I drove 2,500km across Madagascar to find the world's last lemurs

One epic road trip connects Madagascar's richest wildlife, most spectacular landscapes and the world's last lemurs.

Sitting beneath a thick canopy of trees in Mitsinjo Reserve, I crane my neck skyward, straining beneath the weight of my camera. A flash of white and black fur leaps across my lens, much closer than anticipated. I drop the camera from my eye and the heavy jungle air erupts with the haunting, whale-like cries of the indri, the largest lemur species on Earth.

Critically endangered, strictly arboreal and the origin of man, according to Malagasy lore, the indri is a wide-eyed, tuft-eared rarity known to few but the most exuberant wildlife enthusiasts. Madagascar's crown jewel of more than 150,000 endemic species is sitting just 3m (10ft) above my head.

Madagascar is the only place on Earth where lemurs survive in the wild, and my husband and I had come here to see how much of that extraordinary wildlife we could encounter on an independent road trip. Over three weeks, our 2,500km (1,553-mile) route would take us from the capital, Antananarivo, through rainforest, rice paddies, prehistoric canyons and spiny desert to the island's west coast, linking eight national parks and reserves along the way. With a rented 4X4 and an ever-changing cast of park guides, the route offered a surprisingly achievable way to encounter species found nowhere else on the planet.

We rented a 4x4 for the journey, and with the bustle of Antananarivo fading into our rear-view mirror, we rode the RN7's ribbon of freshly laid tarmac up into the central highlands where two-storey trano gasy homes made of red earthen bricks sat on the fringes of expansive rice paddies. Families watched from behind swinging wooden shutters as we passed by. Rolling green hills and terraced valleys grazed by long-horned zebu punctuated the winding roads between towns.

Our first wildlife stop was the dense jungle of Ranomafana National Park. Trudging through the rain, I followed a local guide – required in Madagascar's national parks and readily available at every park entrance – up the muddy trail. Walking with a slight limp, acquired while rescuing a traveller from a jungle waterfall years ago, he pointed out clumsy red-bellied lemurs, self-assured greater bamboo lemurs basking in the sun and ultra-rare golden bamboo lemurs. The latter survive largely on giant bamboo, consuming quantities of cyanide that would be lethal to most other mammals.

The sheer variety is partly a product of Madagascar's fragmented habitats. "Lemurs are ultra-specialised creatures evolved to fill a single ecological niche," our guide explained. "Each forest in Madagascar hosts its own unique adapted species."

More than 110 lemur species have been identified, many restricted to small pockets of forest. To see more of them, you have to keep moving. But the ease of the sightings has a darker explanation. Madagascar's forests are shrinking, our guide said, as communities cut down trees for fuel and agriculture, squeezing lemurs into ever-smaller fragments of habitat.

Continuing south brought new species with each change in landscape. We sunned on chunky boulders surrounded by ring-tailed lemurs in Anja Community Reserve and searched for tree boas in the shadow of the Andringitra massif. Hiking within the ruiniform plateau and jagged canyons of Isalo National Park, the final stop on our voyage down the RN7, we stumbled through verdant foliage and went nearly nose-to-nose with Verreaux's sifaka, long-limbed lemurs famous for their sideways, dancing gait.

At Isalo, however, the easy part of the road trip ended. To reach the stone forests of Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park on the west coast, we would have to leave the RN7 – and the tarmac – behind.

Reaching Tsingy required a four-day traverse across some of the roughest roads of the trip. For the most difficult stretch, between Manja and Morondava, we hired a local pisteur – a ride-along guide who knows every river crossing, mud pits and hidden routes through the maze of dirt tracks.

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We crossed rivers where the flow nearly crested the hood of our truck. Elsewhere, tall grass swallowed the track entirely. Without GPS or a reliable map, the pisteur became our eyes, picking a path through the endless web of sandy tracks and occasionally guiding us through isolated Sakalava communities.

Careening around a particularly sandy corridor, we burst into a kianja, or village square, alive with a market and hundreds of shoppers. Thick ropes of tobacco, roasting cassava and an array of plastic trinkets were spread out on colorful lambahoany, the printed cotton wraps worn across Madagascar. It was a vibrant bazaar erected seemingly out of nowhere, surrounded by wooded savannah a day's drive in any direction.

By the time we reached the town of Morondava in the dim evening light, after days of mud and river crossings, hitting tarmac again felt like a relief. We thanked our pisteur for his life-saving navigational services before setting up camp beneath the moonlit shade of a baobab, Madagascar's emblematic tree.

We woke at the edge of Avenue of the Baobabs – Madagascar's famous dirt road lined with towering baobab trees – in the soft pink light of dawn. For a few precious moments we had the country's most photographed landscape almost to ourselves before the tour groups arrived. Kirindy Reserve was a natural stop on our final stretch to Tsingy, and a welcome break before another gruelling day on the road.

Kirindy is all about nocturnal wildlife. That night, our guide led us through the reserve, where in the glow of my headlamp, a Madame Berthe's mouse lemur scampered into the canopy while the wide, spectral eyes of a red-tailed sportive lemur reflected crimson in the beam. Back in camp, a particularly pudgy fossa – Madagascar's largest predator, with the long body of a mongoose and cat-like features – wandered from the treeline in the shadow of our tent.

The next day, as we neared Tsingy, the hard dirt road devolved into a thick mud pit. Stranded vehicles littered both sides of the swampy mess and crowds from the nearby village gathered to haul drivers free. Before long, our 4X4 was bogged too. But Tsingy was worth every difficult kilometre. Its unique stone forests host many endemic lemurs, and we spent several days clipping into via ferrata lines and climbing through the Unesco-listed limestone pinnacles in search of aye-ayes, stump-tailed chameleons and tiny leaf chameleons.

With our final park behind us, we turned the 4x4 back towards Antananarivo. After weeks of river crossing, mud and increasingly rough roads, the smooth tarmac through the central highlands felt strangely uneventful.

We had succeeded in seeing Madagascar's extraordinary wildlife without joining a tour. But you never really travel "independently" here. Every national park guide who helped us track lemurs, the pisteurwho pointed the way andthe villagers who hauled us from the mud had made the journey possible.

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