The Great Red Island (Madagascar)

Ten nights and some 1,350 kilometres across Madagascar on a Royal Enfield Himalayan 450, running from the central highlands down to the beaches on the Mozambique Channel. Vintage Rides guide the whole route.

Antananarivo opens it at the Queen’s Palace, then the volcanic highlands around Ampefy with their geysers and crater lake, and Antsirabe, where the thermal springs date from the French colonial period and the evening is spent touring by rickshaw, which is still the city’s main transport. Ranomafana follows through Betsileo wood-carving country into primary rainforest, and Sahambavy adds a tea plantation and factory, the only commercial tea estate on the island.

Ambalavao and the Anja Reserve come next, a small community-run forest at the foot of a granite massif where ring-tailed lemurs live among the rocks, though no sighting can be promised. Isalo National Park then gets two days, and it is the landscape most people picture when they imagine the interior: eroded sandstone massifs rising out of Bara herding country, with canyons, natural pools and rock formations that invite comparison with Uluru. A working sapphire mine sits nearby, part of a rush that transformed this corner of the country in the late 1990s.

The final run drops to Mangily on the coast through villages built by sapphire seekers and a baobab forest, on tracks rather than tarmac, with a domestic flight back to the capital at the end. A traditional Vezo dhow sail and snorkelling are optional. The bike rental is included in the price, which is quoted per person. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world and most of its wildlife exists nowhere else, so the riding and the stops carry roughly equal weight here.