Swinging through Swaziland--December 2016

Thunder Bay, March 24

I'm sitting in the comfort of my boyhood bedroom in Thunder Bay, looking out at snow melting on a the morning after a spring snowfall.  It's hard to believe that I've fallen three entire months behind on my blog, so now that I'm going to be stationary for a while, there's no excuse for not catching up rapidly by covering the past three months of travels in Stanley.

The nyala who gored the boy at Mlilwane

I last left you, dear readers, as we flew out of Madagascar on Wednesday, December 21st.  It was a bleary-eyed small-hours-of-the-morning flight to Nairobi, a long wait there and then a flight back south towards Johannesburg.  It is one of the enduring mysteries of airline pricing that it cost us around 500 euros to fly Johannesburg-Nairobi-Antananarivo return, and yet to do half of that trip (Nairobi-Antananarivo return) would cost not half as much, but more than twice as much (about 1100 euros).  Weird.  At any rate we got back to Johannesburg airport, stocked up on cash and phone credit, had a celebratory sushi meal and then called an Uber driver to take us out to Delmas and the Blinkgat workshop.  It was quick and easy, although pricey (about 900 rand, or 60 US dollars), and our driver was clearly doing well off the Uber gig, as he drove a new BMW which he had bought since starting driving for Uber a few years ago.

It was great to get back to Stanley after the rigours of travel in Madagascar, and we were keen to see what improvements Sarel and his Blinkgat Products workers had done since we dropped Stanley off in October.  The key new elements (a slider drawer for the fridge, another big pantry door, a new awning) were all in place and we went to sleep early in familiar, comfortable surroundings.

Unconventional but delicious:  barbecued chicken dinner on Christmas Eve

We spent the entire day on the 22nd getting Stanley sorted out, paying for our repairs (and for a tune-up by one of Sarel's sons) and then repacking our luggage from Sarel's storage into Stanley, ready for a morning departure for Swaziland.  We had a good look at the smaller jobs that Sarel's crew had done, from a new, safer ladder for the back door and a fishing-rod holder tube to new clothes and condiment holders sewed by Sarel's wife Elise.  It all looked good for making Stanley even more liveable and functional. We had decided that we wanted to spend the busy Christmas season somewhere that was not insanely full of holidaying South African families, and Swaziland seemed like a good choice:  a new country for both of us, off the beaten track and with some interesting-looking nature to explore.  

The striking colours of the southern red bishop, Mlilwane

We swung into downtown Delmas mid-morning of the 23rd, filled our fridge full of food and wine (happy at how easy it was to access the fridge using the new slider), bought supplies to bake a gingerbread house, put 147 litres of diesel into the tank and drove off to the east along the main highway.  It was fairly busy, and near a key junction east of Middelburg we ran into heavy traffic that slowed progress to a crawl for half an hour before we passed through the junction and the road opened up again.  Eventually we took a smaller road south to catch a parallel main road that led straight to the Swazi border crossing at Oshoek.  There was a long lineup of people at the immigration counters, as Swazis working in South Africa headed home for Christmas.  We got to talking to a young South African man whose father worked in Swaziland and learned, to our horror, that we weren't supposed to import either meat or liquor into the country.  Our fridge and larder were crammed with festive supplies and the thought of having to lose them at the border horrified us.  We watched glumly as vehicles in front of us were searched thoroughly, but when we got to the customs gate the officer had us open the back door, peeked in cursorily (right at a 5-litre cardboard cask of wine sitting on the floor in full view!) and waved us through.  We had dodged a border-crossing bullet!

As always happened, this blesbok bolted as soon as I took out my camera

The road towards the capital Mbabane was pretty as it dropped down off the highveld plateau.  We drove around Mbabane but what little we saw of it looked modern and prosperous.  The good road continued for a while until our GPS bade us turn right onto a secondary road.  We were headed towards Mlilwane Nature Reserve and the GPS sent us in the right general direction, but unfortunately the selected route headed straight through one of the Swazi king's royal palaces, and we were turned back by the palace guards who pointed us towards a dirt track.  The track started off fine, but quite rapidly narrowed and started to be cut by huge gullies.  The track obviously wasn't used any more and only 100 metres from a junction with the true road to Mlilwane it became completely impassable.  A 23-point turn through the muck and gullies got us headed back the way we came and we took the longer, paved path around to the proper entrance to Mlilwane.  We put up our tent in the well-maintained campground, cooked dinner and went to bed tired.

We spent four nights at Mlilwane and it was an inspired choice.  The campground had good views out towards the game reserve and was well situated for hiking and biking, while being rich in birdlife. The only drawback was that we had chosen it in part because of having electricity, and when we arrived we found that a huge thunderstorm had knocked out the power supply, which stayed off for the next two days, playing havoc with our plans to bake gingerbread and have a roast chicken dinner for Christmas.

Christmas ornaments on our new awning at Mlilwane

Mlilwane is the product of 50 years of effort by Ted Reilly, who as a young man in the 1960s was horrified by the complete disappearance of wild animals in Swaziland and turned his family commercial farm into a wildlife sanctuary which he re-stocked with animals from South Africa.  From small beginnings Mlilwane has expanded to be full of ungulates of all sizes, while Reilly's energy and efforts have seen two other national parks, Hlane and Mkhaya, established with predators and rhinos in residence.  Without potential man-eaters around, though, Mlilwane allows visitors to walk and bicycle around freely, and this freedom of human-powered movement was exactly what both Terri and I were craving after too much control over us in Madagascar.  We went for a hike that morning along the Hippo Trail, a 2-hour loop that we loved as much for its prolific birdlife as for its blesboks and zebras and impalas.  We almost didn't get started on the trail, as we saw so many birds on the first few hundred metres of the trail that we spent a good half hour just watching them and looking them up in our bird guides.  It had been raining since we were last in Southern Africa, and the massive multi-year drought was in the process of breaking.  The countryside was almost painfully green, a huge contrast to the parched, withered vegetation we had seen in Kruger seven months before. 

After returning to Stanley for lunch under the shade of our huge new canvas awning, I went off on my folding bike for a brief exploration of the cycling possibilities.  There were jeep roads everywhere and although I wished I was on a mountain bike, my Giant Expressway bike was up to the job, and I even overtook a couple of guys on mountain bikes on one of the little climbs, much to their surprise. Terri had planned to bake our chicken in our electric oven that evening, but with the power still out, we improvised, cutting it in half and braaing it over charcoal, with appropriately delicious results.  We had bought a few Christmas decorations and we adorned Stanley and the awning with them while donning floppy Christmas hats.  It felt very Christmassy, despite the humid heat, and we were glad that we were spending Christmas together for the very first time in our 6 years together.  We went to bed content and full of South African champagne.

Very pleased with our Christmas lunch at Mlilwane

We had decided to be decadent on Christmas Day and go to Christmas lunch at the fancy Hippo Hole restaurant at the lodge next to the campsite.  It proved to be an inspired choice.  After a brisk morning walk and birdwatching jaunt, we put on our fanciest clothes and strolled over to the restaurant.  An all-you-can-eat Christmas buffet lunch set us back about US$ 17 a head, and it was a tremendous bargain.  We got the best seats in the house due to Terri's eagle eye, in the corner of the restaurant overlooking a waterhole that teemed with turtles, fish and sacred ibis, and set about gorging ourselves silly on roast turkey with stuffing and too many other great dishes too numerous to recall, let alone name.  We struck up conversation with a South African couple and their twenty-something daughter at the next table.  They had moved to Swaziland in the 1990s, where they had all taken out citizenship.  They thought it was a better place for white Afrikaners to build a future than in South Africa itself, and talked about how much Swaziland had changed during their time.  

Nice Christmas table decoration at Mlilwane

Cycling on Boxing Day

By about 2:30, we could barely move and there was no way we could stuff another delectable morsel into our mouths, so we staggered back to the campsite and put on hiking gear for a post-prandial stroll.  We walked all the way to Sondzela Backpackers, another of the accommodation options in the reserve, and then back, passing small herds of nyala and the beautiful blesbok (a type of hartebeest with a real aversion to being photographed face-on).  When we got back Terri coaxed a fire out of some not-so-dry firewood and we sat beside the fire sipping whisky and eating Christmas cake (one of Terri's Christmas traditions) with slatherings of fresh cream.  It had been a wonderful Christmas Day.

Partway up the path to the summit

Boxing Day was devoted to trying to work off some of the lavish Christmas lunch.  We got up and cycled off along jeep tracks towards the start of the Peak hiking trail.  It was steep going as we got closer to the trailhead, and eventually we had to lock the bikes and hide them behind some bushes and continue on foot.  It was further to the peak than it appeared, but it was a perfect day for hiking and the views (and profusion of butterflies) at the top repaid our sweat.  We looked down into the broad plains of the valley and into the royal palace enclosure where we had been turned back a few days earlier; some sort of traditional warriors' dance was going on there and we watched in fascination through our binoculars.  We were alone atop the peak for a long time, gazing out contentedly until it was time to return and start working on the gingerbread.

Relaxing at the top of our hike at Mlilwane

The power had come back on in the night, and so the plan was to bake gingerbread before it went out again.  If Christmas cake and Christmas pudding are Terri's family holiday traditions, baking gingerbread structures is the Hazenberg way.  Over the years it has morphed from making traditional houses to making castles, parliament buildings, pyramids and even the Taj Mahal.  The plan this year was to construct a replica of Stanley.  I did the designs and then mixed up some gingerbread dough.  We were somewhat impaired by not having real molasses or the type of brown sugar that I was used to, and the resulting gingerbread was a little too soft for real structural integrity, but we were making do with what we had available.

One of the hundreds of butterflies we encountered on our hike

As I was mixing up gingerbread Terri was chatting to an Australian family who were camped next to us.  One of the nyala bucks that always wandered around the campsite came nearby and Terri patted him on the nose.  The Australian's ten-year-old boy followed suit and, without any warning, the nyala changed from friendliness to aggression and gored the boy in the abdomen.  We spent a good while helping the family deal with the traumatized boy who was in shock.  He didn't seem to be losing much blood, but he was definitely in pain.  Terri felt terrible since the boy had just imitated her.  The manager came over to see the family and called an ambulance, but it never turned up; the family ended up driving into Mbabane after dark that evening to take the boy to the hospital.  We never heard how it all turned out; I hope the boy was all right in the end.  It was a timely reminder not to take wild animals at all for granted!

We fired up a charcoal braai and grilled some delicious steaks before baking the gingerbread pieces.  Our little electric oven was a bit uneven in its heat distribution, but it produced surprisingly good results.  We let the pieces cool and dry overnight, getting them ready for construction the next day.  That night it was hard to sleep, not just for us but for all the other campers, as a group of very loud Swazi yahoos set up camp not far from us and kept the noise going almost until dawn.  It was the one real blot on our time at Mlilwane, and the next morning the manager was apologetic and took statements from the other campers so that the offenders could be banned from the campground in the future.  It was a nice gesture, but it would have been much more effective if the night security guard had simply shut down the noise before it got too loud or too late.

Tuesday, December 27th found us packing up, making complaints to the manager about our inconsiderate neighbours and then driving out of Mlilwane.  We had considered going hiking in another nature reserve slightly to the north, Malolotja, but the weather forecast looked dismal and we didn't fancy hiking in the rain.  Instead we turned east, towards the Mozambique border and Hlane National Park.  Swaziland is a tiny country with the main roads well paved, so it took less than two hours to get to our destination.  We drove past the country's second city, Manzini, which looked prosperous and modern and a better ratio of decent houses to slum shacks than you would see in many South African cities.  Like Kruger, Hlane is nestled between the edge of the highveld and the rounded Lebombo hills that mark the frontier with Mozambique, and like Kruger it's full of big animals, both rhinos and big predator cats.  We drove into the park just as a huge rainstorm whose progress we had been tracking along the horizon caught up with us, and for fifteen minutes we sheltered while Niagara Falls thundered down out of the sky on us.  When we got to the campground we found it half-flooded, but we found a slightly higher chunk of ground to put Stanley on.  

A weaver quickly building a replacement nest after a storm

Once the skies had cleared, we walked out to the camp waterhole to see if there were any rhinos around (there weren't) and whether there were any interesting birds (there most certainly were).  We found hundreds of weaver nests on the ground where the rain and wind had knocked them out of the trees, and looking up we saw the industrious weavers hard at work rebuilding in a frenzy of activity that was fascinating to watch.  We cooked up dinner, set up our awning against further rain and then went to bed.

In the morning I opened the fridge to take out breakfast supplies and found that it wasn't on.  A quick bout of trouble-shooting revealed that the new slider drawer had run over the power cord and it had shorted out and melted the cord; luckily we hadn't caused a fire!  There was only one thing to do:  drive into Manzini and get it fixed.  It proved to be fairly easy, as the fridge itself proved to be still working fine (we were worried that we had fried the motor) and we were able to find both an electric supply store and a refrigerator store.  We had the fridge re-gassed (it had seemed to be labouring to keep stuff cool even before the short-circuit) and had a new DC power cord made, while a truly Biblical downpour turned the town's streets into rivers.  Eventually the rain passed and we drove back to Hlane with our repaired fridge.  I mixed up some thick icing to use as glue and put the various bits of Gingerbread Stanley together.  The icing needed to set overnight to harden, so we hid Stanley away so as not to step on him inadvertently and waited for the last step in the process.  That evening we had dinner with one of the few other couples in the soggy campground, Neil and Elise.  Neil, an architect, had spent much of his life camping in beautiful spots in southern Africa and was full of great stories and advice for us.  We also admired the design and workmanship on his camper, a converted Toyota Land Cruiser that made Stanley look decidedly shabby in comparison.  Another camper, Colin, wandered over to join us bringing some wine, and in the process lent us some elastic cord to wrap around both our refrigerator power cables (AC and DC) to avoid a repeat of the previous day's mishap.  We wobbled to bed a little tipsy and full of good food and ideas for our trip.

It proved to be a serious mistake to leave our awning up overnight.  After midnight the skies opened again in torrents, accompanied by heavy wind, and the awning was subjected to the twin stresses of heavy wind and the pooling of water in low points on the waterproof canvas.  In the night both Terri and I were awoken by a very violent jolt that felt like something other than wind.  In the morning we discovered what had occurred:  the awning had come down, bending two of its three poles in half.  It was weeks later that we realized that more than that had occurred:  the violence of the sideways force had actually moved the camper sideways inside the loadbed of the pickup truck.  It didn't move very far (maybe 1.5 cm), but it was enough to make it drop downwards a bit and twist, putting huge strain on the four retaining screws that hold it in place and causing damage to the camper itself.  

Gingerbread Stanley in front of the real item, Hlane

But that was all in the future.  That morning of December 29th as we looked at the wreckage we didn't know what to do, but Terri quickly came up with the idea of finding the handymen from the campsite to see if they could do anything to repair the poles.  Amazingly within a couple of hours they had straightened the poles and reinforced them with bits of copper piping and strong screws, as well as with strategically-placed indentations on the metal.  While that was going on, we were busy with our own DIY, icing and decorating Gingerbread Stanley.  A couple of hours of mixing up icing and figuring out good colour schemes with the Smarties, gumdrops and other sugary goodies and we had created a reasonable edible facsimile of our beloved home and source of transport.  It was Terri's first-ever gingerbread construction project, and she absolutely loved it.  It was fun over the course of the holidays to try to fuse together our differing family traditions to create our own rituals to mark Christmas and New Year.

That day as we sat out by the waterhole watching birds, we fell into conversation with a couple of American Peace Corps volunteers who were working in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in central Swaziland.  They said that the veneer of prosperity and good roads and houses that we had glimpsed on our trip so far didn't extend far into the countryside away from the asphalt roads.  They said that poverty and AIDS made life pretty tough for the majority of Swazis, with many Swazis moving to work in South Africa, and the country suffering from the highest incidence of HIV of any country in the world (although specific regions of South Africa, like the province of KwaZulu-Natal, have even higher rates of infection).  It was a sobering reminder that Swaziland, for all that we had had a great time in the country, is a tough place for the majority of its citizens to live.  This situation has been exacerbated by the drought, which has reduced maize yields for subsistence farmers.  The biggest problem in the country, though, as we heard from many different sources, is the king, the last absolute monarch in the world.  His lavish spending on himself, his multiple wives and extended family while the country grapples with poverty, food shortage, AIDS and a stuttering economy does nothing to improve the situation.  He crushes dissent with an iron hand, and the economic and political malaise seems unlike to to improve until he either exits the throne or makes himself a constitutionally limited monarch.  Neither seems likely in the immediate future.  In June of 2016 there were howls of protest from outside the kingdom when the king took over the rotating chairmanship of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) despite his heavy-handed draconian authoritarianism at home.

Two white rhinos jousting gently with their horns, Hlane

White rhino, Hlane

Another great supper of grilled steak and mushrooms, washed down by great South African red wine, and we were in bed for the last time in Swaziland.  The next day, Friday December 30th, found us up, quickly breakfasted and out for a game drive.  Lions had been roaring loudly in the night, and we were ready for some big game.  The repeated big rainstorms meant that the tracks inside the park were mostly muddy quagmires, but luckily we didn't have to go very far to find Hlane's premier attraction:  white rhinos.  Barely a kilometre into the park we ran into a group of 5 of them beside the track and we spent a long time just sitting and watching them.  Two of them were fighting, jousting with each other with their enormous horns, and it was fascinating to see them push and nudge each other quite hard for a minute or two before settling down to some serious grazing and then starting up again.  We had a perfect view of these behemoths and it was bittersweet to reflect that this species was rescued from near-extinction (fewer than 50 left in the wild around 1900), painstakingly restored to plenty and now faces the spectre of extinction again, all because of the long, elegant "horns" (really made of something closer to matted hair or fingernails) with which they were now battling.  A few days ago, a white rhino was killed inside a zoo in France for its horn, while museums have seen their rhino specimens dehorned by determined thieves.  Last year about three white rhinos a year were poached in South Africa alone.  There are still estimated to be about 20,000 white rhinos left in southern Africa (the northern subspecies is probably extinct in the wild now), but at 1000 poaching incidents a year, that leaves only a few decades for the remaining rhinos.  All this went through our minds as we sat watching, spellbound, this slow-motion intermittent sumo.  We realized how lucky we were to be able to see it, and that perhaps in a generation no-one will see this sort of spectacle ever again outside a heavily-guarded zoo.

White rhino crossing our jeep track, Hlane, with his valuable horn

We drove back to the campsite, tucked into a hearty post-game-drive brunch of eggs, bacon and corn fritters and drove south out of the country into South Africa, past a string of commercial sugar farms that should be making the country wealthy, but is apparently benefitting mostly the king.  It had been a fun, interesting and thought-provoking week in Swaziland.  Now it was time for our tour of South Africa to begin.

Tune in a few days from now (I hope) for a longer blog post on our shorter-than-expected exploration of South Africa.

Farewell to Madagascar: Our Southern Sojourn

Channeling my inner Ansel Adams in the Tsaranoro Valley

Windhoek, February 19^th

Seated in a warm, dry hotel room while rain comes down outside on this capital city, I am trying to cast my mind far away from mainland Africa, where we have been for the past two months, to the last leg of our Madagascar odyssey, our two-week swing through the south-central highlands of the country.  This section of the trip, although somewhat shorter than we had anticipated in terms of distance, still gave us plenty of scenery and wildlife to take away and provided a fitting conclusion to our trip.  It will also be good for me to start catching up on my much-delayed blog; after a burst of writing energy in early January, I haven’t written a word in over a month, so it’s time to get back at it.  Here goes.

Taxi rickshaw in the back streets of Ambalavao

Terri and I headed out from the squalour of Antananarivo very early on the morning of Tuesday, December 6^th on the most luxurious bus we could find, the Sonaotra+.  The bus was clean and the seats were well spaced.  We had bought an extra seat just in case, and the space and legroom were luxurious after some of the taxis-brousses we had taken up in the north.  It couldn’t compare for luxury with a Chilean, Argentinian or Turkish bus, but it was a relief to our battered backsides.

Our destination was the large town of Fianaratsoa, and it was, by the standards of Madagascar travel, a quick, pleasant and comfortable trip.  We could even look out the windows at a rolling landscape of hills, irrigated valleys and straggling villages of red-brick houses.  I put on my headphones and listened to a big backlog of podcasts, stopping only at the mid-trip meal stop.  One of the sad things about travelling by bus, compared to travelling with your own vehicle or (even better) a bicycle, is that you race past landscapes and sights that you would love to stop and look at, unable to cast more than a cursory glance at them.  In the end you get dozy and stop paying attention, stultified by the swaying of the bus and the fact that you were up at 5 am, and this is the worst thing:  you travel halfway around the world to ignore the country passing past your window, dozing in a stupor.

The main street of Ambalavao

Fianarantsoa is a big, sprawling town built between a series of low hills.  We caught a taxi to the tiny, cheap and friendly Hotel Arinofy and were in bed early.  The long day of imprisonment in the bus and the fact that there was no power both sent us to sleep sooner than expected.  We woke up in the morning to the sight of brilliant red Madagascar fody birds frolicking in the garden, had breakfast and then trudged down the hill to the chaos of the taxi brousse stand.  We enquired about rides to Ambalavao, then went into town looking for a supermarket to buy supplies for our upcoming hike, while I ran off to a gas station to fill our MSR stove fuel bottle.  The supermarket was a bit dismal in its selection, but we scrounged together some potatoes, instant noodles, instant soup, canned tomatoes and a few other items before heading back to the taxi brousse stand with our booty.

The staple of life in central Madagascar

It was a lot less comfortable ride to Ambalavao (despite booking extra seats), but it was a fairly short trip, and within two hours we were tumbling off the bus at the main market square in Ambalavao.  The landscape had changed, growing distinctly dryer and more open, and Ambalavao had the distinct air of a Western cowboy town, with lots of wiry men in Stetson hats and carrying big walking sticks marching up and down the road.  Right in the square there was an office for JB Trekking, and we stopped in to find out about transport to the Parc National d’Andringitra, our next destination.

Another beautiful chameleon

We discovered that we could have saved ourselves the effort of buying food, as an all-inclusive 4-day hike, with food, cook and porters included, was about 120 euros per person, not significantly more than we would pay trying to negotiate a 4WD lift to and from the park.  We signed up and then spent the afternoon in the delightfully French atmosphere of the Relais d’Andringitra, run by an expat Frenchman who regaled us with tales of life in Ambalavao and fed us magnificently on magret de canard and zebu bourguignon.  We strolled around the streets later in the afternoon, drinking in the atmosphere of market day, with the local Betsileo farmers thronging the streets.  The houses along the main street were picturesque in a decaying colonial era sort of way, and it was pleasant to stretch our legs after two days of bus travel. It actually reminded me a bit of a spaghetti Western set, between the wooden balconies, the hand-painted signs and the cowboy hats, and I half-expected Clint Eastwood to come around the next corner instead of another tuk-tuk.

Rice terraces on the way to Andringitra

Thursday Dec. 8 found us up early and piling into a decently maintained 4x4 pickup truck with our guide Tovo, lots of food and equipment and a live chicken, its legs tied together.  The chicken was going to be dinner on the second night, and Terri immediately took a shine to the little fellow, feeding him bread, bits of flour and water to ease his last 36 hours on earth.  We stopped in to see the zebu market, a huge bustling open area on the outskirts of town full of cowboys and big zebu, some of them escaping from their owners from time to time and causing much shouting and chasing and corralling.  From that point on it was a 3-hour slog over a truly awful road, comparable to the Daraina track still burned into our nightmares.  At least the scenery was very pretty, with distant mountains closing in on the road as we climbed past emerald rice terraces towards the forested higher peaks.  By 10:30 we were at the national park office, where interminable paperwork was filled out and we looked at the surprisingly good displays at the visitor’s centre.  We were the only visitors to pass through the gate that day, which is surprising because Andringitra is one of the very best national parks in Madagascar, with great scenery, fantastic hiking and good infrastructure.

Looking up at the King's Waterfall and the jumble of peaks behind

Eventually we piled back into the truck along with a couple of porters that our guide had engaged.  We climbed up an ever-deteriorating track until we could drive no further (the next bridge was a gutted mas of burnt timbers), then got out, distributed the gear and food (and the unfortunate chicken) among the two porters, picked up our park guide Fleury and set off uphill, relieved to be walking at last.  We climbed steadily through lovely forest (a rarity in these parts; only the protection of the national park has saved a small area of native bush), with occasional stops to pant in the cloying humidity.  The forest was full of chameleons, lizards, crickets and noisy but unseen birds.

Nice reflection of the high peaks of Andringitra

After three kilometres of steady climbing past two impressive waterfalls (the King’s and the Queen’s Waterfalls), we finally found ourselves on flattish open moorland on a long plateau at the foot of the high peaks.  The next 3 km were easy and pleasant and full of birds that were easy to see.  The orchids for which the area is famous weren’t in season, but the rugged granite peaks and undulated heath made up for their absence.  We made camp beside a burbling river (a location known as Camp Three), ate a great beef stew, fed the chicken again and were in bed early in the big tent provided by the trekking company.

Pretty mountain peaks seen from near Camp Three

Terri, Fleury and Tovo on the way to Camp Three

Granite shining bright in the morning sunshine

We slept well, and were up early the next morning for our summit push.  A recent change in park regulations meant that we couldn’t leave at 3 am for sunrise on the summit, so we settled for a 5:15 wakeup and a 5:45 departure.  Our guide from JB Trekking was feeling unwell, so we had Fleury, our National Park guide, as our only companion.  It was a very scenic climb, first along the plateau, then steeply uphill across steep granite faces scored with streams and waterfalls, across a second, higher plateau and finally, at 8:45, up to Pic Boby, at 2658 metres the second-highest peak in the country.  (The highest peak is inaccessible by casual hikers, so this is the trekking summit of Madagascar.)

The jumbled, eroded granite outcrops on the final push up Pic Boby

We had perfect bluebird weather and endless views across the jumble of shattered granite peaks (some of which actually look higher than Boby itself) south to the start of the southern desert and north to the forested peaks of Parc National de Ranomafana.  It felt good to be standing (almost) on top of Madagascar and to be walking almost free (with the exception of Fleury) through a wonderful landscape.  We returned to camp in a jubilant mood, swam in the stream, had a quick early lunch and set off across the lower plateau towards our next camp by 12:20.

Made it!  Two tired but exultant trekkers at the summit

The view from the top

The landscape of that afternoon’s hike was wonderful, a mixture of open grassland, exposed granite (the “Lunar Landscape” for which Andringitra is known) and a descent through more dense forest.  Accompanying us most of the way were views of the immense vertical granite walls of the Tsaranoro Valley, into which we were descending.  It was a long day, and we were a bit footsore by the time we got to Camp Yetaranomby, on the boundary of the national park after a 1000-metre descent from the summit.

Our serpentine visitor and his unfortunate dinner guest

The campsite had another great swimming hole and Terri and I bathed, feeling the cool water refresh our dusty skin and tired legs.  While we were in the water, the chicken met his demise and appeared in our dinner.  He was more skin and bones than meat, and it seemed almost criminal to kill a chicken for so little nutritional benefit to us, but we were both hungry and were able to salve our consciences.  Ten minutes after dinner I realized I had left my sunglasses at the table and when I returned to our outdoor dining area, my headlamp picked out the slightly gruesome sight of a boa constrictor halfway through the process of swallowing an unfortunate rat whole.  I called Terri and we watched the rest of the meal; it took almost half an hour for the snake to finish ingesting its prey, and watching the convulsive bursts of peristalsis was fascinating, if grim. 

The spectacular wall of Tsaranoro Peak

The next day we bid farewell to Fleury after breakfast as we left the national park.  He headed back over the mountains to park headquarters while we continued mostly downhill into the heat and rice cultivation of the Tsaranoro Valley.  The views were stunning, with Tsaranoro Peak giving us different colours and angles every few minutes.  When we dropped low enough to be in rice fields, young kids raced uphill to try to sell us trinkets and souvenirs and ask for money, candy and pencils.  They were quite persistent, but Terri managed to divert them into singing while I walked ahead to take pictures.  It saddened me a bit to see how the presence of tourists, as is so often the case, turns kids into beggars and salesmen, diverting them from school and working in the fields.

Terri near the bottom of the long descent into the Tsaranoro Valley

Terri being serenaded by village children in the Tsaranoro Valley

It was properly hot down at 1000 metres’ elevation and we trudged along the valley, wishing that the local farmers hadn’t cut down every single tree for firewood, leaving us in a shadeless oven of a landscape.  The colours of the young rice and the contours of the terraces were beautiful, but they were also reminders of the natural beauty and diversity that has been lost as Madagascar’s population has mushroomed over the past few decades.  We got to Camp Meva, a rather ramshackle camp owned by JB Trekking, at 11:30.  The heat was intense, and after a quick picnic lunch, Terri and I decided to walk uphill to the fancier digs at Camp Catta for a swim and to look for ring-tailed lemurs.  The “eco” swimming pool was delightfully cool but not terribly clean, but it was a great way to beat the heat. 

Eventually we hauled ourselves out of the green water and went off to look for the ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) that live in the area.  It didn’t take long, with the help of one of the Camp Catta employees, to locate a troop of lemurs right in the hotel grounds, and we spent a very happy hour following them around and photographing them.  They don’t have the ethereal beauty of the silky sifakas that we saw in Marojejy, but they are very cute, very active and love to cross open ground with a strange sideways skipping gait, so it weas a lot of fun to take pictures of them.  We watched them marking trees vigorously with scent using their paws, first rubbing their paws up and down their tails where their scent glands are located.  I felt (not for the first time in Madagascar) that I was in a BBC Nature documentary narrated by David Attenborough.  The mothers carrying babies on their backs were of course the cutest photo subjects.  We returned to Camp Meva buzzing with excitement from seeing the lemurs.

Ring-tailed mother and child

We slept well that night and awoke early, ready for a long, hot slog out to the road and a crowded taxi brousse, but a phone call while we were breakfasting told Tovo, our guide, that another trekking party from JB Trekking was on its way to Camp Meva in a 4x4 and the truck would give us a lift back to town once it had dropped off its trekkers.  We were doubly fortunate:  not only did it save us a rather grim walk along the main track, it also gave us more time at Meva where we got to watch a troop of ring-tailed lemurs walk right up to the main building, jump through the windows and start licking and chewing whitewash off the walls.  We had wondered why the walls looked so chipped and ragged, and now we knew:  it was the lemurs!

Ring-tailed lemurs licking the paint off the walls

Apparently the whitewash contains salt and minerals that they crave.  We watched them gnawing away at the walls for a good 45 minutes before they finally gave up and headed off towards the nearby village.  As they were crossing an open field, a domestic dog suddenly raced out in pursuit of them and they split up, two young males heading in one direction and a mother and infant in the other.  We saw the two males sitting high in a tree in the village as we passed in our luxurious truck, but saw no sign of the mother and child.  The two males were calling plaintively and looking around for their troopmates, and we hoped that the dog hadn’t caught and killed the pair.  As with most species of lemur, the ring-tailed lemurs are fairly rare, with a fragmented habitat and falling numbers, so the death of even a couple of them is significant.

Ring-tailed lemurs at Camp Catta

We drove back to town with the owner of JB, his driver and our guide Tovo.  It was a quick, comfortable ride (the road on this side of the park is far less abysmal than on the other side) and quite soon we found ourselves back at the Relais d’Andringitra, tucking into more fine French cuisine and then taking a well-earned siesta.  That evening over dinner we made the acquaintance of Allegra, a fisheries biologist from Alaska, and had a pleasant evening comparing notes on where we had been in Madagascar.

Intense colours in the Tsaranoro Valley

Ring-tailed lemurs fleeing an oncoming dog

It was hard to tear ourselves away from this little oasis of good food, and the next morning found us lingering over breakfast and internet, trying to book accommodation for our upcoming sojourn in Swaziland and trying to upload photos.  Finally by 10:30 we tore ourselves away, found a taxi brousse back to Fianaratsoa and another one to Ranomafana, arriving late in the afternoon after one of the slowest taxi-brousse rides yet, albeit through spectacular scenery.  We found rooms in the Hotel Manja just in time for sunset beers and were in bed pretty early.

It was at this point that our onward progress ran into the sands of lassitude.  We had planned to spend a couple of days in Ranomafana, seeing the lemurs, before continuing north to do some community-based trekking.  Instead we woke up the next day thinking that we wanted to minimize the number of hours and the number of days that we spent on Madagascar public transport, and that Ranomafana seemed like a beautiful place to kick back for the remaining week of our trip before heading back to Antananarivo and our flight back to South Africa.  The trekking option was going to involve a lot more taxis-brousses into the back of beyond, and after six weeks of taxis-brousses this was a prospect too horrible to contemplate.  I don’t know if it’s my advanced age, or the years of travelling by bicycle, or the past six months of comfortable travel driving ourselves around Africa in our beloved Stanley, but the hours spent contorted inside a taxi-brousse, crawling past scenery without stopping (or, often, even being able to see it) really sapped my will to continue exploring.  Madagascar has so much that is worth seeing and experiencing, but unless you’re willing to shell out the big bucks to have someone drive you around, or unless you’re willing to pedal yourself around on a bicycle, it’s a bear to travel around by public transport. 

Wonderful chameleon in Ranomafana town

Having made up our mind to stay, we were in no hurry to race off to the park, especially given the unsettled weather.  We spent our first day wandering lazily along the town (strung untidily along the bottom of a river valley tumbling down off the central highlands).  It was a small hot spring spa in colonial times, and the French infrastructure still exists, albeit mostly in a state of overgrown decrepitude.  The old suspension bridge over the river lies in ruins, with a jerry-rigged temporary bridge meandering beside it.  Many old French buildings associated with the hot springs lie in dereliction behind the modern springs, a complex that was closed that day for cleaning.  We decided to visit the next day when the water would be at its cleanest.  Near the bridge, we spotted a huge, spectacularly-coloured chameleon climbing a tree, but before we could take pictures a disagreeable old woman grabbed the chameleon, said it was hers and demanded money for photos.  We walked off, Terri giving the lady a piece of her mind, and made our way back to the Manja.

The next day was devoted to a long visit to the hot springs.  We got there early and had the hot water swimming pool to ourselves for most of the morning.  It was almost too hot to swim lengths, and we had to climb out from time to time to cool off in the shade of the trees, but it was a pleasant place to read, to watch birds and to do yoga.

 

Ranomafana butterfly

While there, we struck up a conversation with a Swiss guy and a Malagasy woman, Cyril and Mushu, who wanted to share the expense of a guide to the park the next day.  We agreed to the idea, and the next morning Terri, the guide and I were crawling into a crowded passing taxi-brousse for the 10 km drive uphill to the main gate of Ranomafana National Park, where we met the other two travellers waiting for us outside their accommodation.  We paid for admission and the guide (pretty steep, at 65,000 MGA per person for admission, and MGA 75,000 split between us for the guide) then set off into the park, past the cheeky “community levy” desk which extorted a small fee from all visitors on top of the large fee we had just paid for the park ticket and guide.  Terri was not amused.

 

Golden bamboo lemurs in Ranomafana National Park

Ranomafana’s claim to fame is the presence of a couple of species of very rare lemurs, the golden bamboo lemur (Hapalemur aureus) and the greater bamboo lemur (Prolemur simus).  We were hopeful of encountering both of them, but had to content ourselves with the golden species.  We had several close encounters with these gentle creatures who are studied by scientists curious as to how they are able to get rid of the cyanide present in their diet of bamboo shoots.  They were tough to photograph, as we were always looking up through dark branches towards dark lemurs silhouetted against a bright sky, but in the end we got a couple of decent shots.  The same can’t be said about the other new species we spotted, the Milne-Edwards’ sifaka (Propithecus edwardsi) and the critically endangered black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata), which we saw in short bursts as they moved rapidly across the forest canopy.  We spotted a few chameleons and saw lots of beautiful forest, but it was a rather low-key finale to our Madagascar wildlife experience.  Our guide Angelin was also a bit of a loudmouth, so we weren’t broken-hearted to say goodbye to him.  We walked downhill back to town along the main road, an hour and a half of trudgery that made Terri’s injured leg pretty sore. 

The last few days passed in a lazy haze, with some blog post writing, some running and lots of watching the huge and amazingly coloured Parson’s chameleon who lived in the hedge outside the Manja Hotel restaurant.  We were sad when he finally disappeared on our last day.  We also had the good fortune to meet Jannico Kelk and Jasmine Vink, an Australian couple who are passionate herpetologists (“we love herping”, according to Jasmine).  I had seen some of Jasmine’s amazing photos on Instagram, and it was great to meet the two of them in person.  They had just come from Andasibe, and from India and Bangladesh before that, and they were looking forward to lots of night-time exploration.  Seeing their exquisite photos, I realized that although I’m quite pleased with the wildlife photos I’ve taken on this trip, there are many levels of proficiency above me to strive for in the future.  (You can see some of their photos here and here, if you’re curious.)  Terri and I also ventured out to the botanical gardens just outside of town, where we saw a number of rare Madagascar species, including one that has exactly one known tree in the wild (the one we were looking at).  It’s amazing, and rather sobering, to realize that there are so many species just being discovered, or still unknown to science, at the exact moment when so much of Madagascar’s unique forests are being cut down rapidly. 

The amazing Parson's chameleon in the garden of the Hotel Manja

Farmer bringing his crop to market in Ranomafana

And then, suddenly, it was December 18^th and we were on our way back towards our flight.  That afternoon we sprang for a private transfer to Fianaratsoa (MGA 100,000 well spent, although the first guy whom we had reserved cancelled about 20 minutes before our scheduled departure, leaving us scrambling to find a replacement).  In Fianar, we stayed at the bizarre Soafia Hotel, a gigantic Chinese-themed complex that seemed half-deserted and half-derelict.  We had dinner that night in the restaurant, where we made up half of the evening’s clientele and where we were told that they had no water and no beer in stock.  Terri got cross with the waitress and finally they found some bottled water, but it was a strange experience.

December 19^th found us on the “luxury” Sonaotra+ bus back to Tana.  Again we sprang for 3 seats to have more space, and again it was a long but reasonably comfortable drive across the endless hills and valleys of the central highlands, binge-listening to podcasts and admiring the emerald green of the rice fields.  It took absolutely forever to fight our way through traffic the last 10 km into central Tana, and more time to fight our way back to the Hotel Sole, our oasis away from the hideousness of Tana’s mean streets.

Mother and child ring-tailed lemurs

December 20^th we lingered over breakfast, packed, wrote blog posts and sorted photos and napped, ready for the sleep-deprivation exercise of the coming night flight.  We dined as usual at the Taj Mahal, an Indian restaurant that had become our local hangout for its excellent cuisine and low prices.  At 10 pm we caught a taxi through the dark and somewhat menacing streets of the capital out to the airport and caught our 2:40 am flight to Nairobi, followed by our connection to Johannesburg the next morning. 

In total we spent six weeks in Madagascar, and we should probably have spent longer if we wanted to see all the amazing animals and plants and landscapes of this huge island.  However, as we had to admit to ourselves by the end, we were burned out by local transport and ready to get out of the country.  I loved being able to see so many species of lemur (23 in total), and the hiking in Marojejy and Andrangitra was a particular highlight.  Seeing the aye-aye and the other species in Daraina was a lot of fun, while swimming with whale sharks off Nosy Be was a wonderful experience.  If I went back to Madagascar, I would want to have my own transport:  a car, a motorcycle or a bicycle.  I would want to explore the remote northeast coast and get down to the south.  However, I think that we got a reasonable taste of the country’s diversity, and I didn’t fall in love with Madagascar enough to want to return immediately.  There are still a lot of countries left for me to visit in the world, and returning to Madagascar would be a diversion from that mission.  I also didn’t fall in love with the Malagasy people or the food, and I really loathed Antananarivo (not quite as much as Dhaka or Jakarta or Manila, but pretty close) and the fact that we had to pass through Tana so often didn’t fill me with great joy.  I was very glad that we visited Madagascar and that we had enough time to see so many highlights, but it might well end up being a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Definitely one of the cuter species of lemur!

Northern Highlights and Lowlights in Madagascar

Hlane National Park, Swaziland

Marvellous Marojejy

Madagascar from 33,000 feet; not much forest cover!

We were a bleary-eyed couple of backpackers on the morning of Wednesday, November 16^th.  Alarms hauled us from our beds cruelly at 4:30 am and 5 am found us in another decrepit taxi rattling through the surprisingly thronged streets towards the airport.  We checked in by 5:40 and sat down to await our 8:00 am flight.  We were two of the four white faces on the flight, along with a British couple (Nic and Mandy) who were also headed to Marojejy National Park.  The flight was quick and calm, with good views out through the dappled clouds to the denuded hills below.  As we got closer to Sambava the cloud cover solidified and we landed in persistent drizzle.  We caught an overpriced taxi to the Orchidea Hotel, checked in, then walked out along the surprisingly busy and unpleasant main road to the Chez Mimi hotel in search of a man, Bruno, who allegedly had good information on visiting Marojejy.  We hadn’t been able to contact the Malagasy National Parks to arrange a guide or porter, and Terri was concerned.  We had a nice Chinese lunch at Mimi, but Bruno was taking a siesta and his young assistant didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.  We caught a local minitaxi back to the supermarket, bought some food for our upcoming hike in the national park, and then went out for a run along the beach.  It was a rough sea on a dissipative beach, so swimming wasn’t too appealing, although I did throw myself in briefly to cool off after running.  Sambava is supposedly one of the most prosperous towns in the country, growing rich on the vanilla trade, but it wears its alleged wealth very discreetly.  It’s full of retired Frenchmen, living with their younger Malagasy girlfriends/wives; it looks like a pretty dull town to retire in, but to each his own.  I sat in the bar of the Orchidea sorting photos and writing up my diary over steak frites before we retired early to a rainy night.

First view of Marojejy from the trail

Beautiful lizard

We slept well, lulled by the roar of the surf, and by 6:40 the next morning we were in a local taxi to the taxi-brousse stand.  It was an uncommonly uncomfortable ride to the park, crammed into the back row of seats which had barely enough legroom for a double amputee; my legs stuck sideways out into the aisle, which was fine at first but then as more and more passengers were picked up it became a game of Twister to weave my legs around those of the extra passengers.  Luckily it was a fast ride on good pavement, and within two hours we were tumbling out of the taxi-brousse at the Marojejy National Park office with our luggage and our food, ready to start hiking.  First, though, we had to fork out big wads of ariary for national park entrance fees (45,000 MGA per person each for 3 days), a guide, a porter for Terri, camping fees and cooking fees.  It all added up to 484,000 MGA (about 140 euros) for both of us for 3 days, so not cheap but not outrageously expensive.  We had a moment of comedy when the guide first selected for us, an English-speaker, told us that we had to hire a cook, as cooking for himself was beneath his dignity, and that we had to buy him food since his food allowance was insufficient.  We quickly canned him and hired another less stuck-up Francophone-only guide, Patrick, along with a young and enthusiastic porter (and wannabe-guide) named Dany.  We stored excess baggage such as our tent and cooking stove in the storage room at the park office and set off by 11, keen to get up the mountain.

Beautiful day gecko

Gecko and millipede meet each other 

It was a pretty walk right from the beginning.  We hiked through a landscape of lush green ricefields lined with hilly plots of vanilla and lychees.  It was lychee season and we were already indulging in them as we marched along through the village and its seemingly infinite supply of small children.  Eventually, an hour down the track, we started to leave behind the dense settlement of the village and headed into a bit more forest.  We entered the national park and proceeded uphill through dense rainforest.  Madagascar has two rainfall gradients, one decreasing from north to south, and the other from east to west.  Up in the northeast corner, where we were, is the wettest bit of the island, and it rains pretty much year-round.  This shows in the dense vegetation, flowers and orchids.  Dany was a star, finding much of the wildlife that we saw:  numerous chameleons, a big boa constrictor of some sort, plenty of lizards and lots of birds, including the brilliantly coloured Madagascar kingfisher and several of the bright, long-tailed Madagascar paradise-flycatchers that we had seen in Andasibe.  We also saw a couple of species of frog, including one small and beautiful black and green frog of the Mantella genus for which Marojejy is renowned.

Eastern lesser bamboo lemur

The path was fairly gentle and led through dense jungle that eventually gave way to bamboo thickets.  We saw a number of Eastern lesser bamboo lemurs (Hapalemur griseus griseus), most of whom fled fairly quickly.  They are interesting animals who are somehow able to stomach the high levels of cyanide found in the local bamboo shoots.  We also caught a glimpse of the white-fronted brown lemur (Eulemur fulvus albifrons).  After a short snack stop at Camp One the path got a bit steeper.  We had started the walk at less than 100 metres above sea level, and most of the climb to 800 metres (the altitude of Camp Two) happened in the path between Camps One and Two.  It was sweaty work in the steamy humidity, but it was pretty, and just as we approached Camp Two, we ran into the tracker who showed us (at a distance) our first examples of the very rare silky sifaka (Propithecus candidus).  The silky sifaka is very rare (somewhere between 100 and 1000 individuals exist in the entire world, confined to Marojejy National Park and its immediate surroundings), quite large (second only to the indri among living lemur species) and very beautiful, with long white fur and very long tails.  We admired the sifakas from afar for a bit, and then continued on to Camp Two.

Mantella frog

Most hikers at Marojejy choose a four-day itinerary, with a first night at Camp Two, a second night at Camp Three, the summit on the third night followed by a retreat to Camp Two, and then a walk out on the fourth day.  With Terri’s leg still bothering her and the climb to the summit steep, we had opted out of the summit in favour of two nights at Camp Two in order to have time to see the sifakas.  We settled into our cabin (a strange mixture of wood and waterproof canvas tent material) and wandered over to the cooking area to start working on supper.

The view from Camp Two

Ring-tailed mongoose, mischievous camp visitor

It had been a glorious day of hiking, past waterfalls and streams, with beetles and butterflies and orchids to please the senses, through a rainforest absolutely pulsing with life.  It reminded us of what we hadn’t been doing enough of recently in Africa, constrained as we often were by national park regulations from wandering around freely.  We cooked up rice and lentils over the camp’s charcoal cookers beside the cooks from another hiking group.  The setting was perfect, overlooking a stream that pooled into a perfect little bathing hole, and both Terri and I slipped away from cooking duties to immerse ourselves in the cool water, surrounded by more Mantella frogs.  It was very idyllic, and the final piece of perfection was a playful, curious and mischievous ring-tailed mongoose who patrolled around the cooking area, looking for any unguarded food or empty tin to nip in and steal.  The only blemish on our happiness was finding a couple of leeches when we peeled off our hiking socks.

Our silky sifaika crew:  Patrick, Dany, Janvier and me

After dinner we went for a brief spot-lighting walk around camp with Patrick.  We were hoping for leaf-tailed geckos and tiny Brookesia chameleons, but neither were to be seen.  Instead we consoled ourselves with a couple of nocturnal frogs with huge eyes, a big toad and a brief glimpse of a fat-tailed mouse lemur’s eyes glinting in the spotlight before he moved into the shelter of the vegetation.  We returned to our hut for an early night.

Silky sifakas

We slept well that night in our little cabin, glad for the waterproof tent roof when the heavens opened for a torrential downpour sometime after midnight.  We awoke at 6, breakfasted on baguettes, jam and fried eggs, then set off with Patrick and Davy in search of the silky sifakas.  The camp’s resident tracker, Janvier, had already been up and found the nearest group not far from camp, and we followed the sound of his voice to where a group of 3 sifakas was sitting high in a tree eating and grooming.  We spent nearly two hours watching them, with a number of close encounters when they dropped down close to the ground.  They are truly beautiful animals, their white fur contrasting with their black faces, their gentle nature obvious from their grooming interactions.  They are, like all sifakas, prodigious leapers and we watched them hurl themselves across many metres of open space to get from one tree to another.  They also performed impossible gymnastics as they hung in all possible orientations to get at leaves to eat, or to groom each other in interlocking balls of silky fur.  It was frustrating trying to photograph them in the low light of the forest, with big contrasts in light from sunny patches to shade, but I got a few decent shots in the end.  Eventually I ended up putting my camera away and just watching them with my naked eye or through binoculars, feeling privileged to be so close to such a rare and beautiful animal.  It felt, Terri agreed, a bit like watching mountain gorillas, as though we were intruders in the tiny patch of wilderness that we humans have left to these precious animals.

Silky sifakas are high on the cuteness scale

Brookesia minima chameleon:  check out the fingernail for scale!

On the way back we saw a greater vasa parrot flying through the trees, and then Davy spotted a Brookesia minima chameleon, the tiniest species in Madagascar, barely the length of Terri’s thumbnail.  We watched in fascination as he crawled determinedly among the leaf litter in search of insects to eat.  We had a snack in camp, then set off uphill in search of the red lemur.  We had no luck, despite hearing them in the distance a couple of times, and eventually we admitted defeat and trudged back downhill.  Success was had on the chameleon front, though, with a couple more tiny species of Brookesia, as well as several more frogs.  We ran into a researcher carrying several more species of frog and chameleon; apparently Camp Three is a big research base for herpetologists who are particularly keen on Marojejy’s endemic frog species.

White-faced brown lemur (Eulemur albifrons), Marojejy

We spent the afternoon pleasantly in camp cooking, sorting photos and watching the mongoose and a truly beautiful green day gecko.  The diversity and beauty of the wildlife in the jungle was absolutely outstanding, and we were very happy to have the privilege of being part of it for a few days.  That evening in camp we ran into Nic and Mandy who had summited that morning, as well as a pair of French hikers who had just arrived from below.  We had a pleasant evening around the cookhouse cooking, eating and swapping stories. 

Helmeted vanga sitting on his nest in Marojejy

Our walk out the next morning began with a leisurely breakfast, and didn’t really get going downhill until about 8:30.  It was much quicker going downhill than up, and by 12:40 we were back at our starting point at the park office.  Along the way we had quite a close encounter with the white-faced brown lemur (Eulemur albifrons), finally giving us some decent photos.  We also, after much searching, spotted one of Madagascar’s iconic birds, the helmet vanga.  With its outsized blue beak, it is unmistakeable, and since it nests at the top of the trunk of one particular species of palm tree, Dany and Patrick kept peering hopefully up at every one of these trees until we were finally rewarded with a view of a huge blue bill.  We then saw another pair flying through the trees, too quickly to photograph, but the vanga on the nest stayed helpfully still for the camera.  We also saw a tenrec, the small hedgehog-like animal that bumbles around amiably through the undergrowth.  He was too fast to get a photo, but we got pretty good views.  In the BBC TV series Madagascar they get great footage of a pair of adults leading a party of 15 or so babies around; litter sizes of up to 30 have been recorded, very unusual for a mammal.

Marojejy is famous for its frogs

I was sad when we left the park behind and rejoined the busy, noisy world of the village.  Marojejy had been everything I was looking for when I came to Madagascar:  hiking, wilderness, rainforest, lemurs and a plethora of other animals.  Terri was sad when we got to the park entrance and her backpack, which had been carried by a new porter instead of Dany (there is a strict rotation system among the porters, and it was the other guy’s turn) wasn’t there.  The porter had apparently stopped off in the village for food and to see his family, and Terri was not at all impressed with his work ethic.  Eventually Dany walked back and repossessed the backpack, to Terri’s delight.

We had anticipated catching a crowded taxi-brousse back to town, but since Nic and Mandy had arrived at the same time as us and had arranged a lift back to Sambava in a comfortable Toyota Land Cruiser, we were glad to accept their offer to ride along with them.  It was a much quicker, more comfortable trip back to Sambava.  We both checked into Chez Mimi, visions of a delicious Chinese lunch dancing in our heads, only to find that the restaurant was closed until 6.  We found a few pastries to eat in the bakery next door, then had a nap until supper.  Once the restaurant had opened, they served up a delicious repast.  Nic and Mandy were at the table, and we were entertained by some of Nic’s more outrageous travel stories.  He’s a judge in real life, but certainly lets his hair down on holiday.

More lemuring in Daraina

Sunday, November 20^th found us a bit groggy after a night of poor sleep on a really lame excuse for a mattress.  We breakfasted, then caught a local taxi to the chaos of the taxi-brousse stand.  We were headed north along the coast to Vohemar, and it didn’t take long to get a full taxi and set off with us in the prime front seats.  It’s only 90 km or so from Sambava to Vohemar, but it took almost 5 hours of leisurely travel with an endless series of stops.  I was watching our driver fiddle with the money he had collected from passengers, and realized that every time there was a police roadblock (which was very frequently), he slipped 2000 MGA (about 50 euro cents) into the pages of his car registration.  When he got it back again, the money would be gone.  Multiplying by the number of cars that the cops stop every day, the obvious conclusion to draw is that being a traffic policeman is a job of great monetary potential in Madagascar, while imposing a significant cost on road traffic.

Vohemar is where the pavement ends if you’re headed west towards Ambilobe.  At the junction, a number of 4x4s tout for business.  This dirt track is renowned as one of the worst “roads” in all of Madagascar, and the 4x4s charge accordingly.  While the taxi-brousse from Sambava to Vohemar had cost us about 7000 MGA, a seat from Vohemar to Ambilobe was going for 60,000 MGA for a distance that was only 50 percent further.  What made it worse was that we wanted to hop out in the village of Daraina, about one-third of the way along the track, and the 4x4 operators insisted that we had to pay for the full distance since they wouldn’t be able to pick up any passengers in Daraina.  Then, when we had finished in Daraina, we would have to phone back to Vohemar, make a reservation and pay another 60,000 ariary.  It was a pretty expensive trip for something that looked as though it was going to be excruciatingly uncomfortable.

We sat around for a couple of hours waiting for our vehicle to fill up, and finally drove off around 5:00.  Terri and I were wedged onto the single front passenger seat of a Ford Ranger, but it looked a lot more comfortable than our fellow passengers wedged in the back.  The first 30 km of the road were actually quite decent, but then the real horror began.  It took three hours to cover the next 25 km, with the driver carefully negotiating huge holes, metres deep, that had appeared in the track over the previous rainy season.  At one point most of the passengers leapt out and started hiking through the bush by the light of their mobile phones, leaving Terri and myself and two other passengers to continue with the driver over particularly steep and difficult terrain.  We followed a convoluted squiggle of a track downhill and eventually stopped, waiting for the pedestrians to appear out of the night.  Finally, after 9 pm, we stopped outside a small hotel, Le Lemurien Blanc, and Terri and I got out into the dark.  The night watchman let us in, and the manager appeared, showed us to a room and conjured up some food from the kitchen.  We ate and then crashed, worn out by the energy-sapping process of moving from place to place by public transport.

We slept well that night and awoke to a sunny, warm day.  The whole reason we had chosen to stop in this small village was that we had been told about a lemur reserve just outside town by Nic and Mandy’s guide in Marojejy.  As we breakfasted, a local guide, Amidou, appeared and we sat down to discuss logistics.  The lemur forest is 12 km from town, so walking there and back seemed out of the question, especially as we wanted to do a night walk to spot the fabled and elusive aye aye, the strangest of the lemurs.  We eventually decided that we would rent one scooter for Terri, while I would ride as a passenger on Amidou’s slightly larger motorcycle.  We had a reasonable spaghetti lunch, then set off at 1:30 for the park. 

Heading off to see lemurs in Daraina; I rode on the back of Amidou's bike

It was a fun ride, first towards Ambilobe on the main road, then on a smaller track off to the right.  The “road” part was in awful condition, but Amidou was a careful driver, and Terri was a picture of concentration, picking the best line through craters that gave the scene the look of Passchendaele, 1916.  It was a relief to turn onto the less destroyed tertiary track.  At the end of the road, we parked the bikes beside some abandoned huts once inhabited by gold miners.  This area, despite being officially a nature reserve, was invaded by many hundreds of gold panners some years ago.  Most of them have now moved on to the next gold strike closer to Ambilobe, but a handful of miners still remain, and the ground of the reserve is a treacherous labyrinth of two-metre-deep pits.  The riverbed, dry in this season, is honeycombed with such holes, but the higher ground beside it is more selectively excavated.  It’s sad to see, once again, mining trump nature, but at least the miners don’t seem to be hunting and eating the lemurs as has happened in other parts of the country.

Golden-crowned sifaka in Daraina

The forest here is much, much drier than in Marojejy, but it’s full of lemurs.  The main species here is the golden-crowned sifaka (Propithecus tattersalli), and they are not difficult to see.  It took less than ten minutes of walking to spot our first group, high up in the branches of a tall tree.  They are big sifakas, not quite as large as the silkies, but close.  They are also white of fur, but with a crown of golden brown fur atop their heads.  They are quite curious, numerous and apparently doing well on the breeding front, as every one of the four groups we encountered had at least one baby riding on its mother’s back.  They are ridiculously agile, leaping big gaps between adjacent trees without any apparent effort, and quite curious and unafraid of people.  They are apparently protected by a strong local fady (taboo) about hunting and eating them.  We spent a lot of time watching them feed on leaves and fruits, climb around the trees and bound acrobatically across gaps, getting some good photos in the strong light. 

As the time wound on towards sundown, we eventually said goodbye to our last group of sifakas and set off in search of an aye aye tracker.  Some of the local miners supplement their incomes by watching for signs of aye ayes nesting in the treetops and then reporting this to guides and tourists for tips.  We passed a couple of teenagers with headlamps setting off hopefully in search of aye ayes, but Amidou figured that one of the older trackers would be a surer bet.  Eventually we found our man, a middle-aged man with a bright headlamp, and the four of us set off through the bush peering upwards into the canopy in search of a fresh aye aye nest.  Twenty minutes of tramping brought us to a point in the riverbed where both Amidou and our aye aye man pointed up into the trees.  “Fresh nest.  You can see the new leaves.” 

Waiting for the aye aye to emerge

I wasn’t convinced, but they were certain that there was an aye aye slumbering inside, so there was nothing to do but lie down and wait, staring up at the untidy jumble of vegetation.  As we waited the daylight began to fade, but not before another lemur species made an appearance.  A hyperactive feeding party of crowned lemurs (Eulemur coronatus) came crashing down through the trees, and we got quite close views of their faces and their red-brown crowns.  Amidou told us that they were one of few lemur species that was active both by day and by night.

We were lying on our backs, staring up into the canopy, when suddenly our aye aye man got excited, as did Amidou.  “Get your lights ready!  He’s moving!”  And then, quite suddenly, the aye aye was out of the nest and moving rapidly through the trees in search of tasty insects to eat.  With our spotlight, the aye aye spotter’s, and two very bright lights in Amidou’s possession, we had enough lumens to light up the animal quite well, even if it was too far to get a decent photo.  We scrambled around through the undergrowth, following our moving target and trying not to break a leg in one of the many gold-mining pits. 

The aye aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a lemur, but a very unusual-looking one.  There are five families of lemur (Daubentonidae, Indriidae, Lepilemuridae, Lemuridae and Cheirogaleidae) with a total of 98 species.  One family, the Daubentonidae, contains only 1 species, the aye aye.  It is considered to be the most ancient lineage of the lemurs, having split off from all other lemurs a long time ago.  It is nocturnal and insectivorous, with long, slender fingers for digging insects out of fruits and wood and leaves, and huge leathery ears a bit like a bat for hearing the faint sounds of bugs.  We got an excellent view of his sharp-featured face and his big ears, his dark grey body fur and his lighter face, as well as the glint of his eyes in our lights.  We followed him for a good 15 minutes before we finally lost him; he was quick and very agile, leaping from tree to tree, and eventually we couldn’t keep up anymore.  An aye aye may cover 30 kilometres or more in a night’s foraging before he constructs a fresh nest at dawn to protect him during his daytime snooze.  We were lucky to see one; they’re notoriously hard to find, and Daraina is one of the few places where, thanks to the spotters, you have a better than even chance of seeing one on a given evening.

Can't get enough pictures of day geckos!

We were elated as we started walking back to the motorcycles in the dark.  The show wasn’t over yet, though, as our spotlights picked out a lot of different eyes shining back at us.  There was a rufous mouse lemur (Microcebus rufus), a small Daraina sportive lemur (Lepilemur milanoi), another fat-tailed dwarf lemur, an Amber Mountain fork-marked lemur (Phaner electromontis) and then, right at the end, the eyes of a Malagasy civet (Fossa fossana), the smaller of the two main carnivorous predators of Madagascar (the larger is the fossa, Cryptoprocta ferox, which we sadly never caught a glimpse of).  We got back to the motorbikes absolutely ecstatic at the number of species we had seen.  The ride back was challenging in the dark, but the stars were glittering in a moonless sky with Venus shining very bright in the western sky so at least we were surrounded by beauty.  We made it back unscathed to Le Lemurien Blanc by 8:30 and tucked into a big meal that the manager had waiting for us.  It had been a red-letter day for scenery, for wildlife and for fun.  We chatted at dinner with three French tourists who, incredibly, had just driven the miserable track in a two-wheel drive Citroen 2CV, a car that barely looks capable of climbing a moderate incline on a paved road.  The driver, Bruno, was a real character and we had a great time chatting with him, his sister and his friend.

This Ain’t No Technological Breakdown…..

The drier countryside around Daraina

The next day, Tuesday November 22^nd, was not a red-letter day for anything.  It was, instead, one of those awful days that try the souls of travellers and make you wonder if all the lemur species in the world are worth a miserable 4x4 ride.  We had sent Amidou off the previous morning with the mission of booking us seats on a 4x4 coming through, and he had done so.  We had two front seats in a 4x4, and we had slept on this assurance.  In the morning, though, Amidou was back with bad news.  The 4x4 we had reserved had just called him to say they had broken down and wouldn’t be driving that day.  We had him call another outfit in Vohemar, and he was able to pin down another vehicle that was about to leave.  We asked to buy an extra seat to give ourselves some extra space and a modicum of comfort.  We had to pay for one seat up front by a telephonic money transfer which Amidou handled.  Then we sat and waited.  We had hoped to leave in the morning so that we could do most of the trip in daylight.  Instead, it was almost 2:30 in the afternoon when a tiny short-wheel-base Land Cruiser drove up with an impossibly low-ceilinged enclosure around the back.  There was no sign of the extra seat we had been promised, and in fact I could not sit in the back at all, as the ceiling was far too low.  We started off with a flaming row with the driver, who was about to return us our deposit money and leave without us.  We weren’t having any of it, and insisted that he honour his commitment.  After much shouting and grumbling and translation (he spoke not a word of French), he relented.  I ended up sitting on the floor of the back, between the two rows of passengers, with nothing to hold onto.  Terri was crammed onto the end of one of the two benches running the (very short) length of the back, with nothing to hold onto and barely any space to perch.  There were three other people on her side, and three very chubby ladies on the other side.  It seemed impossible that there were any spaces at all for us, let alone the three we had been promised.

It was excruciatingly uncomfortable for Terri, whose leg was being mercilessly tenderized by a metal pipe behind her, and who clocked her head a few times when we hit particularly big bumps.  We were bounced all over by the huge chasms in the roadbed, and after an hour I couldn’t take it anymore.  When the jeep stopped to wait for another vehicle to cross a narrow bridge, I hopped out and perched myself outside the back of the vehicle, with one foot on the back bumper and one butt cheek perched on the spare tire, my hands gripping the metal of the roof rack.  It was a bit precarious, but at least my legs were comfortable and there was space for my head.  I spent the rest of the trip, all eight hours, hanging off the back and it was infinitely superior to being inside.  I put on my iPod and worked my way methodically through hours of content to try to escape from the never-ending horror of the road.  It got dark by 6, and for five and a half long hours we continued through the dark, bouncing like demented pinballs across a surface that (allegedly) had been smooth asphalt back in the days of Francois Mitterand, but which was now more or less undriveable.

Loading up in Daraina:  7 people sat in the back!

I was a complete zombie, coated with dust and diesel exhaust, my hands blistered from gripping the roof rack, but Terri was much worse, unable to sit upright, bruised and battered and constantly fighting her seatmates for sufficient space to sit.  We stopped once for a quick dinner stop at a filthy roadside diner, and that was about it, other than one bathroom break.  It all blurred into a hallucinatory nightmare until finally, well after 11:30 at night, we arrived at the far end of the track in the unlovely junction town of Ambilobe.  We pulled into a tiny roadstop hotel and booked a room, only to have a much bigger fight with our driver.  We paid him for the second place we had occupied, but he demanded payment for the third space.  Since we had really only had one space, not two, and there was absolutely no way that we had had access to three seats, we refused and he went absolutely mental, screaming and thumping his chest and barging into me.  I have limited tolerance for bullying, and I was much bigger than him, so I pushed him back and began screaming myself.  Neither of us understood a word of what the other was shouting, but it didn’t matter:  the meaning was clear enough.  Then the driver grabbed Terri roughly by the arm and then she was shouting at him and I had had enough and ran him across the courtyard and up against a wall with my forearm across his neck.  The hotel staff and fellow passengers were watching this all agog.  We stormed off to our room, only to find the driver hammering and howling at the door.  We opened the door to find him drawing a forefinger menacingly across his throat in an unmistakeable gesture of threat.  Terri was outraged, and I again manhandled him away, half-convinced that it was about to come to fisticuffs.  Eventually the driver was dragged away, but not before both of us had threatened to bring the police into the story.  We bathed and went to bed still dirty, bone-tired, stiff and sore and wired with fight-or-flight adrenaline.  It had been a truly horrible day, and the only thing to do was to fall asleep and hope the driver didn’t return to batter in our door.  I remembered how much I had hated this sort of travel in Indonesia back in 1996 (fights with drivers and dishonest touts included); I had hated it so much that I had taken up bicycle touring instead.

Practical Information

A cluster of silky sifakas

Marojejy is a must-see, one of the great wildlife parks of Madagascar.  It makes sense to fly to it, despite the exorbitant cost, at least one way, as there is no short way to drive to it.  For trekking, the only obligatory hire is a guide (30,000 MGA a day if he’s going to feed himself); porters are optional.  The park isn’t cheap, but it’s not crazy expensive either; we spent 484,000 MGA (about 160 EUR) between us for 3 days.  I think that taking 4 days and climbing the peak is a good idea (which we would have done except for Terri’s sore leg).  The sifakas are amazing and worth spending another 30,000 MGA on a specialized tracker.  The park entrance is easily accessible from Sambava by taxi-brousse.  There’s one tiny supermarket in Sambava, so camping supplies are a bit limited.  You don’t need to carry a tent or stove as they’re supplied.  This is one of the best places on the island to see a helmet vanga, so try to see one on the way up the mountain!

In Sambava we found the Orchidea Beach Hotel to be a much better place to sleep (better beds, quieter) than Chez Mimi, as well as having a much nicer location on the beach.  Chez Mimi does have great food, though. 

Day geckos have amazing colours!

In Daraina you have little choice in where to stay; all tourists basically stay at Le Lemurien Blanc which is clean and reasonably priced, and guides can find you there; we found Amidou to be an excellent, knowledgeable guide.  If you have your own transport, you can stay out near the lemurs at Camp Tattersalli (as Bruno and his 2CV crew did), but we didn’t have that option.  Getting out to the lemurs we thought that renting a scooter was the cheapest, most comfortable and most fun option, although there are 4x4s available too at a steeper price.  The night walk in search of aye ayes is a must; we saw a ridiculous number of species as well as the amazing aye aye. 

Fleeting view of a snake in Marojejy

Getting to and from Daraina was where we adopted a sub-optimal method.  In hindsight, the way to go is to ride on the back of a dirt bike.  It’s more expensive (200,000 MGA from Vohemar to Ambilobe, instead of 60,000 MGA), but much faster, more comfortable and you see more, plus you are less likely to come to blows with your driver.  If you have a heavy backpack, it might be worth sending it ahead on the roof of a 4x4 for a small fee.  The other nice thing about the motorcycle option is that you won’t be asked to pay the full fare twice (once Vohemar-Daraina, and again Daraina-Ambilobe).  It’s hard to describe how awful, uncomfortable and deeply unpleasant 9 hours of bouncing around the back of a 4x4 can be, but believe us:  you don’t want to do it.  Just say “moto, please!” and save yourself a stay in the Eighth Circle of Dante’s Hell.  It is worth seeing the lemurs in Daraina; just keep reminding yourself of this.