Antsirabe

Antsirabe took me by surprise. After days on the Route Nationale 7, winding south through the central highlands with their terraced rice paddies and red-earth villages, I was not expecting to roll into what looked like a slightly threadbare Alpine spa town that had been picked up and set down on a tropical plateau. The Norwegians founded it in the 1870s as a missionary retreat, drawn by the cool climate and the thermal springs, and the French later turned it into a fashionable watering hole. The grand Hôtel des Thermes still presides over a long avenue, pastel and peeling, like a dowager who has seen better days but refuses to leave the party.

The City of Rickshaws

What you notice first, though, are the pousse-pousse — the hand-pulled rickshaws that swarm every street in their thousands, painted in joyful clashing colours and given names like proud little ships. Antsirabe is flat, which is rare in the highlands, and that flatness made it Madagascar’s rickshaw capital. There are reportedly several thousand of them, and the men who pull them run barefoot or in flip-flops, calling out for fares, weaving around the cycle-rickshaws that compete for the same trade.

I have a complicated relationship with being pulled through a street by another human being, and I said so to Lia, who pointed out, reasonably, that refusing to hire one out of squeamishness simply denied the man his living. So we took one, to the central market, and our puller — a lean, grinning man named Hery — talked the entire way, pointing out the old railway station, the Catholic cathedral, the spot where the rickshaw men gather to eat. It was, against all my northern-European self-consciousness, one of the warmest encounters of the whole trip.

Workshops and Stones

The other thing Antsirabe is known for is craft. The town and its surroundings are a hub of small-scale artisanal industry, and you can spend an entire day visiting workshops — a family carving miniature bicycles and rickshaws out of recycled tin cans and aluminium, a polisher cutting the semi-precious stones for which this volcanic region is famous, an embroidery cooperative, a workshop where they make zebu-horn jewellery and another distilling essential oils. None of it is slick. You walk into someone’s yard, they show you what they do, and there is no pressure to buy, though of course we did.

The region around Antsirabe is volcanic, dotted with crater lakes — Lake Tritriva, an eerie green crater lake wrapped in local legend, sits a short drive out of town and is well worth the detour. We went late in the day, when the water had gone almost black and the wind had dropped, and a guide told us the story of the two doomed lovers said to have drowned themselves there. I have heard versions of that legend on three continents, but rarely in a setting that made it feel so plausible.

When to go: April to October for the dry, cool highland season — bring a fleece, because nights here genuinely get cold, something first-time visitors to Madagascar never expect. Antsirabe makes a natural overnight stop on the long RN7 journey between Antananarivo and the south.