NDBT

Okay, here it is, the long ginormous post you’ve all been waiting with baited breath for…

  

First off, a few quotes courtesy of my Bradt travel guide: “Here in Madagascar I have truly found the naturalist’s promised land. Nature seems to have retreated into a private sanctuary, to work on models unlike any she has created elsewhere. At every step one encounters the most strange and marvelous forms.” – Joseph-Philibert Commerson

  

“Some day when I am old and worn and there is nothing new to see, I shall go back to the palm-fringed lagoons, the sun-drenched, rolling moors, the pink villages, and the purple peaks of Madagascar” – E. A. Powell

  

“The mercies of God be bestowed on this people whose simplicity hath herein made them more happy than our too dear-bought knowledge hath advantaged us” – Walter Hamond

  

So – Madagascar is very far from home. In fact, Toliara (or Tulear) is exactly as far from San Francisco as it is possible to be before starting to come back around (antipode!). I’m going to do my best to update this chronologically. Apologies if the entries aren’t very detailed – it’s a lot to get through all at once.

  

10/4 I arrived in Tana (I passed through Mauritius on the way – which looked absolutely gorgeous from the air – if mostly sugar plantations and not forests). Hot in Tana, and the drive reminded me in many ways of South Africa, although the people are ethnically a mix of South east asian and African. I found more English than I was expecting, although there was a bit of a language barrier (my French improved in leaps and bounds). Met Patrick, who was also staying at my hotel in the tourist office and we decided to travel together, as my itinerary had changed and we both thought we’d get more out of the trip. He’s Canadian, just finished up a business degree, and began RTW travels about the same time I did.

  

11/4 Left super early to go to Fianarantsoa. Got to the taxi brousse station on the outskirts of town and were immediately accosted by touts trying to get us to go with their company. The taxi brousses are much like minibuses in Southern Africa – jammed to capacity (although less so in Madagascar), with music on full blast (in Madagascar it was lots of French soft rock, and I found myself actually missing the ‘Rock of Ages’ and its Europop. We did occasionally get a hip hop song or two, and we heard ‘Toxicity’ by system of a down bizarrely frequently. It seems to be a chart hit at the moment.) BTW – foreigners are called vazaha, and it was a term we heard fairly often. It took us 9 hours to get to Fianar, with a couple of stops – one was a bathroom break by the side of the road, and the other was a lunch break at a local hotely. I got quite a kick throughout my journey needing to ask for the WC to be directed to the pit toilets (why use the term water when there is none?). The toilets by the hotely happened to have some of the largest spiders I have ever seen dangling precariously above my head (I was pretty tall for the local population). We ran over a chicken during the journey (there are lots of animals wandering around everywhere – chickens, ducks, zebu, half starved dogs, and cats. I saw a pig too at one point). Passed lots of rice paddies – the Malagasy have a very – special – relationship with rice and eat as much as humanly possible; this in part is what has caused huge amounts of deforestation. Everyone was super-friendly to us, despite the language difference (Patrick remembered a bit of French from school, which helped). The road down to Fianar went through lots of mountains, and there was a lot of very pretty scenery on the way. The beggar children in Fianar were bizarrely polite, selling postcards to raise money for school books and asking for foreign coins for their collections, and they all speak amazing English.

  

12/4 Took a quick brousse to Ranomafana, one of the national parks. Met 2 peace corps girls (turns out there are about 120 peace corps in country and I was often asked if I was PC after I said I was from America). There were 21 people in the brousse, including a boy, who sat next to me who had a chicken in a plastic shopping bag. It clucked at me every so often (bawk-bawk-bawk-jessica). The drive was gorgeous, as we drove through sections of the park, which is eastern rainforest. Stayed at Rian’ala, which is right on the edge of the park. We hired a guide Andre for a 4 hour afternoon hike and a night walk. We set off, and scrambled up and down some very steep paths in the bamboo part of the forest for nearly an hour without seeing anything. I was beginning to despair and was having flashes of leaving Madagascar without ever having seen a lemur when we finally found a group of Golden Bamboo lemurs, which are special to Ranomafana, and a fairly recently discovered species, and very special. I guess Andre had wanted to find the special lemurs first, because then we began seeing lemurs all over the place. Next we saw Milne-Edwards sifaka, red-bellied lemur, and then red-fronted brown lemur. This last was a group that was simply ALL around us; leaping from tree to tree, clambering over our heads, eating, grooming. It was incredible. Then we stopped at a viewpoint and saw a ring tailed mongoose! A carnivore – I hadn’t expected to see any of those. We also saw geckos, more giant spiders, a red forest rat, and a few birds. When we came back that evening we saw a fosa! (Foo-sah) A type of civet and another carnivore. The guides apparently fed it to make it come out, which is sort of unethical biologically, but it was so cool to see, I sort of didn’t care. We also saw some eastern grey bamboo lemurs and tons of brown mouse lemurs, which make little grass nests for their young. They were very small, silent, and they jumped around a ton. I was kind of reminded of the bush babies Colin and I saw in Botswana. We also saw some chameleons, a tenrec (like a hedgehog), and some more birds. Our guide was fabulous – he knew all the biological facts of every lemur we saw. Most of the lemurs haad longer life spans than I expected – about 30-50 years (the smaller ones usually have shorter life spans). It was a great day – the views wre gorgeous and the hiking was great, if occasionally hard (lots of darting up and down the sides of the mountain); sort of what I imagined hiking in the tropics would be like. The kids back at our hotel were lots of fun too – they had made up some sort of jacks game with rocks that they were playing near the dining patio.

  

Okay – that’s all I have the energy to do just now (I have to go eat lunch and I don’t want to spend all of my last day indoors). I’ll back post more when I get to Perth.

Tags: Travel

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