Western Madagascar by dug-out canoe and zebu-cart
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010Madagascar is renowned for its dreadful roads and packed-like-sardines public transport, and with this in mind we knew that getting to the western part of the country to see the famed ‘tsingy’ would be the most challenging part of a challenging country. To get to Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park from Tana, you have to take an 18-hour taxi-brousse (usually a minibus) to Morondava and then have to hire a 4WD for the 8-10 hour journey on a dirt road. And then do it again in reverse to get back. You can fly to Morondava, but at €450 per person one way we baulked at this, and instead settled on what seemed to be a good solution that took public transport out of the equation and avoided the worst stretch of road: we took a taxi-brousse three hours south of Tana to Antsirabe, took in the sights and sounds of its Saturday market, and then arranged a 7-day tour to the tsingy with a local guide named Robinson Crusoe (seriously) and four other foreigners. This involved three days in a private 4WD and some other, more creative means of transport – the highlights of the trip are detailed below.
The Tsiribihina River by Pirogue: We spent days 2-4 floating down the Tsiribihina River and through the Manambolo Gorge in dug-out wooden canoes, a fabulous experience despite the intense heat and the fact that we thought the gorge was not all that spectacular. We camped on the river bank for two nights, saw all-white Decken’s sifakas in the trees and stopped at a gorgeous waterfall / swimming hole on the second day. And, of course, we got a great taste of rural Malagasy river life in a very remote area devoid of roads and, really, anything that could be called infrastructure. Meanwhile, the company was excellent (we made friends with a lovely 73-year-old Frenchwoman named Jacqueline who has invited us to her country house outside Paris) and the boatmen made our seats as comfortable as they could by propping up our backpacks for seat-backs and using folded mattresses for padding.
To Antsiraraka by Zebu-Cart: After disembarking from our pirogues for the last time on the afternoon of Day 4, we hopped onto the main form of transport in the area: a zebu-pulled cart. (Zebus are ubiquitous humpbacked cattle that are regularly seen in both the Malagasy countryside and on the Malagasy dinner plate.) We enjoyed a rather bumpy ride through some villages for about 45 minutes to Antsiraraka, itself nothing more than a village surrounded by rice fields and baobab trees but one that offered bungalows and our first shower for three days.
The Tsingy: After another whole day in a 4WD, we finally arrived in the afternoon of Day 5 at Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park. The next day, we spent about four hours in the ‘Grand Tsingy’ in the morning and two hours in the ‘Petit Tsingy’ in the afternoon and, as we’d hoped, this was another great experience. The Grand Tsingy especially is a forest of jagged limestone rock pinnacles created by erosion and the advancing and receding of the sea over millions of years. The national park authorities have created an impressive circuit involving bolted ladders and bridges that allows you (with a rope and harness) to experience the best of the tsingy and to see it from all angles – from the narrow canyons on the ground to the viewpoints above the tsingy. I think (but I could be wrong) there are only two other places in the world like this – one in China’s Yunnan province and one in Malaysian Borneo, and having not been to either it was very satisfying to reach this one (and to think: we skipped the Borneo one because it was too hard to get to!!!). Plus, on the way back from the Tsingy we saw a Decken’s sifaka (one of the so-called dancing sifakas) bound along the ground like a kangaroo in a hilarious fashion – absolutely priceless.
The Avenue of Baobabs: There are eight species of baobab trees in the world: one on mainland Africa, specifically West Africa, that we saw when we were in the region three years ago; one in Australia that I’ve never seen; and six that are only found in Madagascar. We saw quite a few baobabs along the way once we were past the river stage of the trip, but it was on the last afternoon that we saw the most famous ones of the region: specifically the intertwined ‘lover baobabs’ and, most impressively, the Avenue of the Baobabs, where the enormous trees line both sides of a dirt road with zebu-carts passing underneath them – a fabulous and very Malagasy sight.
Despite the scorching heat and a rather unfortunate falling out with one of the other tourists on the penultimate night (a long story that’s not worth telling, other than to say that you can’t expect to hire a private vehicle and simply pay the taxi-brousse price while the other passengers pay the remainder), it was a memorable trip and is well worth doing not just as a way to reach the Tsingy but for the experience in and of itself.
From Morondava, we took a 14.5 hour taxi-brousse ride back to Ansirabe, which wasn’t too bad all things considered, and then began the next stage of our Madagascar experience: the southern national park trail.
Nick