22 May—Spiny Forest (Tuléar)

Guide at the Arboretum d'Antsoka

I’m liking this hotel.  Up at a decent hour, and the air is a little fresh.  One of my favorite times of day in a hot climate.  I had my usual big opening sitting out in the garden, and Solof and I headed out for some birding and a visit to the arboretum.  And maybe Saint Augustin, a little fishing village about 20 miles away.

We were barely out of town and not even to the airport when we spotted some water birds and pulled over to check them out.  Great light!  Sun was low on the horizon and at our backs as we looked at the highlit birds.  There were three firsts for me: a Black-Winged Stilt, with long red legs and a graphic black-and-white plumage; a Madagascar Kingfisher, with a brilliant blue back and orange front; and a Madagascar Bee-Eater, which looked like most bee-eaters with its generally green coloration and a black mask.  Great fun.  I got a lot of pleasure out of watching the kingfisher make several stabs at minnows and the bee-eater chow down on more than a couple of grasshoppers.

Madagascar Bee-Eater

Just up the road, we made a left and headed down a dirt road along the river to the arboretum.  On the way, there was a striking landscape on the right as brick makers mined clay in a landscape already full of deep, wide brick pits.  These people cut the clay in slabs, hefted the slabs out to colleagues who then molded the clay.  They let it air dry and then stack it in piles 15’ high, leaving hollows at the bottom to later build fires in to cure the bricks.  There are many ethnic groups in southern Madagascar, and these people all looked like they may be in the same group, the men with more African features than many Malagasy and the women with their faces covered with a yellow substance.  It was a visually fantastic thing to see, and I would really like to do a bunch of photos with them the next time I’m there.

We went on past the brick makers to the Arboretum d’Antsokay.  This is my first exposure to spiny forest, and was I impressed; it’s a forest full of things that would be in The Lost World.  Despite my arboretum guide’s best, patient efforts, I retained about none of the scientific vocabulary for these plants, but I can describe them.  One of the most common is something like a cactus tree that is easily 25’-35’ tall.  It has thorns and leaves, and it’s woody – locals even use the wood in houses.  I gather there are many, many species of these, and the arrangements of the thorns evolve for such specific microclimates that the entire range of a species might be one side of a particular mountain that has certain air and moisture conditions since a certain arrangement of thorns might collect more water from the air than another.  That’s intense evolution. 

These forests also have trees that evolve in certain ways to conserve water.  Antsokay isn’t big on baobabs since it started as the plant collection of a Swiss botanist and was put together on cleared land, but baobabs aren’t the only trees to evolve this way.  One tree here looked like a big carrot with a tree on top….amazing.  A tubular palm.  I think I like the euphorbias the most of all.  They’re highly toxic (my favorite queen, Ranavalona I, had her enemies drink euphorbia concoctions when she wasn’t tossing them off cliffs), and the sap can even burn the skin and cause blindness.  The guide showed us a plant that bled red, though, that had sap that could counteract euphorbia toxin.  And I seem to remember Zoco telling me something about a grasshopper that ate euphorbia and was red; birds avoided it because it was toxic. 

Succulent Leaves on a Vine

Then there’s the incredible range of succulents in a spiny forest.  Of course, there are lots of aloes here, but there are also plants with big, fat, spiny leaves that turn into small trees the size of dogwoods.  And there are succulent vines.  That was another first for me.  Sometimes the vine is just the succulent, and in other cases, the succulent has a stringy vine stem with succulent leaves. 

The whole environment was out of a sci fi setting.  Individual plants really make no sense at all, but taken as a whole in these conditions, this is a simply amazing forest.  I’m surprised no Hollywood producer has yet appropriated this environment for a movie.  It would certainly work.

As we started to leave, I finally came face to face with the Madagascar animal I’d been hoping not to see – the famed Madagascar cockroach.  I don’t remember where I first saw these monsters – it might have been the Atlanta Botanical Garden – but wherever it was, they made a huge impression.  These things are 6” long and, well, they’re cockroaches.  The one I saw was being attacked by a group of ants and both Solofo and my guide were sympathizing with the poor roach!  Solof lamented that the roach couldn’t fly, and when the guide tried to rescue the roach, Solof said it wouldn’t help.  Good, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

 We left here and decided to ride out into second growth spiny forest to have lunch on the ocean.  The further out we rode, the more we realized that the road, contrary to what we’d been told, was passable by Solof’s car.  So we rode and rode until we came to the small fishing village of Saint Augustin.

Jamestown on the Indian Ocean

I was happy to get to see this spot because it has little to no tourism. It really is a small, spread-out village laid out in family compounds whose main source of income is fishing.  No restaurants (unfortunately), but we watched while some fishermen went out and came in.  It’s pretty much full of mud and wattle huts with thatched enclosures.  An interesting fact about this place is that group of English colonialists landed here about the same time another group landed in Jamestown.  Here – bad luck for the colony – the weather was even worse than in VA, and the locals were definitely not hospitable.  The colony failed resoundingly. 

Solof bought some fruit for his kids and some manioc here, and we drove back over the mountain we came over to get here, going through valley after valley of succulents and euphorbia.  When we got back to the hotel, I just relaxed the rest of the day, eventually heading to the garden restaurant for dinner.  Talked with a cig-smoking Swiss couple a bit and ran into the French couple from the 18eme again.  Then lights out!