrapped in smoke from charcoal stoves and the air is cool, and in the afternoon, a warm light picks out the colours of the old houses.
Read the complete Antananarivo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Antananarivo is where the day begins. Next is Antsirabe.
Antsirabe sits at about fifteen hundred metres in the central highlands of Madagascar, and the altitude gives it a cool, dry climate that surprises visitors who expect the island to be tropical. Nights can be chilly, even in the dry season, and the town feels a long way from the heat of the coast. The Norwegian missionaries who founded it in 1856 chose the site for its healthy air and its hot springs, and the name, which means the place of much salt, refers to the mineral waters that bubble from the ground.
Read the complete Antsirabe write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Antsirabe comes up about 168 km into the recorded legs. Next is Ranomafana.
Ranomafana means hot water in Malagasy, and the name is a clue to the place. The village sits in a steep, forested valley on the escarpment that drops from Madagascar's central highlands toward the east coast, where the Namorona river drops over rapids and hot springs seep from the rock. The surrounding national park, created in 1991, protects some of the island's most important rainforest, and in 2007 it was added to a UNESCO listing of the rainforests of the Atsinanana. Mist hangs in the trees, orchids cling to the branches, and the air is warm and damp.
Read the complete Ranomafana write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 395 km into the recorded legs you reach Ranomafana. Next is Fianarantsoa.
Fianarantsoa sits in the middle of Madagascar's southern highlands, and the name is usually translated as the place where one learns what is good. It is the capital of the Betsileo people, a population of rice farmers whose terraced hillsides you will have been riding through for the last hundred kilometres, and the old upper town, perched on a ridge above the modern one, still has the stone houses and church spires that the nineteenth century left behind. About 167,000 people live here, which makes it one of the larger cities on the RN7, and it is the proper stop for fuel, cash and a real meal before the road runs south toward the drier country.
Read the complete Fianarantsoa write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Fianarantsoa, about halfway. Next is Isalo.
Isalo is the end of the long southbound haul down the RN7, and the landscape changes abruptly to mark it. After the green terraces of the highlands the road enters a country of dry grass, scattered palms and then, suddenly, a sandstone massif that rises like a ruined wall out of the plain. The Isalo range is a mass of Jurassic sandstone that wind and rain have carved into canyons, buttresses and bare orange ridges, with narrow green oases hidden between them where water still runs all year.
Read the complete Isalo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Isalo sits at 1297 km, late in the day. Next is Toliara.
The RN7 ends at Toliara, a flat, sandy, sun-struck town on the south-west coast of Madagascar, where the highlands have been left far behind and the land is dry, thorny and bright. The town, sometimes still called Tulear, has about a hundred and fifteen thousand people, and it sits on the Mozambique Channel with wide streets, dusty pavements, handcarts and the pousse-pousse rickshaws that carry people everywhere. Nights are warm, days are hot and the sea breeze is a mercy.
Read the complete Toliara write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 985 km.
Antananarivo → Antsirabe is 168 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Antsirabe → Ranomafana is 227 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Ranomafana → Fianarantsoa is 63 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Fianarantsoa → Isalo is 283 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Isalo → Toliara is 244 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.