19 May – Calling John Ford

Nice day today, a combination of traveling through some pretty magnificent landscape and, after a nice lunch, a little out-of-car tourism.

 During the morning, we drove from Ambalavao to a little village south of Ihosy, Ranohira, through an amazing landscape.  Outside of Ambalavao were huge granite extrusions with some little villages spread at their feet among the trees that grow there.  There was also a good deal of agriculture, mostly rice with the terraces running up every crevice.  People are now cutting, thrashing and drying the.  Looks like the men cut, the women carry, the men thrash, and the women dry and winnow. 

We also stopped to check out some tombs built on clear rock surfaces.  The tombs, apparently old, are pretty much just stone squares put together without masonry, but the stonework is, while not Inca quality, still pretty tight.  The stone squares look great set out on the rounded exposed rock surfaces with the rounded massifs off in the background….almost like some sort of art installation.  It was pleasant stopping there and walking around them.  Solof is wonderfully patient.

We eventually came to a descent, wound our way into lower land and left the great massifs behind.  This land was similar to that coming out of Tana – low, rolling, densely cultivated – but clearly drier than that I’d seen previously.  As always, the road was full of people walking somewhere, most of it local traffic, I suspect, of people walking to and from fields.

We stopped for gas in Ihosy and, as we headed out, the road became a series of switchbacks winding up a steep incline to a big plateau.  On the plateau, it was Nebraska without the corn -- a flat, tan horizon stretching out far and wide.  And it went on and on and on.  There was nothing up there at all – no people, no villages, no agriculture, no birds.  Just dry tan flatness.

It only lasted 20 miles, though, before we descended a bit into what is, for all intents and purposes, the landscape of Monument Valley. Big, open areas between table plateaus and vertical cliffs.  You’d expect to find Anasazi carvings in these places.  Didn’t see any stagecoaches, though.

We arrived at Ranohira about lunch time, and I had another zebu steak and frites (I wasn’t going to risk fish here, so far from the sea over such bad roads).  I checked into a cute little hotel with lots of little bungalows and a big cactus garden.  In one of the narrow-leaved trees, Solofo spotted a bright green chameleon the size of my forearm that put the lie to my belief that chameleons move slow.  He was headed to the top of the tree, his two-toed bowed legs moving and both eyes spinning.  Fast.

A nap ensued although I’d swear it was hotter at 10:30 than at 1.  When the heat had broken some, we went to a visitor center about five miles down the road.  Spotted a Madagascar Kestrel hunting big bugs and watched it land on a rock prominence, soon to be joined by its mate.  Learned in the visitor center that these birds don’t even build nests but lay their eggs in and raise their brood in rock crevices.  They have plenty of options here.

The visitor center was laid out pretty well and explained the weird geology of this place (in English!), but it was a little hard to follow.  And I don’t think the translation was the problem.  Bottom line: there’s lots of sedimentary rock here because a lot of the area was a river bottom at some point.  I think.

Queen's Rock: Can you see her?

Nothing else exciting but still very unique.  We drove around enjoying the landscape in the light of the setting sun.  I saw the Queen’s Rock, spotted a Madagascar Partridge, and went into Ranohira to find a guide for the Ilosy National Park.  I’ve been feeling so fat and out of condition that I’ve had some reservations about a long hike in the sun, but I think I’m going to give it a go and try to do the six-hour tour so I can check out the tops of the plateaus as well as the shady canyons below.  The guide said he’d have his cell phone in case we need to crap out early and call Solofo to meet us at the bottom of a plateau at some point.