I landed in Antananarivo one afternoon in the late autumn of 2023, one day before my girlfriend, Sophie, arrived on a separate flight. Our plan was to spend in Madagascar the better part of the upcoming north winter. Of what little we had researched in advance, doing this would require a visa extension.
All resources we had read, official or unofficial, outlined the same details concerning Madagascar’s visa regime… We get a tourist visa on arrival with either a duration of 1 month for €35 or 2 months for €40. Then we have the option to extend the visa for a maximum of 30 additional days so that if we get the one-month visa on arrival we’ll be able to stay for a maximum of only 60 days in total. The former part of this process turned out to be valid, whereas the latter was not; the tourist visa is in fact extendable to a total stay of 90 days regardless of the original visa’s duration.
According to that information, our initial plan was to take the two-month visa on arrival and then extend it for 30 days. But this didn’t work out due to a mishap I had at the airport…
Showing up at the immigration control, I asked the policeman for the two-month tourist visa. The gist of our ensuing dialog was:
“Ok, monsieur. 80 euros.”
“No. It should be 40 euros.”
“No. It’s 80 euros.”
“Alright”—I thought it may have changed indeed—“80 euros, but you give me a receipt.”
“No. If you want a receipt, you get one month for 35 euros. If you want two months, you pay 80 euros without a receipt.”
“No. I need two months. I either pay 40 euros without a receipt or 80 euros with a receipt.”
“You get one month then.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the boss and I say so.”
We argued a bit longer, but I wasn’t inclined to kick up too much of a fuss—like shouting and calling out for his superiors. I was tired from 30 hours of traveling and didn’t want to test my nerves against the authorities in a country I didn’t yet know anything about. Since he insisted I could extend it for two more months later, I compromised with the one-month visa. Worst case scenario, we’d stay in Madagascar for only two months and then hop on to another African country.
It turned out I just bumped into the wrong officer. Sophie on the next day got her two-month visa for €40 without any issue. Anyhow, we now had a mission to extend both our visas for 30 and 60 days respectively.
The visa receipt I got upon entry featured a list of all the locations where we could go for the extension around the country:
We could have waited and attempt to extend in some other city closer to my visa’s expiry date. But we ruled it better to finish this chore as soon as possible to be able to plan our trip at ease. So, postponing it for only the next day of Sophie’s arrival which was a Sunday, Monday morning we made straight for the Ministry of Immigration (Service Central de l’Immigration et de l’Emigration).
It is located inside a big complex that houses several ministries as well as the police headquarters, southwest of Lake Anosy. The correct entrance is from the road on the southern side of the complex (coordinates: -18.9172, 47.5174). From there, you have to walk around the first building to an inner yard with a row of letter-signified gates. You look for the one with the letter D. Inside, in the corner to the far right, there is a little office with a sign that says prolongation de visa.
There was no queue, and we walked straight in. The woman on the post didn’t speak any English. But if you can’t muster some simple French, you’ll surely find someone to help.
She asked whether we’d brought all the required documents. And when I asked her which were those, she pointed at a list taped on the window outside of the office.
By the way, FYI, there was also another list with the prices for longer-term residence visas. These went up to 10+ years and cost reasonable amounts of money. But since we weren’t interested, I didn’t take a picture nor did I inquire for additional requirements.
The relevant list was already long and confusing enough. So I walked back in and asked her whether we really needed all these things. She promptly cut the list down in half to the six following requirements:
- Two photocopies of the passport identification page
- One photocopy of the passport page containing the original visa
- Four face photos of unspecified size
- An 80,000 ariary processing fee
- A copy of an outbound flight ticket
- An accommodation certificate written by our hotel
We didn’t have anything with us save passports and money. We were counting on first figuring out exactly what we needed and then sort everything out on the spot.
The photocopies were the easy part. There was a little printing shop inside the complex where we printed copies of our passports and tickets. The tickets we had were already canceled: “fake” ones we had purchased from one of those onward ticket websites for boarding the plane and entering the country. Instead of buying new ones, we decided to risk it and reuse them, since—rightly so as it turned out—we doubted that they would check them. The printing shop strangely didn’t have an email, so we had to plug our phones in by cable in order to print them.
Regarding the face photos, I had some spare ones already left over from previous visa applications. Sophie had hers taken at a Fujifilm shop for about a euro.
For the accommodation certificate, we had to return to our hotel, which was quite a distance away. Since it was already quite late, we needed to postpone our applications for the next day.
We were back early in the morning with all the documents. This time there was a short queue but it moved fairly quickly. We gave all the papers and the cash, we got the latter back stapled together with a new set of papers, and were sent to a different office to pay and return with the receipts.
That office was located in another building (palais de justice), a five-minute walk away. A kind young cop volunteered to take us to the right place. We paid, waited for a few minutes, and left with the receipts.
Back in the visa office, the woman took the receipts and gave us two tickets of sorts with which we should return in two days. These tickets were also meant to be used in lieu of our passports, which she kept in the meantime.
Two days later, we returned to the same office for the third time, and within seconds we had left with two new, 90-day visas stamped in our passports. So it turned out I was actually better off to have taken the one-month visa on arrival. This way, since the extension fee and process remain the same regardless, my three-month stay in Madagascar came €5 cheaper.
Accommodation and Activities in Madagascar
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