Tag Archives: Madagascar

On the road (1) – Antananarivo to Antsirabe

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Monday 10 June 2024 – We have to get to Ranomafana in order to see our next batch of wildlife, a journey of about 420km that can’t be done in a single day. The distance equates to about 260 miles, or London to Durham, a journey which can be driven in under six hours.  So, why not Tana to Ranomafana?

RN7 is the answer. Read on for details.

The practical upshot is that today was the first of two days spent on the road – 170 km to get to Antsirabe, then 250km tomorrow to complete the journey.

Getting out of Tana through the Monday morning rush was the first hurdle. It was motorbike central for quite some time through the city and into the suburbs.

It took us about three quarters of an hour to get into the countryside

where the views of the passing landscape were quite good. However, there was also plenty of evidence of quarrying, past and present.

The demand for granite blocks and chippings is sufficient to maintain plenty of small scale quarrying, often run as one of the various side hustles that farming families undertake. Another such side hustle is excavating clay from the rice paddies to make bricks, and we saw plenty of evidence of this, too.

One thing Madagascar does not have a shortage of is bricks, which (outside rain forest areas) are a principal house building material.

In many cases, the bricks are covered in a plaster based on the local soil (enriched with zebu droppings which apparently set hard!), so the houses look as if they’re mud houses, but they aren’t.  They are, however, often the same colour as the landscape and can blend in rather harmoniously.

Interestingly, later on in the journey, we passed through an area where the houses are built with bricks but without using any mortar – the brickmakers and masons are skillful enough that this works as a construction technique.

It also helps that the cyclones which bedevil the edges of the island rarely reach this far inland.

Brickmaking sites dotted our journey

and in some places were part of larger scale operations which dominated the landscape.

The roadside retail opportunities demonstrated once again the entrepreneurial spirit which is ubiquitous in our experience of the island so far.  The types of stall varied by region, it seemed.  We stopped briefly at a craft market

and other roadside stalls in the area all, like these ones, specialised in raffia work.

Later on, several stalls specialised in ceramic sculpture,

then came a series which sold musical instruments

and then toy vehicles carved in wood

(with some overlap!).

It seemed that when someone had a good idea for a roadside stall, others in the area picked up on it.  This actually doesn’t seem such a good idea to me; after a while, choice is so wide that custom must inevitably drop off, one would think.

Roadside stalls were plentiful throughout the journey, often selling fruit and/or vegetables;

others we saw sold plants;

inevitably, charcoal;

and even live animals, either as pets or as lunch, apparently.

Everywhere, we saw rice paddies, often terraced:

the country’s appetite for rice is phenomenal.

Despite our driver Haja’s best efforts, progress was slow.  We left Tana at 8am and were on the road for six and a half hours to cover the 170 km.  The reason for this was that we were on Route National 7, the principal route from Tana to the south west of the island. The reason for slow progress was partly congestion (these vehicles are all local or longer distance minibus buses)

but mainly a crappy road surface.

We thought that we’d suffered bad road surfaces in Costa Rica, but that was nothing compared to the slaloming necessary to avoid the craters in this road. That’s why the journey to Ranomafana takes two days.

So, what else did we see on this first segment?

As well as brown brick buildings, there were some more gaily appointed;

there were plenty of churches along the way, both protestant and catholic;

it being sweetcorn harvesting time, several houses were using their balconies to dry the cobs;

ox carts (the first I remember seeing on the island) were frequent as we approached Antsirabe;

and the landscapes were impressive, with significant irrigation channels to support what is a very large, but not the largest, agricultural area on the island, growing a variety of crops in addition to the ubiquitous rice.

(I just chucked in the photo of the man with the straw because it was interesting.)

And then we were in the outskirts of Antsirabe, where we stopped for lunch. We actually managed to get proper Malagasy food, which was very tasty but a bit tricky to deal with – Jane’s chicken had a gallon of broth with it and it was a bit tricky to get the good meat off my zebu with vegetables.  The restaurant we were at had some other tourists in it, and by the time we had finished lunch, the word had got out that There Were Tourists In.

The entrepreneurial drive of the Malagasy showed itself in their willingness to tempt us to buy any number of different sorts of tat.

Antsirabe means the “big town of salts”. It is, also, the town of cycle rickshaws, which are used by local people to get around, and which, we are told, are often contracted by parents to take their children to and from school.

The “salts” bit comes from the local geothermal springs, around which an impressive hotel was built.

It’s still in operation, but if you look closely it couldn’t half do with a lick of paint.  Just nearby is an almost equally impressive railway station building

outside which I saw the first horses I’d noticed on the island.

Nearby were some miniature cars for kids

and a small fairground setup

which Kenny explained was all in place in the lead up to the Independence Day celebrations slated for June 26th.  After checking into our hotel (see later), Kenny then took us on a “city tour”, which meant a bit of exposure to some retail opportunities before a stroll through the town’s market.

We were led to three different outfits, one of which was absolutely fascinating, one quite interesting and the last a little uncomfortable.  The first was really lovely; it specialises in making realistic miniature models of various modes of transport, using entirely recycled materials, which are then offered for sale to tourists.  We got a demonstration about how to make this tiny little bicycle

almost entirely from recycled bits of other things: the tyres are surgical piping, the wheels are cut from aerosol cans, the spokes are fishing line and the saddle is wood.  I have a video of the construction process and will publish it in good time; but it was lovely to see something like this made from materials which would otherwise have been thrown away – nothing gets wasted in Madagascar, it seems.

Part of the same enterprise produces embroidery, which is beautiful but Not Our Thing, and leads to a precious stone emporium which, again, has some beautiful things, but one began to feel a bit of pressure to buy, which makes me very uncomfortable.  Next door is a place which deals in things made out of zebu horn.  Once again, we got a demo of how things can be made, which was interesting; and their showroom

has some imaginative uses of horn,

but once again we weren’t tempted to buy anything. Kenny then walked us through the (busy, colourful and noisy) market that surrounded these emporia.

It was pretty standard fare (i.e. you could find almost anything, actually), but a couple of things caught my eye: a stall with a bewildering variety of rice;

a bicycle repair man;

and rickshaw repair man.

The horsey chaps rode through the market, though I don’t know why

and then we repaired to our hotel, the Couleur Cafe.

It has “bungalows” around rather nice courtyards,

and ours on the face of it seemed very good – lots of space, unusual decor and even its own real fireplace (in which, yes, we had our own real fire to sit around). But it felt actually a bit odd – somewhat faded in its elegance, somehow. We had a perfectly decent evening meal there and retired for the night in preparation for the second leg of the drive down to Ranomafana, with which I’ll regale you in the next post.

 

Mitsinjo reserve and the journey back to Antananarivo

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Sunday June 9 2024 – The afternoon today was spent retracing our tyre tracks towards Antananarivo. But first we had one final wildlife walk in the Mitsinjo reserve within the Analamazaotra park.  This actually started from the same place as yesterday’s night walk, but today we entered a reserve where yesterday we walked along the road. We met Abraham there, and before we started the walk proper, he was able to show us a young Elephant-ear Chameleon that he’d spotted on a tree outside the reserve.

“Mitsinjo” comes from the Malagasy for “looking ahead”; it is a private reserve set up by guides to promote conservation and community tourism.

It also features the steepest trails with the trickiest access of all the walks we’ve done so far.

It starts of with a fairly standard-looking path, oh yes.

But this gives way very soon to narrow, steep and tricky paths through the rainforest.  Before we started up the steep bit, Abraham showed us a reforesting centre that has been set up in the reserve.

Original species – some trees, some other plants – are started in pots, which are set up in a potting shed

beyond which is a nursery area for bring on the more mature seedlings.  it’s very encouraging to see initiatives like this, dedicated to countering the ravaging deforestation that the island has suffered over the years.

The Steep Bit was only 60 metres or so of vertical ascent, but was quite hard work. However, the walking we’d recently done in Spain served us well and so when Abraham offered us a rest at a specially-constructed rest area

we were able to decline, and so pressed on. As we did so, Abraham spent a lot of time on his phone, and it became clear that he was chatting to other guides who were out in the reserve, to get pointers to where there were creatures to see.  The first of these was an Indri, who was not inclined to be helpful to us paparazzi.

Abraham woke him/her up by playing Indri calls from his phone, and so we got a bleary glance

before it decided to go back to sleep.

Some time later, we came across a male Parson’s Chameleon, obligingly sitting at head height in a tree.

I took some detailed photos; I’m fascinated by ithe eyes which look like elephant eyes within the spooky, independently-moving chameleon socket.

The Parson’s Chameleon is the largest of the Madagascan chameleons.  This one was apparently not particularly large, as they go – here’s a photo to give you an idea of scale – as I say, he’s head height above the ground.

Nearby, Abraham also found us a young female of the species, which was a distinctly different colour.

As she matures (in about a month’s time) her skin will turn more green and she will end up a darker shade of green than the male we just saw.

Within a few minutes, we found a small family group of common brown lemurs, but they were very high, difficult to see and not very active.  I got a snap of two young’uns,

but that was all that was on offer, really. Towards the end of the walk, I got this photo

which looks like just these leaves, you know? But on closer examination, there’s a cricket there.

That was it for the Andasibe area.  We bade Abraham goodbye and set out on the road back to Tana, so the rest of this post concerns the scenes we saw on that journey.

We passed once again through the substantial town of Moramanga, which is the site of a national monument to the 1947 Malagasy Uprising, a revolt after the failure of Madagascar’s 1945 effort to achieve independence through legal channels. Malagasy nationalists, armed mainly with spears, attacked military bases and French-owned plantations in the eastern part of the island. The French response was, in a word, barbaric. It tripled the number of troops on the island to 18,000, primarily by transferring soldiers from French colonies elsewhere in Africa, and then engaged in a variety of terror tactics designed to demoralize the population. The French military force carried out mass execution, torture, war rape, torching of entire villages, collective punishment and other atrocities such as throwing live Malagasy prisoners out of airplanes. In the 20th Century, for Christ’s sake!

Combining this with the French political skulduggery that gave rise to the 2009 defenestration of a president who was improving the lot of the islanders in many ways, but who was moving in a direction that didn’t suit French interests (which led to the worst economic crisis in the island’s history) leads one to lower one’s opinion of the French political classes. This is further lowered by hearing about its further manoeuvring to prevent his re-election in 2018 by getting the rules of the election changed to exclude him. Furthermore, the French are still pulling political strings and interfering with Malagasy affairs to the point where many locals consider the island’s 1960 independence to be a sham.  All in all, these actions present a very sorry story about French foreign policy in Madagascar.  The celebrations on June 26th – Madagascar’s Independence Day – will be more muted than they might have been had independence truly been achieved.

A feature of Malagasy life – possibly a consequence of the economic turmoil that started in 2009 – is that everyone seems to have a side hustle – farmers, for example, will often make charcoal; the fires that can sometimes be seen dotting the landscape.  We passed one who had finished making charcoal and was busy bagging it up in standard-sized bags, either for his own use at home or, more likely, for selling on. The grass visible at the top of the bags is just to keep the charcoal in.

Every village we passed has an array of (normally, it has to be said, ramshackle) shops, most of which sell foodstuffs.  Occasionally there are roadside markets as well, like this fruit market we passed.

Because the route we were on (National Route 2) is a major route for transporting of goods from the port of Toamasina to Tana, the heavy traffic necessitates much repair work. This does sometimes get done, which inevitably causes huge queues to form.  Drivers therefore often nip out to have a quick roadside pee – so we had a giggle at the “roadworks” sign, which actually appears to be advertising a toilet.

We eventually got past the roadworks, and took a sandwich lunch, once again provided by our hotel, at a pleasant riverside picnic area,

which provided an opportunity to photograph a Madagascan Sparrowhawk, which is just as handsome as its European counterpart.

Some way down the road, we passed a crowd scene, which proved to be a cockfight. Cockfighting is a recognised activity in Madagascar; according to Kenny, it’s not the vicious sport that one finds in illegal and undergound events in other countries, because the fight ends as soon as one bird leaves the arena. It was amusing that one chap spotted Jane videoing and kindly stepped out of the way so we could get a little sense of the flapping and jumping that was going on inside the ring.

Mr. man got a thumbs-up from Jane and gave one in return.  We passed other cockfighting venues, one of which was a permanent arena, advertising itself on its walls.

Another interesting scene we passed was a laundry party,

where many members of a community will get together to do their washing at a stream or other water source.  it’s a great opportunity for community bonding, community spirit and gossip; it can also be a chance, for example after a bereavement, for people to help the healing process by gathering to wash the clothes of the deceased as part of closure.

Everywhere we went, the scenery featured rice paddies.

The journey was torturous as well as tortuous, and it was mid-afternoon when we arrived in the outskirts of Tana and could start to see the city itself.

On the horizon in the photo above, you can see two huge buildings – the Royal Palace (left) and the former Prime Minister’s Palace.

Our hotel for the night was La Varangue, which was simply (and wonderfully) bonkers, evident from the moment you stepped into its courtyard,

into the hallway,

and thence into the bar

where they also had a reception desk.  We checked in, and were led through the restaurant terrace

which has two remarkable pictures on its wall

across a courtyard

to our room, which had a veranda with a nice view across the city.

The restaurant is something of a destination restaurant, and the decor there is just as bonkers as the rest of the place.

The food was very good, and we ended a very enjoyable dinner by having a chat with a Dutch couple we’d met in the primary rainforest in Mantadia; they were on their honeymoon, and, having been in the south of Madagascar heading north, were bound for Mauritius to decompress, whereas we, of course, are now heading south.

That journey southwards starts on the morrow, with a day spent mainly driving in the direction of Antsirabe.  Maybe it will be an interesting drive, maybe it won’t; stay tuned to find out which.

 

 

 

Analamazaotra and Andasibe Nature Reserves

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Saturday 8 June 2024 – We had a really content-rich day today, as you’ll see from the length of this post (I suggest you get yourself a cuppa or a glass of something cold and settle down to it if you want to get through it in one sitting). As usual, it started with an 0530 alarm call and an 0730 departure.  We had only two destinations, but did four walks during the day.  In the case of three of them, I was struck by the similarity of wildlife walks and Wagner operas.  It was Rossini who said, “Wagner has some wonderful moments, but some dreadful quarter hours”. Similarly, walking around in Madagascar contains some wonderful moments, but also hours of tedious crashing through undergrowth, overgrowth, mud and tree roots. Sometimes in the rain.  I got quite tired and grumpy at one stage, since we’d only managed about 10 hours’ sleep over two nights; but nonetheless we came out with some good photos and some lovely experiences.

I haven’t talked much about the weather we’ve experienced so far, apart from moaning about mentioning the rain. Actually, we’ve been quite lucky in that it hasn’t often rained on us so as to ruin our enjoyment. The temperatures have been on the cool side – about 12°C in the mornings, a few degrees warmer during the days.  Today ended up in wonderful sunshine and temperatures in the low twenties Celsius, but as we left our hotel room, the start of the day was misty and cool.

Walk No. 1 was in a local National Park, the Analamazaotra Reserve.  Kenny told us that this was secondary rainforest (i.e. there’s been a degree of replanting over the years), that it was smaller than the primary forest we’d visited in Mantadia and more visited; also it was Saturday, so it was likely to be quite popular.  This view was supported by the activity in the hotel car park.

There were several tourist minivans awaiting groups from the hotel, and we knew that one such group was a bunch of Americans; we wondered if they were headed for the same place as us (see later).

Like most of the reserves we’ve visited, Analamazaotra offers toilets at the entrance.  There’s little doubt which is the way to the gents, that’s for sure.

We met Abraham, as before, and set off into the reserve.

The double line of blocks is something we’ve come across several times.  It’s not necessarily unbroken, but is a common way of laying the trails.  Abraham, of course, led us off the trails a few times, so there was quite a lot of crashing through undergrowth.  It wasn’t raining, but it obviously had been, as we were mercilessly dripped on by the forest trees.

It was half an hour before we came across anything noteworthy, and that was a quite substantial termites nest.

Someone had poked a hole in the top, and the termites were busy mending it.

At around the same place there was a wonderfully-shaped spider’s web,

but it was a further 30 minutes before we came across any major wildlife.  However, it was a splendid encounter, with a family group of Diademed Sifakas, At  first, they were a bit elusive;

but eventually we got good visibility of them, feeding in a really athletic fashion.

They were lovely to watch, so I took lots of pictures. Obviously.

The popularity of the reserve was demonstrated by the number of other people who had congregated to watch and photograph the action.

I have no right to be snarky about this, but I quite resented all these other people trying to get in on my action. At one stage, the entire group of about a dozen Americans from our hotel tramped past us in their search for things to see. The place was really quite crowded.

A few minutes after we left the Sifakas, we heard Indris shouting at each other, much closer than we had the day before, so I recorded a bit more of the sound, as it’s really (a) distinctive and (b) loud – apparently the Indri call is among the loudest animal calls known.

We did get to see the Indris, but they were very high up and I didn’t get any striking images or video, just a few snaps.

We pressed on again, and eventually Abraham led us off another path, which took us by a fish farm, something one doesn’t normally expect to find in a forest.

It’s partly a research facility, partly commercial, but the farming seems to be done in a responsible way, starting fish in the smaller enclosures you see above, and moving them between enclosures as they grow, then into successively larger enclosures before extraction.

A few metres on from this view of the fish farm, we got the second charming encounter of the day; two Eastern Grey Bamboo lemurs, stuffing their cute little faces with loquats.

The path then led to the Green Lake.

Yup. It’s green.  Not a lot to add to that, though, I have to say. And it was the last thing we saw on the walk, which was five kilometres spread over four hours, hence (looking at how many encounters we had) my comment about the similarity with Wagner’s music.

On the way back for lunch at the hotel, we stopped at Andasibe village and walked through it.  It’s very picturesque and colourful any day of the week, but this was market day!

Obviously, I took a load of photos of this very vibrant, colourful and noisy place. I have put them up on Flickr, if you’d like to take a look. Walking through the village also gave us an insight into what people of colour must feel in the UK; everyone was smiling, friendly and welcoming – but we were the only white faces in the village. I felt like an intruder, even though I wasn’t being looked at that way.

It was now lunchtime, the sun had come out and it was a glorious day.

During the afternoon, we returned to the VOIMMA (community-run) reserve at Andasibe, as Jane wanted to see some chameleons during the day time when we’d see their best colours. Thus started another Wagnerian walk.

After about half an hour, we saw a Parson’s Chameleon, which is the largest of the Madagascan chameleons.

Chameleons move very slowly.

We saw very little for the next 40 minutes or so. But then what happened was rather lovely – a group of common brown lemurs came to play with us.

I had never expected to get this close to lemurs, but these were clearly habituated to humans.  They didn’t even appear to mind when the arsehole of a Frenchman who was also at the scene started using them for selfies and had to be warned off actually touching them.  The vacuousness of some people utterly bewilders me.

We saw no wildlife of any pith or moment for the rest of the walk, but our path took by the river, across which was a Sacred Place.

This is reserved for spiritual occasions. The colours, red and white, represented the colours of the king’s first and second wives in those times when the island had a monarch (deposed by the French in 1897). It seems to be used to mark special occasions, sometimes accompanied by an animal sacrifice.

After an all-too-brief rest back at the hotel, we embarked on the final walk of the day, a night walk around the Analamzaotra reserve.  This was clearly also a popular option for a Saturday night.  We started off along a road and there were dozens of people in front of us all heading along the same route.  The path led by a lake, and it was faintly amusing to see our American gang from the hotel walking along the opposite side,

We didn’t see much, to be honest.  A poor unfortunate Goodman’s mouse lemur got spotted

and caused another of those feeding frenzies which I find so uncomfortable.

Apart from that, all we saw was a small (but pretty) frog

and a couple of big-nosed chameleons.

A note, here.  Their noses might be big, but they themselves are tiny.

Thus ended a day which seemed to be largely filled with tramping round dripping rainforest, but which had actually had some really lovely moments.

Sorry to have droned on for so long about the day, and well done for reaching this point. We leave Andasibe tomorrow and take the five-hour drive back to Tana, albeit via a final wildlife walk, so I doubt there’ll be that much to write about. You’ll have to keep reading these pages to find out, won’t you?