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.
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| Chameleon sticking his face into the light |
Arriving in Madagascar in the
afternoon of Thursday November 10th 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| Our juvenile Madagascar long-eared owl in his fluffy plumage |
November the 14th 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Baby indri |
