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.

First Steps in Madagascar: Andasibe

Ranomafana, Madagascar

So to break a recent trend, I am actually writing this blog post while still in the country in which the action takes place.  I have caught up on my posting backlog to mid-November, when Terri and I arrived in Madagascar.  I will try to break our time in Madagascar into three or four smaller chunks to keep it a bit more manageable, and this first part will deal with our time in Andasibe, a wonderful introduction to the wilderness of the country.

Chameleon sticking his face into the light

Arriving in Madagascar in the afternoon of Thursday November 10^th was a bit disorienting; seen from above, the highlands of Madagascar look very clearcut and denuded, with dense rice cultivation in the valley bottoms in tightly-packed terraces.  I looked in vain for any evidence of surviving rainforest.  Immigration took a long time, and was spectacularly inefficient, and then buying local SIM cards took a while as well, as did changing money. Eventually we piled ourselves and our luggage into an ancient banger of a Renault and set off for town.  There was none of the usual Third World window-dressing of a fancy new expressway from the international airport leading downtown to wow diplomats and businesspeople.  The drive was agonizingly slow, along narrow potholed roads clogged with traffic, vendors, pedestrians, cyclists, beggars and animals.  It took an hour to move less than 10 kilometres to our hotel, the Sole, and if anything the centre of town was even poorer-looking and more chaotic than the outskirts had been.  We checked into our room and then went out for a short orientation walk around town.  I have been to a lot of poverty-ridden big cities around the world, and while Antananarivo (aka “Tana”) isn’t as godawful as Dhaka or Delhi, or as soul-destroying as Manila or Jakarta, it is not a pleasant town.  There is rampant poverty, widespread begging, indescribable filth and hopeless traffic.  It was quite an assault on the senses after a month in eastern Europe and six months in southern Africa, and we were glad to retreat to the hotel for food and an early night.

The expressive eyes of a common brown lemur

Restored by a good night’s shut-eye, we set off into the chaos the next day in search of airplane tickets.  We had decided to fly northeast to Sambava in a few days, and to explore the national parks nearby Tana in the meantime.  We found a nearby travel agent and paid the excessive price of 210 euros per person one way for a one-hour flight leaving on the 16^th.  Madagascans pay only two-thirds of that, and there are also discounts for people who fly into the country on Air Madagascar, but we had to pay full fare.  It costs a lot, but it saves days and days of miserable overland travel, so we gritted our teeth and pulled out our credit cards.

After that we hired a taxi to head out to the old Malagasy royal capital of Ambohimanga, about 20 kilometres from downtown.  It was another Flintstones-era Renault, but it still cost 80,000 ariary (MGA; about 23 euros) to hire for a few hours.  We crawled through the traffic, watching the faces of people in the streets.  Madagascar has a complex history of settlement, with the earliest immigrants (and the Malagasy language) coming from Borneo.  In the Tana area the people look very Indonesian indeed, and the ricefields everywhere adds to the Asian feel.  We eventually got out of the central knot of cars and drove into the surrounding hills which reminded me more of the Kathmandu Valley:  ricefields, multi-storey red-brick buildings and surrounding hills and distant mountains. 

The view from Ambohimanga

Ambohimanga is located on a pleasant hilltop overlooking Tana, and is full of trees and gardens and all the peace and tranquility absent from the capital.  The old royal palace was interesting historically, although it was a bit underwhelming physically.  I preferred the palace gardens, full of birds and jacaranda trees and providing views over the surrounding valleys and hills.  We had a great lunch at a restaurant with sweeping views, having the Malagasy staple of ravitoto (pork cooked in bitter greens, one of my favourite Malagasy dishes) for the first time.  We crawled back into town and I went off to the main downtown street, Avenue de l’Independence, to change some more euros into ariary.  All the legitimate moneychangers were shut (downtown starts to shut down by 4 pm, and it was 4:30) and I ended up changing money with some distinctly dodgy young men on the street.  I didn’t get ripped off, but it wasn’t an ideal situation, and I was happy to get out of there with my pocket brimming with ariary (the biggest bill is 10,000 ariary, less than 3 euros, so you end up carrying around fairly thick stacks of Malagasy currency.

Male Madagascar paradise-flycatcher on his nest

Saturday, November 11^th found us in a taxi fairly early in the morning headed through the streets of Tana headed towards the taxi-brousse station.  We got ourselves into a taxi-brousse (a minibus that leaves when full, the basic standard public transport of much of the world), waiting a bit for it to fill up and set off for Moramanga, the nearest big town to the east.  It wasn’t comfortable and didn’t provide views, and the Malagasy pop was loud and inane, but an iPod full of podcasts eased the pain.  We changed in Moramanga for another taxi-brousse to Andasibe, our destination, and spent part of the ride chatting with a Dutch backpacker, Manon, who was full of stories and useful information about her travels.  We finally arrived in Andasibe in early afternoon (what was supposed to have been two and a half hours from Tana having stretched in common Malagasy style into four and a half hours) and settled into our comfortable cottage in the Fean’ny Ala Hotel, an oasis of calm and beauty after the noise and griminess of the road.

Beautiful frog

Andasibe is the most accessible place from Tana to see Madagascar’s wildlife, and as such is the most visited set of parks in the country.  There were several busloads of birdwatchers in the Fean’ny Ala during our stay, and there were always other tourists around during our wildlife walks, but the numbers were by no means excessive.  Andasibe is one of those places that is popular for a good reason:  it’s the best place to see several lemur species, along with lots of chameleons, snakes, geckos and birds. 

Sleeping chameleon

We walked along the road that connects the hotel with the village centre (about 3 kilometres away), via the entrances to three separate wildlife areas:  Andasibe National Park, Parc Mitsinjo and the MMA.  The latter two are administered by local village organizations independent of the Madagascar National Parks, and we decided to do our first wildlife-spotting trip, a night walk, with the folks at Parc Mitsinjo.  On the way past the National Park, we stopped in to find out about admission rates (they had tripled in price since our edition of the Lonely Planet was published in 2012!) and ended up seeing one of Madagascar’s prettiest birds, a male Madagascar paradise-flycatcher, seated atop a nest right beside the entrance gate. We strolled back for a sundowner on the lovely riverside balcony at Fean’ny Ala, spotting several common brown lemurs crossing the road on overhead telephone wires, got our spotlight and headed back to Mitsinjo for our night walk.

The fat-tailed dwarf lemur we saw at Fean'ny Ala

It was a wonderful introduction to the Madagascar forests.  We saw no fewer than six species of chameleons, including the largest species, Parson’s chameleon.  Our guide had an unerring eye for chameleons, as well as for frogs.  On the lemur front, we saw two small nocturnal species--Goodman’s mouse lemur (Microcebus lehikhytsara) and the fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius)--as well as an Eastern wooly lemur (Avahi laniger).  Seeing eyes glinting back at us when we shone our torches around was an unforgettable experience, and we walked back in the dark along the road very satisfied with our walk.  The show wasn't over, with more chameleons visible beside the road, and another fat-tailed dwarf lemur appearing in the trees beside the restaurant back at Fean'ny Ala (as he did every night that we were there).

Crested ibis

The next morning we awoke early, at 5 am.  Partly this was inevitable, as the sun rises at 5:20 and the sky was already light, but the main wake-up mechanism is the sound of indris calling to each other across the river at maximum volume.  Their call, a series of rising “whoop” sounds increasing in volume, can be heard for several kilometres around, and is impossible to sleep through.  We had breakfast and then wandered along to the MMA reserve to see what we could see by daylight.  Our guide, George, was excellent and had a good eye for birds.  We had several encounters with groups of indris (Indri indri, described accurately in our guidebook as resembling “an eight-year-old in a panda suit”), saw common brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus), lots of well-disguised geckos, some beautiful flowers and a number of new bird species, including the Madagascar crested ibis, a spectacular species that can be hard to see.  It was our first encounter with the beautiful blue coua, and we saw a juvenile Madagascar long-eared owl still in his fluffy infantile plumage and looking slightly like a baby penguin.  Sadly we missed seeing the diademed sifaka (Propithecus diadema) by a couple of seconds, unable to spot him when George pointed him out before he scooted into the shelter of the canopy layer. We were done by noon, had a slightly disappointing lunch at the truck stop at the junction with the main highway and spent the afternoon napping and taking a run along the road.

Our juvenile Madagascar long-eared owl in his fluffy plumage

November the 14^th was devoted to exploring a park slightly further afield with George, our guide from the previous day.  We rendezvoused at 6:30 am and walked out to the main highway and then 4 kilometres along the road to reach the Maromizaha Forest Reserve, a little-visited mountainous park that has more undisturbed primary forest than the reserves in Andasibe village.  It was a long walk, mostly uphill, at first through clearcuts and then through secondary bush before finally joining the undisturbed primary forest in which a research team studies diademed sifakas and indris.  We were lucky with indris, having a number of good close encounters with these, the largest surviving lemurs, but our bad luck with diademed sifakas continued despite our best efforts and those of George.  We saw lots of new birds, including Henst’s goshawk, the Madagascar buzzard, the Madagascar cuckoo, the Madagascar brush warbler and the souimanga sunbird.  We also got good views over the surrounding countryside, where fires were visible in all directions, and every bit of land that wasn’t inside a protected area had been clearcut.  The immensity of the pressure on the few remaining pockets of forest was immediately obvious.  

The view from Maromizaha

We finished our walk, backtracked to the road and hitched a lift back with a friendly trucker.  After lunch with George at the little restaurant across the street from Fean’ny Ala, we retreated to the cottage for a big nap and then sorting through the photos from the previous few days.  We waited in the restaurant for the full moon, billed as a “supermoon”, but super or not, the clouds covered the moon most of the time, making for a somewhat disappointing full moon experience, although a couple of pegs of duty-free Aberlour whisky made the waiting enjoyable.

Young indri in Parc Mitsinjo

November 15^th was our last day in Andasibe, and we were up early again with the indris to get in one last walk in the forest.  We went back to Mitsinjo and saw it by daylight on a 2-hour tour.  We had our closest-yet encounters with indris, including one curious youngster who came right down to us to have a close look, and accepted fresh leaves from the guide.  We also saw another huge Parson’s chameleon and a lovely spectacled tetraka before heading back to our hotel to gather our possessions and brave the taxis-brousses back to the capital.  Despite a very long, hot wait in Moramanga, we were back in Tana by mid-afternoon with a few extra gray hairs caused by truly reckless overtaking by our driver.  I went out to change more euros into ariary, again with the dodgy street guys; this time I was ripped off, but only by about 20,000 ariary, or about 6 percent:  annoying, but not catastrophic.  (Not like the time a dodgy street moneychanger gave me $2 worth of Polish zloty in exchange for $100 US in Prague in 1988 when we thought we were buying Czechoslovak korony at a really good rate…..).  An excellent Indian dinner at the Taj Majal restaurant, and we were in bed early, ready for a very early morning’s start to our Marojejy adventure the next morning.

Big Parson's chameleon at Mitsinjo

Andasibe was a wonderful introduction to Madagascar’s wildlife.  It gave us lots of birds, plenty of chameleons and great encounters with the indri, one of the crown jewels of the lemur world.  The only real downer was not seeing the diademed sifaka, which we never saw anywhere else later.  In retrospect, I wish we had stayed a few days longer, which would have given us a chance to visit more of the further-flung reserves and parks, like Mantadia, Vohimana and Torotorofotsy, all of which provide different lemur, bird and reptile species.

Common brown lemur mother and baby using a lemur overpass

Practical information:  The taxi-brousse to Moramanga from Tana was 7000 MGA (about 2 euros) and the second leg to Andasibe was only 2000 MGA per person.  In fact it cost almost as much for the taxi from our hotel across Tana to Ampasampito taxi-brousse station as it did from there all the way to Andasibe.  Budget a good 4 to 5 hours for this trip, even if it’s only 140 km in total along the best paved roads in the entire country.  The Fean’ny Ala was a great place to stay, with clean, quiet cottages with great views, a good restaurant and lots of birds and (if you’re lucky) indris to see across the river inside the National Park.  It’s a good 30-minute walk to any of the park entrances from there, but it’s a pleasant walk through lemur- and chameleon-filled woods.  Getting to any of the other reserves requires some sort of transport; mountain bikes would be good, but I didn’t see any for rent.  Hiring vehicles is relatively expensive, and there’s no public transport to Mantadia or Vohimana or Torotorofotsy.  I don’t see the point of spending the extra 45,000 MGA per day to enter the national park; Mitsinjo and the MMA have free admission and you just pay for the guide, and even the guide is cheaper than at the National Park.  Other tourists, some of them serious birdwatchers and herpetologists, have sworn in particular by Mitsinjo as a very professional organization that is worth supporting, rather than the rather bureaucratic and overpriced national parks.

Baby indri