Tag Archives: Wildlife

A Day on Rottnest Island

6 Replies

Monday 5 August 2024 – Today was the only formal item on our Perth agenda – we had a booking to catch the ferry over to Rottnest Island. This seems a cruel piece of naming to me; I’m sure there must be rottner islands elsewhere in the world. Indeed, there’s one on the fringes of London which has completely gone to the Dogs.

The item on our Audley itinerary was described as a “tour and bike ride”, with bicycle hire included in the booking, and a day at leisure on the island with just a lunch included. Jane professes not to have ridden a bicycle for longer than she cares to mention (and in fact had signalled this to Audley some time back in the trip’s planning process).  Also, given that wildlife was part of the attraction of the place, I wanted to take The Big Lens (which is also darned heavy); as well, I thought it might be possible, during our leisurely progress round the island, to whizz the drone up for a different view point.  This added two non-trivial items to be lugged about along with all the other stuff we’d need – sunscreen, water, that kind of thing.  Jane’s caution about bicycling, and the extra baggage from my photographic ambitions, gave us to decide to pass up on the bicycling idea and seek other ways of getting round the island. That, therefore, was the plan.

As Hannibal Smith so often said, “I love it when a plan comes together”.  Ours, however, didn’t.

Not in any way that detracted from an enjoyable day, you understand, but the way the day worked out was quite different from what I, at least, had expected.

We were to be collected at a nearby crossroads, so we made sure to get there nice and early, as instructed. By the appointed pick-up time, no-one had appeared to collect us, so we fell to wondering how long we should give them before stirring things up a bit.  Just at the point where we thought that Someone Had Blundered, a bus marked “Rottnest Express” did actually turn up, so we climbed on board and took about the last two available seats – it was quite crowded. The bus then took us down to the Barrack Street Quay (to which we could have quite easily walked, as it happens, but never mind) and we joined the check-in queue to collect our tickets.  It was at about this point that we began to realise that the shape of the day was different from what we’d imagined. For sure, lunch was included; but we also had an afternoon bus tour as part of our package, with no mention of bicycles. Having collected our tickets, we headed for the ferry,

which was already pretty much full, but we found a couple of seats, settled ourselves down and then we were off.

There was the usual video about safety and life jackets, with frequent mentions of the “friendly crew” to whom we could turn if we needed help. And there was a commentary, delivered as we pottered along the Swan river (originally Black Swan river, named by Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh in 1697) towards Fremantle, by a lady who appeared only to have received the script a couple of moments before she had to deliver it. The commentary, though, allowed us to understand some of the landmarks we passed, such as the old Swan Brewery

which, back in the day, had produced Swan Lager, one of only about half a dozen different beers readily available in Australia when I first visited back in the 1980s (others being Castlemaine XXXX, Tooheys, Victoria Bitter and, of course, the amber nectar of Fosters. Ah, the heady days before the craft beer movement had taken off!)

We got a silhouetted view of the Perth skyline

and passed a couple of pretty impressive mansions

that either still belonged, or used to belong, to people whose names meant absolutely nothing to me. And we got a good view of the industrial port by North Fremantle.

The ferry docked at Fremantle to pick up more passengers (the nice lady doing the commentary told us all to shuffle up to make room) and then the boat roared off towards Rottnest Island.

The main wildlife of interest on the Island, and something that Jane specifically wanted to see, was the quokka. There was some video on the ferry about how it was important not to disturb them or to feed them. I had no idea what to expect when it came to getting photos of this mysterious beast, which is why I’d brought the Big Lens, in case I could only see one in the distance. This is another way in which the day turned out very differently from my expectations.  As we walked off the quay, I saw my first quokka, by a “Welcome” noticeboard.

and it very soon became clear that it would not be difficult to see more of them. They were everywhere in the settlement beside the harbour. Indeed, you had to be careful not to trip over them.

You also had to be careful not to trip over all the people who were contorting themselves in various undignified ways to get photos and – inevitably – selfies with the quokkas.  It actually made it quite difficult to get a photo of one of these beasts without any people in it.  I did manage a couple, though. One quokka was still carrying a joey in its pouch

and was actually considerate enough to pose so I could get a clearer shot.

The area around the settlement, which has a shop, a visitors centre, a restaurant and a bakery, was pretty crowded with tourists,

many of whom were having their own moments with the quokkas,

and gulls and ravens,

which could lunge for any food which was not closely guarded.

The instructions about the quokkas were perfectly clear

but the beasts themselves didn’t make things any easier for the punters.

Instead of the leisurely pottering about we had originally expected, we actually had a reasonably tight schedule to observe: lunch at midday, bus tour at 1.45pm, ferry back to Perth at 4pm. This gave us time for a coffee and a short walk before lunch, so we headed off towards the nearby lakes, which are salt lakes.

There’s vegetation regeneration work going on on the banks of the lakes, to help preserve the environment.

On the way, we came across a Laughing Turtle Dove, which is very prettily coloured,

and, in an area by the lakes, I managed to get a photo of a quokka in a more natural-looking setting,

and Jane got a cute photo of one having a bit of a sleep (they’re described as semi-nocturnal, whatever that means).

Their natural food is vegetation, and they particularly like the paler-coloured fallen leaves from the Moreton Bay fig trees around the settlement.

Human food is bad for them, which is why (a) there are the stern instructions not to feed them and (b) why the ones near the settlement live half as long as those further out in the island.  There are plenty of those – there are tens of thousands of quokkas on the island, making it the largest known colony; their success is due to the absence of natural predators and the exclusion of introduced ones – steps have been taken to remove cats, dogs and foxes.

Back at the settlement, as well as a decent lunch at Frankie’s, I got a couple of photos of the non-quokka wildlife which is profuse around the settlement: Australian Ravens,

which are noisy, with a call sounding about half way between an annoyed cat and a squalling baby; and silver gulls, which don’t necessarily get on well with each other.

I also managed to get a shot of a mother quokka with a joey

which I think was trying to climb back into its pouch, but mamma was having none of it and wandered off in search of food, with the joey chasing after.

After lunch, we hopped on board our Discovery Tour bus, with guide Leo and driver Sam

and were driven anticlockwise round the periphery of the island whilst Leo gave an interesting commentary, interspersed with some very bad jokes. It was our opportunity to learn something of the history of the island, which is somewhat chequered.

  • The island became detached from the mainland about 7,000 years ago when sea levels rose; before that time it was inhabited by the Noongar people.
  • The name Rottnest was conferred by Willem de Vlamingh, who first documented the island in 1696.  He saw the quokkas as large rats and called it “Rat’s Nest” Island, but in Dutch – Rottnest. The island’s aboriginal Noongar name is Wadjemup – “The Place Across the Water Where the Spirits Are”. The Perth locals, predictably, call it “Rotto”.
  • From 1838 to 1931, the island was used as a prison and forced labour camp for over 3,600 Aboriginal people, who were subjected to extremely harsh conditions on the island.
  • Other historical uses of the island include as a military site, and for internment camps housing enemy aliens during the world wars. Many of the island’s buildings date from the colonial period, often made from locally quarried limestone, and are now used as accommodation for holidays.
  • This accommodation came in handy as a quarantine facility during the Covid pandemic.
  • During World War II, two 9.2 inch guns were installed near the middle of the island at Oliver Hill, and two 6 inch guns installed at Bickley Point, for defence of the Fremantle port. The location of the island was seen as being important to the defense of the important port of Fremantle, the major base for the Allies in the Indian Ocean, as bombardment of any attacking ships could be made from the island before the ships would come into range of the port. In the 1990s, the (decommissioned) gun emplacements were extensively reconstructed, and since then a popular tourist activity has included a tour of the guns and the tunnels.

In many areas around the island there’s growth of seagrass, which is important for the integrity of the sea floor as well as for marine life. The seagrass areas can be seen as the dark areas,

with the paler areas being sand.  Anchoring a boat among the seagrass is forbidden and offenders are subject to a large fine.

There are other nice views on the trip around the island, with some secluded and empty beaches (some are less secluded and more popular among bathers).

From a headland on the far south of the island, Leo pointed out that the next landfall to the east was Adelaide, about 2,000km away, and to the west was Madagascar – 7,000km distant. Also around the southern point, there’s an osprey’s nest which is several decades old.

There was even an osprey on it.

The osprey seems to be some kind of an icon for the island; a board by the jetty says “Follow The Osprey”, and the trails are marked with a rather nicely-imagined osprey outline.

We stopped for a 20-minute break at the far western point of the island, where we could get some shots of the scenery, which had another osprey nest and some great rock formations,

and I got a nice clear photo of a silver gull.

I’d like to say how tricky this shot was, but I’d be lying; it was just hovering there before coming in to land.

After the tour, we just had time for a swift beer

before boarding the ferry for the return journey.

So, the day had had a very different pattern from what we’d been expecting, but was enjoyable and interesting nonetheless. I don’t know if Audley had taken Jane’s reservations about bicycles on board and had altered the booking, but it’s certainly true that the information we had was largely

a quokka shit. Jane insists on taking credit for that one. No matter; we had a good day and we got to see the quokkas.

The morrow is our final day in Perth.  We have no formal plans, but I expect we’ll think of something. You’ll have to return to these pages to find out what that was, won’t you?

 

Activities at Anjajavy – and Farewell

10 Replies

Tuesday to Friday 18-21 June 2024 – We had three days to relax at Anjajavy before we had to return home. Following is a summary of it all, therefore this is a Long Post Alert.

As well as being a splendid place to relax e.g. after two weeks’ relentless tourism, crashing through forest and bouncing along dodgy roads, Le Lodge at Anjajavy offers a variety of Things To Do, some at no extra charge and some at, it must be said, prices which cause a sharp intake of breath; for example, a 1-hour night walk with a guide is €50 per person with an additional €50 for a limited group. In other words it would have cost €150 for Jane and me to do a guided night walk; for one hour, even taking into context the overall cost of the holiday travel, this is too steep. So we didn’t do that, but confined ourselves to things that were on offer at no extra charge. Typically, there were two of these each day, one starting at 0900, the other at 1600. There was also afternoon tea by the rather lovely pond in an area called The Oasis,

1990s Britpop in a single image

where, if we were lucky, we could see lemurs frolicking in the surrounding trees, and possibly other wildlife also.

Here’s a summary of what we got up to.

Sakalava Walk

Our relatively early arrival on Tuesday meant that we could participate in this afternoon activity, which was advertised as a chance to explore the different terrains in the Reserve, including a path which villagers working at Le Lodge would take to walk to work.  We were taken by car a short distance, walked a while and were picked up and driven back to the lodge.  Our guide was a young lad called Tom.

Tom led us along a well-defined trail, which led through a specially constructed gap in the fence

designed to be big enough for humans to squeeze through, but not Zebu; we had entered an area where traditionally Zebu would be herded for grazing, and through which local villagers would walk to get to work. Here, we got our first view of one of the species of lemurs to be found in the Reserve, the Coquerel’s Sifaka, which is a beautiful creature.

As is normal with these lemurs, this was a family group, and one of the females had a tiny baby, which it carried on its belly.  I may have got a shot of it – we’re frankly not quite sure if what you can see on her belly is actually the clinging baby or not. Your call.

I also got my first view of Tsingy; I had seen this mentioned in articles but wasn’t sure actually what it was. It is karstic stone into which groundwater has gouged fissures. Anjajavy has areas of Grey Tsingy

which is formed from limestone. There is also Red Tsingy in other areas of Madagascar, which is the same idea, but in sandstone and therefore a lot more fragile. More on Tsingy later.

We continued into an area with Mangrove trees in it.

You can just about make out the roots sprouting from the ground around it, which is a good indication of the type of tree. The big one is many, many years old, the smaller ones, as you might infer, being younger, but still some decades in age.

Our path led among these Mangroves; it became first muddy, and then

much wetter – full-blown swamp, in fact.  I was not particularly happy about this, as I had merely expected mud and puddles and so was wearing long trousers, walking shoes and socks. [Shorts and sandals in my case, ha ha – Ed] But there was little choice but to wade through the water, being rather careful about where we put our feet, to avoid stumbling and falling. Where there were mud banks, there were tiny mud skippers

who scattered if one stepped near them.

You can pick up a fallen Mangrove seedpod, which has the remains of the flower on its tip, and take the flower off.

If the remnant shows a little  spike such as you see above, it is ready to grow, and can be planted just by putting it directly into the mud.

Within two weeks, it will start to sprout leaves and will grow satisfactorily into another Mangrove tree if left alone for long enough.  We could see a few that had been planted by other tourists

and also some that had, we were told, been systematically planted as project sponsored by the Lodge to repopulate the area.

The repopulation project is important to the overall health of the Reserve. Mangroves are important for the environment: they support biodiversity through providing critical habitat for a variety of species; they act as a defense against soil erosion; they sequester carbon by storing it in their biomass; and they have cultural significance among the local people – one area, which was once a rich source of fish, they call fady, sacred or taboo, where silence should be observed.

The Crab Path – To The Batcave!

On the Wednesday morning, we set out from the lodge on a path signposted as the Crab Path. Anjajavy has two varieties of crab, a land crab and one called the Hairy-legged Crab, which is the one we hoped to be able to see.  Both sorts dig and live in holes, so it was not a given. We did see other wildlife, of course.

Bees had made their nest in this limestone formation

Chabert Vanga

Flycatcher, taking time off from catching flies

We also saw a Coquerel’s Sifaka near the path.

He didn’t look all that happy, and there’s a chunk missing from his left ear. Tom, who again was guiding us, told us that he had been ejected from a family group after losing a fight to be the alpha male, so he would be solitary unless a) the alpha male who defeated him died, or b) he could creep back into his old, or perhaps another, group by using very servile body language and behaviour. It sounds a sad story, but it is, after all, Nature taking its course.

There were several large crab holes: one of them contained a crab which we could make out bits of by shining a torch down it; beside another, a crab had been digging, and so there was a large pile of black, oozing mud by its hole; and one was actually out and about.

This was a substantial crab, possibly as much as a foot across, and it looked dead sinister when it started towards us – but it was only retreating to its hole.

As well as crabs, the walk offered the opportunity to see subfossil examples of giant lemurs (now extinct for 500 years through human activity, apparently).  To do this we had to get into a cave, which required us to get Geared Up

Your intrepid blogger donning hard hat and harness

and to clamber down a 5-metre ladder.

Your intrepid Editor nearing the bottom of the ladder

The cave itself was not huge, but nonetheless quite spectacular

and we had to make our way carefully a little further down

in order to see the bones of this creature.  There were two sets of remnant bones (called subfossils because they’re not old enough to be grown-up, proper, fossils). The first one we saw is the smaller of the two.

To help orient you, I’ve circled its skull, which you’re viewing as from above. There are also leg bones to be seen lower and to the right.

The first set is actually under (salt) water

The other subfossil was of a larger beast; the main things you can see here are its skull and a couple of leg bones.

The second set of subfossil bones

At their largest, these creatures would have been gorilla-sized; these two probably fell into a hole whilst fighting, which just goes to show that violence really doesn’t pay.

As we climbed out, it became clear that this was, indeed, a Bat-cave!

The Tsingy Yard

Later on on the Wednesday, we were ferried a short distance by car, where we had a walk along a path through a particularly striking set of Tsingys, at times looking almost like an art exhibition.

“Tsingy” is Malagasy for “Stone that cannot be walked on barefoot”. You can see why.

The Baobab Walk

Some 15 minutes drive from the lodge is an avenue of Baobabs.

Like Tsingy, Baobabs come in Grey and Red, and there are many Red baobabs among the Anjajavy crop.

They come in all shapes and sizes

and, sadly, are threatened by increasingly high levels of seawater at high tide; salt water kills them.  So the team at the Reserve are trying to plant new ones, on higher ground.

However, it’s not just as simple as taking seeds and planting them. Baobab seeds are more likely to germinate if they have been through the digestive tract of a creature. When the Giant Tortoises were roaming the area, they acted as a vector for Baobabs, being one of the few creatures which could crack open a Baobab fruit and eat the flesh (and, of course, the seeds).

The other significant sight on this walk was something that Jane spotted;

tracks of a fossa, Madagascar’s largest carnivore – weasel-ish, something like a cross between a cat and a dog – which we’d dearly love to see in the flesh, but probably won’t, as they’re very shy and reclusive. Unless you’re a lemur, in which case you are dinner.

The Salt-Wells Walk

The limestone karst formations which erupt above ground as tsingys also, of course, continue underground. The passage of water through the stone creates channels which evidently reach the sea; the water covering the bones in the bat-cave was salt water and that cave is a good 250m from the nearest shore. This walk led to two salt water wells, equally far from the sea, which fill and drain according to the tides. The first was a bit of a scramble to reach…

Our path then led along the beach for a short distance

before turning inland again to reach the second salt water well.

In the same area are several caves which have been used in the past as resting places for the dead, according to local custom. This one was evidently of a fisherman, since a boat, as well as amulets and figures of spirit guardians, mark the place. The wall of small stones is a relatively recent addition as villagers were uncomfortable with the bones being on display (presumably to tourist such as ourselves).

Afternoon Tea

Served at 1700 daily beside the lily pond at The Oasis,

this was an opportunity to relish the relative cool of the late afternoon, and a chance to see lemurs as they came by on their afternoon patrols. Engagingly, Le Lodge operates on an artificial time zone, one hour ahead of the rest of Madagascar. This carries the benefit of extending the daylight time to make the afternoon tea a delightful time as the day cools.

Common Brown Lemurs and Coquerel’s Sifakas routinely came by towards 6pm and we could admire their agility as they clambered and leapt through the trees surrounding us.

These creatures are so beautiful and so eminently watchable that it’s difficult not to keep trying to get just that one extra great photo.  The Oasis lawn during teatime was dotted with people watching and photographing these lovely lemurs, who, although not fed by humans, are quite habituated to them.

“Hi, Douglas. What are you up to?”

Other guests

Among the Anjajavy photos, there are pictures of some of the other guests whose company we enjoyed at the lodge. Above, you can see one of them, Douglas, who was accompanied by his wife, Robin and their friend Val. They were on our flight up from Tana, as were a younger couple, Jenny and Sam, who had been on an itinerary around the north of the island and who, it turned out, were driven to Andasibe and back by Aine, the chap who had greeted us on our arrival to Madagascar; it was they who told us how to spell his name. Also joining the Lodge a couple of days after we arrived were Shirley and Ian, completing a gemütlich group of kindred spirits (the spirits in question being mainly rum and gin).

There were two other guests, an American couple, but they completely ignored us all, which seemed strange, but, hey….

Other animals

We’ve seen 20 species of lemur during our time here. Not that we’ve been counting or anything.  As well as them and the other animals you’ve seen so far, we have seen Banded Iguanas,

Drongos (yes, really) and Parrots (a very dull colour),

and the lesser-spotted bathroom frog,

a little chap who persisted in finding his way back to our bathroom no matter how often we tipped him into the bushes or how firmly we closed the doors and windows.

There was also the remarkable Coconut-Collecting Pool Guy. There are footholds carved into the trees, but still…

And…farewell

Saturday June 22 2024 – I write this as Jane and I sit in the familiar surroundings of Room 24 at the Relais des Plateaux hotel – the very room we first stayed in on arrival to Madagascar.

Frederic joined us on the drive to the airport from the Lodge and we were able to tell him how much we’d enjoyed our stay.  He then had to marshal the incoming guests – 16 of them!  It took two aeroplanes to deliver them.

The flight down was uneventful, and we were delighted to be met at Tana airport by Haja, who transferred us here to the Relais des Plateaux, and who will also take us back to the airport later for our flight back to the cold, wet weather that’s bound to await in Europe.

Oh, wait…

Our time at Le Lodge was supremely relaxing; a great end to a wonderful three weeks exploring a new country and an unfamiliar culture. Although our phones are full of photos and our brains are full of new experiences, we realise that we’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to understanding Madagascar; but what we have experienced has been intense, educational and fun.

After previous travels, I have often done a valedictory post to sum up our impressions of a place, but Madagascar is too complex and varied to even consider doing that.  I hope that these pages give a reasonably coherent impression of our 23 days as strangers in a strange land.  We’re very grateful to Kate at Whisper and Wild and to Tamana, the local agency, as well as all the teams at all the places we’ve stayed for creating an absorbing itinerary that took us faultlessly around fascinating and welcoming places across 1,000km of a remarkable and unique island.

Maybe we’ll be back!

 

Coasting into Toliara – end of the RN7

2 Replies

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?