Astani Ringo

Growing up beside the Tsiribihina

Belo sur Tsiribihina is a town of dust, zebu carts and a river. The river decides everything: when the barge runs, when the market is full, when the road north is a road and when it is mud. I grew up two streets from the landing, watching vehicles queue for the crossing.

The travellers in those vehicles were going to the Tsingy. As a boy I understood that whatever the stone forest was, the whole world seemed to want to see it, and that it was four hours from my house.

Becoming a guide at twenty

I started carrying bags and translating at the ferry, then walking the Petit Tsingy with local guides who let me follow. At twenty I was taking my first groups. The park teaches you quickly: where the rock is loose, where the shade is at eleven, which ladder people are frightened of and how to talk them up it.

Ten years of walking the Tsingy

I have done the Grand circuit more times than I can count, in May when it is cool and in November when you must be out by ten. I know the sifaka groups near the second bridge and the fish eagle on the Manambolo. I know which viewpoint is worth the extra forty minutes.

Three languages, and why

Malagasy is mine. French came from school, and because the older lodge owners and the park administration work in it. English I learned because the people who most wanted to walk the Tsingy were arriving with English, and nobody in Belo could talk to them properly. I studied it for years, mostly out loud, mostly badly at first.

Why I started my own agency

For a decade I guided for agencies in Antananarivo and abroad. They sold trips to my region, described my town in their brochures, and paid me a guide's daily rate. Most of what a traveller spent never reached the west at all.

Bien Tsingy Expedition is simply the same work without the layers in between. You write to me, I plan the trip, I guide it, and what you pay stays here — with the lodges, the drivers, the cooks, the park and the villages around it.