BootsnAll Travel Network



Introduction to Madagascar: Lemurs and plenty more

Our flight from Nairobi dumped us in the Malagasy capital Antananarivo (hereafter ‘Tana’) at 2am, and after a night in a hotel near the airport and a good sleep in, we were ready to begin the last stage of our last big journey – a month in Madagascar. Within five days, we’d already come and gone from Tana twice without really seeing much of the city, but at first glance it’s infinitely more pleasant than any major city on the African mainland, and nicer than most in Asia too, for what it’s worth. I mention Asia because that was the first aspect of Madagascar’s ‘otherness’ that struck us upon arrival – that despite its position off the southeast coast of Africa, the Malagasy people (well, at least those of the highlands in and around Tana) look Asian, having arrived by dugout canoe from Indonesia/Malaysia about 2000 years ago.

We had known for a while that one month would not be enough to cover all of Madagascar, so we decided to abandon the north of the country (at least until the next trip) and focus largely on the south. But for our first explorations outside Tana, we thought that heading east to the closest major national park to the capital, Andasibe-Mantadia, would be the best place to start. This would be our introduction to the unique flora and fauna of Madagascar, and like all other visitors to this land, we were most looking forward to seeing our first lemurs.

Lemurs, to give a brief introduction, are about 40-50 million years old and predate the monkey. Indeed, it was the arrival of the quicker, smarter monkey on the scene about 35 million years ago that spelled the end for the lemur everywhere – except Madagascar, where there are 86 species and sub-species still going strong, and not a single monkey in the entire country. On our first day in Andasibe we saw five different lemur species – the brown lemur, the lesser bamboo lemur, the red-bellied lemur (somewhat rare in Andasibe) and two spectacular species, the Indri Indri and the diademed sifaka, which both deserve a detailed description.

The Indri Indri is the largest lemur, the only one without a monkey-style tail and the only one with a singing-style call (which is quite beautiful and enchanting when you hear it deep in the rainforest). It is about the size of a small bear, looks like a combination of a panda and a koala and is, in every way, an absolutely extraordinary animal. We saw one close up (but briefly) in Andasibe and then saw a handful of them at very close range the following day in Mitsinjo, an NGO reserve nearby, as they came out of the trees to the forest floor. To be so close to this bizarre but wonderful animal was absolutely fantastic and more than we could have hoped for.

The diademed sifaka is one of nine types of sifaka and is notable for its striking yellow fur. Sifakas are, I think, the most beautiful lemurs in general because of their thick fur and bright colours, and the diademed sifaka is quite rare and only found in this area. In fact, the ones that we saw in the Andasibe section of the park had been transferred from the Mantadia section, which is, I believe, the only national park where you can see them in their natural habitat. The sifakas jump spectacularly from tree to tree – not at all like a monkey but instead using virtually only their back legs to rebound from one tree trunk to another.

On our day in the NGO reserve, we also saw our first chameleon, who was green, large and quite spectacular, as well as the most extraordinary gecko we had ever seen by far (though this was a title it was not to hold for long) – a leaf-tailed gecko that had camouflaged itself so amazingly well to a tree trunk that we simply couldn’t see it for a minute or two despite our guide pointing right at it. We also took a night walk in the same reserve and saw our first nocturnal lemur, the avahi or woolly lemur.

In short, our Madagascar experience was off to a fantastic start, and we returned to Tana excited about what lay in store for the rest of the trip.



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