Tag Archives: Wildlife

Coasting into Toliara – end of the RN7

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Sunday 16 June 2024 – Today is the day we completed our journey to the south-western coast of Madagascar by reaching Toliara – from Antananarivo, over 900km of sometimes absolutely ghastly road surface, but expertly – and safely – driven by Haja over the course of 6 days.

Shortly after leaving Roy’s Garden (Le Jardin du Roy – gerrit?) we went through a town called Ilakaka, which is the main town in the sapphire mining area of Madagascar (not being a jewellery kind of guy, I had no idea that Madagascar was well-known for its high-quality sapphire).  It’s a busy place,

and one immediately understands the importance of the sapphire mining here.

These, by the way, are not selling finished stones, they are mainly buying what people bring in. Thousands of Malagasy are involved in what is turning into a “sapphire rush”, like the north American gold rushes; deposits of sapphire-bearing soil and gravel are being mined, often without due respect for the environment – or indeed health and safety – by hand.

The excavated material is then searched for raw sapphire – exiting the town, we crossed a bridge over a river which is clearly a prime spot for panning for sapphires.

The entire industry is based on manual labour – no heavy machinery of any description is used, as far as I know. Kenny was of the opinion that the miners are being exploited by the traders (often Indian and Pakistani) who understand the value of the gems far better than the miners do.

The nearby town of Sakaraha specialises in cutting the raw sapphire to produce saleable gems.

A side note, here: in one of our conversations with a large group of European – Belgian, Dutch and German – tourists, we learned that their minibus stopped in the area, presumably at one of the establishments that sells sapphire as well as buying it. They weren’t impressed, they would much rather have got on with their journey.  It made us glad that we had the flexibility of being just the two of us with Kenny and Haja, Kenny having picked up by this stage our vibes that we weren’t much taken with retail opportunities.)

Although we started out in sunshine, there was mist in the valleys

and there were several “table top” hills in the surrounding countryside.

I guess that the tops were of softer sedimentary stone, worn down by erosion.

We passed several roadside tombs on our journey.

Some were well-established and some were newer.  One stood out in particular,

a boat-shaped tomb of someone who was clearly very rich.  The tombs illustrate the importance of Zebu to the ethnic groups who inhabit the area. Zebu are used as a sort of bank: if wealthy, buy Zebu; if in need of funds, sell Zebu. When someone dies and is buried in a tomb, Zebu play a part in the process. For a wealthy person, several Zebu might be killed and their skulls used to “decorate” the tomb, showing that it was of a wealthy person or family; for a poorer family, just one Zebu might be sacrificed.

It’s the sort of thing that sparks a debate about poverty in what is officially one of the poorest countries in the world. Looking at the lives of rural people through western eyes, one is tempted to think of them as poor, but this is perhaps a cultural illusion. Money and possessions might be in short supply, but life as a farmer provides food for the table and the market, and a rhythm of life that doesn’t require a significant income stream; and there’s no tax to pay. Raw materials for building come from the land and the capacity of the Malagasy to repurpose things is astonishingly inventive and effective. Where they need them, people have their mobile phones and their portable solar panels to power them; they may not have bank accounts but the mobile telephone companies enable a sophisticated instant money transfer system which, together with mobile phone charging, is available at any number of roadside stalls.

They seem to our eyes to be happy.  In income terms, yes, they’re poor by our standards, but I don’t believe that they live below the poverty line.

City folk, though – that’s a different matter; they have to pay tax, pay for food, for their electricity and so on; perhaps they’re not as well off as rural folk?

Anyhoo….

We started, once again, to see a change in the landscape.  We began to see Baobab trees, at first in the distance

and then closer to,

like this one, which still had fruit on it.  There were some older trees in the landscape as well;

this one is very old, and regarded by the local as a “sacred tree”. We also saw a major change in the landscape.

which heralded our Activity For The Day; a visit to the Zombitse National Park. It’s quite substantial, at over 360km² and falls within a region classified as Madagascar succulent woodlands, known for many endemic species, and on the transition between the dry deciduous woodlands we have already visited and the spiny forest that is on the plan before we return to Antananarivo.

We had a shortish walk around the park, and saw some creatures we’d seen before, such as the Oustalet’s Chameleon and the Verreaux’s Sifaka; some we’d sort of seen before, such as this Sportive Lemur

who was a Zombitse Sportive Lemur (as opposed to the Masoala variant we’d seen in, erm, Masoala) and, being nocturnal, looked less than delighted to be woken up. We saw a beautifully coloured Day Gecko

and got up close and personal with a couple of huge Baobab trees.

Male Baobab
Female Baobab

These were several hundred years old.  I don’t know if they’d been creating little Baobab trees between them, but they were very impressive trees….

….or not, actually. In fact, Baobabs are not trees, but succulents (like cacti); it looks like bark on the outside, but inside is fibrous and squishy – and no good for building things, making things or burning, which is why so many Baobabs have survived; had they actually been useful, I suspect the landscape would have been bereft of them.

We passed through a town, Andoharotsy, where there is quite a flourishing trade in creating and selling rum, made from local sugar cane.

Barrels of fermented sugar syrup awaiting distilling

Wood to fuel the still

Yellow containers for the final product

Given the random nature of the creation of the raw materials and the quality and length of distillation, one can imagine that there is a huge variation in how the final product turns out. I can imagine it’s rather like poitin in Ireland – something to be treated with extreme caution.

At this point the RN7, which had been reasonably well-behaved for the last segment of our journey, turned mischievous again.  How can you tell the road surface is bad?

Because traffic is likely coming your way on your side of the road. Correct timing of slalom turns becomes more than just a matter of passenger comfort.

The next town, Andranovory, has (surprise!) a very busy market

and the local specialisation is in carpentry, especially making furniture.

The architecture also has a local flavour, with small houses, quite often of wattle-and-daub construction,

and an extended thatch roof, supported by pillars, OK officer I’ll come clean, sticks, which provide an extra shaded area.

The landscape changed again, this time to a limestone base

and we began to see an intimation of the “spiny forest” that we planned to visit the next day.

By this stage, it was lunchtime, and Kenny proposed a lunch stop at  L’Auberge de la Table, which gave us a nice, somewhat up-market lunch, and also enabled us to buy tickets to a connected establishment, the Arboretum at Antsokay, a place which, presumably, anteaters would enjoy visiting. We were expecting to take just a few minutes to wander round looking at, well, trees, I suppose, but – no, there was a guided tour, which would take an hour and, yes, there was a guide.  Who’d a thunk it, eh?  Our initial cynicism, though was allayed when our guide turned out to be both charming and knowledgeable. Jane is interested in things arboretumological, and so she and the guide (whose name, to my shame, I have forgotten), got on famously, while he found us not only some interesting plants for mainly Jane’s interest,

Fake Baobab
Some plant’s fruit that looks like a face
A young baobab – looks like just this tree, you know?
A “compass plant”, which leans south to catch any moisture in the prevailing wind
The “bleeding tree”, with red sap
A 400-year-old pachypodium or elephant’s foot plant

but also some creatures to include mine as well.

Common Big-eyed Snake. We think.
Skink
Day Gecko
The spiny tail of a (hibernating) Collared Iguana
Magpie Robin, female
Magpie Robin, male

Apologies for the poor quality of the final two pictures; I only had the phone with me.

It was actually a pleasant visit, and our guide would have kept on chatting to us, but another group of punters came through the door and so (probably to Kenny’s relief) we took our leave, and headed to our hotel, the Bakuba Lodge, an establishment designed and created, with great style and panache, by a Belgian, Bruno Decorte.

Jane thought its appearance had a lot in common with “La Pedrera”, Casa Milà, in Barcelona.  I thought it was more like the somewhat confected architecture we saw in Finca Rosa Blanca (Costa Rica), or Binibecquer Vell, in Menorca. Whatever, we had a great dinner, with very good service, and a nice sunset view,

so the day ended well.

One would have thought that, having made the epic journey from Antananarivo to Toliara down the notorious RN7, we would at least spend a couple of days exploring the area and relishing the completion of such an expedition, but no, tomorrow we head back to Tana. But at least we have an  encounter en route with a spiny forest in the plan, so the day will not be spent simply travelling. Why don’t you come back to these pages to find out what a spiny forest looks like, eh?

A scramble in Isalo National Park

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Saturday 15 June 2024 – Le Jardin du Roy is very nicely put together. The rooms are spacious and comfortable; my main gripe is that there’s not enough light to see what you’re doing.  I suppose that this is a consequence of running from solar power and/or a generator, but it makes finding things (e.g. a black laptop on a dark surface in an underlit room) very frustrating. The internet availability was pretty poor, too, but the food was good and the service very agreeable.

Its buildings were in very lovely stonework,

and whoever designed or crafted it put several “hidden” things among the stones. At a basic level, you could find things like this star among the stones.

but there were more complicated creations as well.

Two lemurs and a palm tree

A nativity scene in our room

The day dawned, as I imagine is a regular pattern at this time of year (beginning of the Malagasy winter), cool and misty.

Our mission for the day was to explore Isalo National Park, so we headed to town (Ranohira) and Kenny (a) introduced us to our guide, José and (b) got tickets for the National Park , which, at 815 square kilometres, is pretty substantial. It was created in 1962, and is mainly dry, deciduous forest, based on sandstone landscapes, which means there has been plenty of erosion from wind and rain, creating rocky outcrops, plateaux and canyons up to 200m deep.

Our main objective for the day was to walk along one of these canyons.

After a short drive, we started our hike, for it definitely wasn’t a walk in the park, as you’ll see as you read further.

The scenery was quite spectacular with the sandstone cliffs we’d seen elsewhere.

 

We were headed alongside a river, as one could tell from the aquatic bamboo plants we could see.

The path started off easy enough

and, as happens so often, we started off with José explaining all sorts of non-wildlife stuff, such as: the difference between young Pandanus palms (single stem, thicker leaves, in the foreground) and older Pandanus (branched, leaves thinner, in middle and background);

and the iron pipe leading water to the town, some 6km away.

We did see some of the local fauna:

A butterfly – sorry, don’t know which sort
A red dragonfly, nothing to do with Hannibal Lecter
Sleepy Scops Owl
Sleepy Scops Owl

Darwin’s Bark Spider and its web

Madagascan White-Eye

I was dead chuffed to have nailed the image above, as the birds that we occasionally saw around us were exceedingly skillful at detecting the instant before a camera shutter is pressed and buggering off.

We soon reached a picnic area

where some lads were starting the preparation of a cooked lunch (what is it with men and outdoor cooking?) for those who had booked it (we’d chickened out, or rather cheesed out, and ordered a packed lunch to protect our, but particularly my, digestive systems). Here, we saw a Red-fronted Brown Lemur

who was very cute, but actually had a very sad back story.  She had got separated from her family group during a bush fire, and had failed to find them again; so she was lost and solitary. She hung around the picnic area trying to steal food – of course everyone was told not to feed her – and she must have been very lonely.

José also found us a White-browed Owl

but the real excitement was seeing a Ground Boa crossing the trail just in front of us.

We stayed very still, hardly daring to breathe, so that it carried on its way into the forest. It was about a metre and a half long.

The walk continued alongside the river into the canyon, which was the main objective of the day’s hike.

and we were treated to a succession of great views as we scrambled over the rocks (it was a real scramble in places,

and we were both grateful for the sticks we’d brought with us from Ranomafana).

Some of the trail had been prepared to make it easier for the punters

and José told us about what happens during the rainy season, when the water level rises several metres.  Some evidence of this could be seen in the trees that had been deposited among the boulders in the canyon.

We eventually reached a couple of pools: the Blue Pool

and the Black Pool (which had no illuminations)

where the trail basically ended.  So we took a rest while Jose and Kenny shot the breeze

and then headed back the way we came. There were a couple of encounters with the local fauna:

Dragonfly

Water beetles

And the colours of the stone were fascinating.

When we got back to the picnic area, we were lucky enough to see a group of Verreaux’s Sifakas.

They were very athletic, as ever, leaping from bough to bough, rather better than the Monty Python sheep, who, of course, tended not so much to fly as to plummet.

After our packed lunch, eaten amid the haunting scent of delicious food being cooked for the other picnickers,

we headed back to the car.  On the way, we passed a rock on which was perched what I heard Jose describe as a “snot bug”.  Eventually, we understood it was a Snout Bug, for fairly obvious reasons

though I suppose that if it caught a cold, then maybe Jose’s original description might have been the better one. We also saw (among the other, more orangey coloured ones) a butterfly with a beautiful blue hue.

That was it for the hike; the canyon was a lovely, if slightly tense, experience, and I was glad to have caught some video of the sifakas.

On the way back to the hotel, we passed a couple of very colourful local scenes.

We had an evening entertainment laid on – a short walk to watch the sunset. On the way, we were lucky enough to see a Hoopoe,

though I had the wrong lens on the camera for a truly good shot. It was still nice to see it. The hotel had laid on a resting place for us (which we laid on)

and a cocktail service

(with nibbles).  The scenery was striking in the setting sun

and the sunset itself was not bad,

(middle photo from a mobile phone; outer two from my Big Camera; shows that mobile phone cameras these days are pretty damn’good).

Actually, we got more striking colours looking behind us

but it was a nice way to finish off the day. The nibbles had been enough food for us, so we simply retired to our room and took no dinner. Since we were (we were told) the only residents at the hotel for that night, it must have meant an entire kitchen staff on duty for no purpose; but we’re at the start of the tourist season, so I guess the hotel must expect quiet times.

We leave the hotel tomorrow, rather early, as we continue our south-westerly journey to Toliara, on the coast.  We have a Thing To Do en route, which we hope will be interesting.  I’ll of course report, so please stick with these pages to find out what we got up to.

Striking gold at Ranomafana

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Wednesday 12 June 2024 – Our accommodation in Ranomafana was the Thermal Hotel. It’s called that because it is beside a geothermal hot springs pool; indeed, the pool used to be part of the hotel complex.

Yesterday, having ascended into the clouds and fog, we then descended to the village and the hotel in the rain, fervently hoping (in my case, at least) that today’s walk in the park would be a, erm, walk in the park, rather than a bedraggled squelch in the mud.  We were lucky; the day dawned sunny, and so we could take some photos of the hotel.

It’s an appallingly middle-class British thing to have difficulties with place names in The Foreign; I normally take pride in getting the name right and the pronunciation approximately so. But I’m having a lot of trouble with some names over here and so I’ve had to resort to mnemonics to help me.  Take, for example, Analamazaotra; I kept thinking of it as Anamalazaotra.  To get the l and the m in the right order, I resorted to the 1958 song “Rama Lama Ding Dong”. I was six when this first hit the charts, which of course I don’t remember. There was a 1978 version by Rocky Sharpe and the Replays, but the one that made the impression on me was the Muppets version, which is spot on my cultural level. I have also struggled with the order of the n and the m in Ranomafana, and so I’ve had “Son of my Father” as my mnemonic and front of mind during my say here. Bloody Chicory Tip! I now discover that the man who should take the blame for this song is Giorgio Moroder.

But I digress….

The morning was taken up by a walk, or more properly a hike, in the Ranamofana National Park.  Our guide for the day was engagingly called Dauphin and did a very good job during the day, taking the trouble to find out what our expectations and preferences were, and stopping to talk to both of us rather than calling back over his shoulder as we walked along.  He also had a “spotter”, who was introduced to us as Tila; his job was to crash around in the forest under- and overgrowth to try to find us interesting wildlife. I immediately christened him “Tila the Hunt”.

The entrance to Ranomafana National Park is in a community reserve; to get to the national park forest, you have to descend about 100 steps to a bridge, which is the border to the National Park.  From the bridge, you then have to walk up another load of steps.

One wonders why they couldn’t have pitched the bridge a bit higher.

On the way down, Dauphin pointed out something to us

which looked like an ant-  or termite nest.  Actually, on closer examination

it turned out to be a very dense cluster of fruits.

Having entered the National Park, the morning proceeded like all forest walks – much wandering about with the guide showing us stuff which wasn’t wildlife whilst hoping that we would soon stumble upon something with a pulse.  So, we saw a massive, 40-plus-year-old birds nest fern

which was, as these things do, growing epiphytically on another tree; and we saw some bamboo which looked eerily like a man-made structure over the path,

having been blown to buggery and deposited there by a cyclone in years past.  We also passed a real man-made structure,

which was the original building of the Valbio Centre that we’d heard about from Tom, the distinguished academic up in Masoala.  The forest has taken this construction back, but the centre is alive and well – see later. We also saw some wild coffee cherries which were blue, an unusual colour to find in nature.

The unripe blue cherries are yellow; and there are also red wild coffee cherries in the forest, as we found later.

So, remarkably, it was less than an hour before the cry went up that someone had spotted a lemur. So we rushed over to where it was. Looking at it through my very expensive camera and even more expensive lens, it was just a silhouette,

However, when I could get at my beloved DxO Photolab, we saw that

we had struck gold! (By the way, Dauphin told us at the time what we were looking at).

This was a Golden Bamboo Lemur!

Why the excitment? I hear you cry. This is the species that was first discovered in 1986 by Patricia Wright, founder of the Valbio Centre, and clearly a formidable lady, because she used the discovery to drive through the preservation order that was the basis for the creation of the very national park in which we stood. This required the removal of people who were actually living in the forest, because people aren’t allowed to live in a preserved space; so providing the incentives to make the move worth their while required national government involvement. Many of these people remain involved with the centre as spotters, guides or other helpers, so Patricia’s determination has paid off in more ways than just one.

Anyway, there it was – the holy grail of today’s search. And we still had about three more hours of wandering about to go.  Apart from this small group of Golden Bamboo Lemurs,

It would be a while before we saw another lemur species, but in the interim Dauphin found a puzzle for us – a branch that was apparently devoid of animal life

but, if one looked carefully, revealed

a leaf-tailed gecko.  To make it easier to see it, I’ve over-processed the photo,

but in real life it was genuinely difficult to see, which shows that its camouflage was of the very highest quality.

The going, by the way, was quite hard work.

Even the official trails were narrow and (as we’d been warned) very up-and down.

My trusty Garmin recorded my calories expended as three times as much as any previous excursion into a rainforest.

We did see a red-bellied lemur, but he was basically lazing about and not inclined to be ready for his close-up

and we wandered around for the next hour or so without seeing anything worth noting. It was Jane, though, who spotted the next creatures.  The guides, who were looking deep into the forest, had failed to notice something clinging to a tree literally beside the path we were walking along.

It was a family group of Red-fronted Brown Lemurs. Like the Common Brown jobbies we’d seen in the Analamazaotra National Park, these were curious and playful, although they didn’t come as close as those had.

After watching them play for a while, it seemed that that was that, and we kind of started for the exit. Dauphin did spot a couple of interesting things: a tiny wasps nest

(yes, it was tiny);

and another puzzle for us.

You have to look closely to see it, all curled and looking like a leaf, i.e. more good camouflage.

It’s commonly called a Satanic Leaf-tailed Gecko, and, looking at its face, you can understand why. It seemed we were almost at the exit when there was a ripple of excitement and Dauphin bade us divert into the dense undergrowth, where we joined a bunch of other people who were looking at

a family group of Milne-Edwards’ Sifakas. They were reasonably active, but spent most of the time huddled together, grooming themselves and other family members, which made it very difficult to get decent pictures.  But I got a couple of halfway good images

and one decent one, purely by luck.

That really  was it for the visit, and we trooped back to the park entrance, with its gaggle of bloody nuisance entrepreneurial types. One of them was an artist who wanted us to visit his gallery there, but we were disinclined to do so at the time. We found out, though, that his works were also on display at the Valbio Centre, and we planned to visit there later, so we were able to put him off politely on the basis that we might see him later.

Accordingly, after lunch back at the hotel, we visited the centre,

and very interesting it was, too. Its mission is to protect Madagascar’s unique and biologically diverse ecosystems – and particularly the Ranomafana National Park – through conservation science and projects that directly benefit the local people. It’s an international research station which facilitates hands-on science to sustain the resources and people of Madagascar. It has equipment and facilities to support lab- and field-based research carried out by visiting students and researchers, as well as accommodation for them; it provides education to local school children and their teachers; it provides a level of front-line medical care and advice to the local communities on, for example, birth control.  Jane talked knowledgeably with a couple of the scientists we met about their projects; and a nice lad called Fabrice showed us around and talked about some of the things the centre is trying to do, such as to identify all of the insect species in the forest, which strikes me as being hugely ambitious; but they’ve already catalogued thousands and thousands.  Among other things, Fabrice showed us an example – the Comet Moth,

which is beautiful even in a display case and must be a lovely thing to see in real life.

We also met the artist, Alain, again in his niche at the Centre; he creates incredibly detailed and accurate representations of the local flora and fauna for use in educational projects, as well as purely artistic work of considerable talent.  And yes, we bought a little something!

Immediately after the visit to the centre, we went on a night walk, even though it wasn’t night yet.  We met Dauphin for the final time and walked slowly along the road at the perimeter of the National Park, looking for, well, things, you know?  It was actually quite good that we started early, while it was still light, because the first thing we saw was a Blue-Legged Chameleon.

Chameleons are more interesting by day, because their true colours appear; after dark, they become much paler and less interesting.

The most engaging thing we saw on the walk was a Rufous Mouse Lemur, which is very cute.

We weren’t the only ones trying to see it, though; there was one of those feeding frenzies that one finds on these walks.

We walked very slowly along, finding the odd occasional Big-nosed chameleon

though it takes skill to spot them because, while their noses may be big, they are tiny!

We did get one puzzle. There’s a chameleon in this picture. Can you spot it?

There it is, a Side-Stripe chameleon.

but that was about it.  The drivers for the various groups stood around, presumably trying not to laugh at us

and then it was time to return to the hotel for dinner.

So, that was Ranomafana; we hit what seems to be the normal strike rate for seeing things, which is about one and a half species per hour of walking about; but it was fantastic to see the Golden Bamboo Lemurs, and the Sifakas were an added bonus.

On the morrow, we continue our southward journey; some driving, some walking about in a forest, although it will be a dry forest, not a rain forest.  We’ve been very lucky with the weather today; who knows what it will be like tomorrow? Stay tuned to find out.