The word means roughly where one cannot walk barefoot, and that is not poetry. The tsingy is a field of limestone blades standing on end, some of them a hundred metres tall, packed close enough that the gaps between them are corridors. The rock has been sharpened to an edge. People cross it on ladders, bridges and fixed cables because there is no other way through.
It was made by water working on a limestone massif over millions of years. Rain is slightly acidic, limestone dissolves, and the water found the joints in the rock and opened them downward. What is left standing between the dissolved joints are the blades. Underneath, the same process cut caves and a deep gorge through the massif, so the formation is as elaborate below ground as above it.
UNESCO inscribed the Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve in 1990. The protected ground runs to roughly 152,000 hectares in the Melaky region, toward the west coast of Madagascar.
The stone forest is hard to enter, which is exactly why so much lives in it. Surveys record eleven lemur species, 103 species of land and water birds, fifteen bats and twenty two amphibians, along with reptiles found nowhere else. Isolation on a mountain of knives turns out to be effective protection.
Getting there is the real filter. It sits inland from the west coast on roads that close in the wet season, so visits run in the dry months and are arranged through the park rather than turned up to. Treat the season and the road as the plan, not a detail: this is one of the least casual places on the map.
Madagascar
See it on the map
This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
