28 May – Whales of the Forest (Andasibe: pics to follow)

Started into the Andasibe Forest at the ungodly hour of 7 am with the understanding that the wildlife is more active at that time.  I was ready for anything, doused in DEET and even bringing along a rain poncho.

It was overcast this morning and humidity was dropping off the leaves….along with leeches.  God I hate those things, skinny little inch-worms that land on your collar and then go for your neck.  Leeches may be as close as I get to having a phobia.  If I translate the French name they use for them here, it’s “blood suckers.”  The only thing that moderated my dislike was that we were walking through what was virtually a glade of some species camellia.

We walked for a while through several groups of birds, stopping to ID some I’d already seen.  My guide here, Pascal, will soon get a bead on what I’m interested in, but for the time being, I went along in pausing for birds I wasn’t overly interested in.  We followed a path along a small river and eventually came to a little bundle of lemurs tucked in fork in a tree.  Turns out they’re a nocturnal species, Wooly Lemurs, and all I saw were three little heads pop up and blink a few times.  I left them alone.  Pascal told me that lemurs are highly territorial, but the diurnal and nocturnal species’ territories overlap.  The day shift will forage quite happily, then when they go to sleep, the night shift moves in.  There’s no real contest between them.

This second-growth forest is quite thick, and I especially like the tree ferns and the huge, agave-looking plants peppered throughout.  Those plants lend the forest a very unique feeling, especially when coupled with the epiphytes and orchids throughout.  It’s only here that I found out that the bird’s nest fern is an epiphyte; they’re huge here.  And I find this forest noteworthy for the large about of fruit in it and for the lack of thorny things. 

After we went on for some time, we came on a group of Diadem Sifakas in the top of some especially tall trees.  I couldn’t make out much about them except the fact that they’re a light golden color and, like all lemurians (it’s a real French term), they are as cute as buttons.  These sifakas were grazing away, their golden butts glowing against a now-blue sky, occasionally jumping from one tree trunk to another.  Nothing small about these guys.  I stayed with them awhile.

We ran into yet another family shortly, and we stayed with them a bit, too.  The light was better on them, but I still couldn’t get a photo to do their beautiful color and cute faces justice.  They’re quite happy hanging around munching on fruit in the tree tops while humans pad around below.

We soon came upon the stars of Andasibe, the Indri.  There are many fascinating things about this animal, the first being its looks.  Indri are about 3’ tall, the biggest lemurian, and they’re light-colored, like their cousins, the Diademed Sifaka.  They hang out in family groups of 4-5, with the older ones striking out on their own after a few years, and they only give birth every couple of years.  Also, they eat the leaves, fruit and flowers of a variety of trees, but they only browse indigenous ones.  They’re an endangered animal with the 60 or so troops here in Andasibe being the only population in the world.  Indri can’t be kept in captivity; they quit eating and die when taken out of the forest or confined.

As if that weren’t enough, the call of the Indri is one of the eeriest sounds in any rainforest anywhere.  They have a call that resembles the human voice in tone, but it’s high and seems to have some harmonic element to it.  It’s terribly loud and can carry for over a mile.  When they call, it sounds almost like a whale song.  And the group I was watching decided to call.  The sound was deafening as these guys clung to their trees and opened their little red mouths to emit their piercing wail.  What an experience to be right in the middle of that.

We walked a few more hours in the agave-accented rainforest, checking out a Madagascar Jumping Rat hiding in a hole in a tree and spotting a group of Brown Lemurs.  Several flocks of parrots flew by, but we didn’t get a good look at them.  We saw, however, several Madagascar Mannikins snipping the seeds off some tall, sunny weeds, looking for all the world like what must be their close relative, the sparrow.  And as we turned onto the path that led to the ranger station, we saw a tight little France’s Sparrowhawk sitting on a wire over the path, waiting for a chance to pounce on a grasshopper or mouse.  Another endemic.

We made our plans for tomorrow with Pascal, and Solofo and I headed to the fancy Andasibe hotel for lunch.  I’d hoped for some Malagash cuisine, but they didn’t have it!  Alas, it was zebu and frites again….and the zebu was so undercooked that I sent it back to the kitchen.  Driving past a field on the way back, we stopped to watch a Common Stonechat doing a flycatcher move by snatching bugs out of the air and returning to its perch.

The rest of the day was playing around the hotel, sitting on the porch of my bungalow and looking into the forest on the other side.  Looking forward to a long walk tomorrow in the primary forest.  I will have to get Pascal to pick up the pace some, though.

27 May – Eastward Ho! (Tana - Andasibe: a pic to follow)

On the road again.  Solofo came by the hotel after breakfast, we filled up the car, and we headed east out of the city to the rainforest and, eventually, the coast.  It was a pleasant drive, one that I’ve gotten used to here in Madagascar, of rice fields and three-story mud houses.  We eventually started down the rather high escarpment that I hadn’t realized we were on, and I could feel the temperature rise as the elevation declined.  Apparently, the central plateau rises rather sharply from the coastal areas.

Something about the area reminded me of the crinum lilies I’d seen but neglected to photograph near Ranomafana, and I mentioned that to Solofo.  He didn’t remember them but promptly pointed one out on the roadside, asking me if I meant that one.  Of course I had, so he pulled off to the side, and I got out to take a pic (and squirrel away some seeds).  We then drove on along the railroad to Andasibe National Park.

Solofo suggested a hotel run by an ethnic Chinese family, and I liked it.  My little bungalow was far at the end of the compound, staring into the side of a mountain just across a river.  Of course, there was practically no one there, and I loved it.  No internet, but electricity with hot water and a toilet.  My quarters here reminded me a lot of the bungalow/tents we stayed in in Kenya.

I had a good lunch in the cavernous restaurant and took a nap.  After I roused about 3:30, we went to the park visitor center to check out the displays and meet tomorrow’s guide – a friend of Solof’s named Pascal.  He seemed pretty on-the-ball, so we planned to meet at the awful hour of 7 am tomorrow.

26 May – Leapin’ Lemurs (Tana: pics to follow when I have faster internet)

I had Solof come by today so I could get out of town and see a few of the sights.  We didn’t start early, but our first stop was just in town, the zoo and botanical garden (Tsimbazaza).  This city has many great features that would be world class if they had just a little maintenance, and I’d put this at the top of the list.

I didn’t expect much of the zoo itself since I’ve seen zoos in developing countries before, and I wasn’t far off the mark.  Some of the cages were very well-maintained, but most weren’t.  Custodians were chasing a rat around one of the bird cages, and all the vitrine displays at the herp house badly needed washing.  That notwithstanding, the zoo is probably the only chance I’ll have to see a fosa, and I’m glad I did.  I think I was told that the fosa is the only carnivore on the island, and it’s an interesting creature.  It’s the size of a medium dog but somewhat catlike in shape, long, sleek and muscular.  One fosa was ok in its cage, but another was pacing up and down the side with a worrisome dementia intensity.

The other interesting animal was the mouse lemur.  In a day with a certain amount of cute in it for me, this little creature was near the top of the list.  How did George Lucas miss this when he was coming up with cute little animals for Star Wars?  I saw this little guy in the night house (they’re nocturnal) ambling up a stick.  The mouse lemur is a true lemur, somewhat similar to a monkey…but it would easily fit in the palm of your hand.  It really is the size of a field mouse, but it has four legs, the legs have hands with fingers at the end of them, there’s a tail, and it has the cutest little lemur face with big eyes.  I didn’t take a picture because I didn’t want too blind it, but it has to be one of the neatest little animals going.

From there, I strolled around the other caged lemurs before heading over to a lake with big, open islands in it that had lemur troops on them.  Lemurs can’t swim, so the island lets them wander, climb and play without risk of escape.  It’s a fine alternative to the cages.

Which calls to mind the overall park plan.  I was constantly thinking of the big botanical garden at Entebbe, Uganda while I was here because this park has several large lakes and some constructed habitats that maintain the appropriate animals.  In the center of the park, for example, there’s a heronry that has several species of day and night herons happily roosting.  As you walk through the big area, you see big bamboo stands, big papyrus stands, huge elephant ear plants up to 15’ tall and even a little pine forest.  Tsimbazaza is really a beautiful getaway from the congestion and fumes of Tana.  I wish it could be maintained a bit better – it’s a jewel in the rough.

From here, we drove out of town to visit another site, the Lemurs Park.  And again, my expectations were exceeded.  This is a smallish private park that has an educational function as well as one of rehabilitating rescued lemurs.  The park has ten different types of lemurs, and each lives in an area designed for its needs.  I had a long view of a mongoose lemur, an animal I’m unlikely to see in the wild, and there were lots of views of other types.  Of all these, though, it was the Verreaux’s Sifaka  that got my attention.

One of the distinctive aspects of a sifaka is that it can’t walk – something to do with the hip.  So if a sifaka is on the ground and not jumping from tree to tree, it has to jump instead of walk.  This has given them the name of “dancing lemur,” and that seems very appropriate.  One of the first sifakas I saw leapt to the ground and jumped off to another tree.

The one that got me, though, was a bored one-year-old who was just dying to play with someone, and when I walked up, he decided it was going to be me.  I was taking advantage of the very tired parents to get a good sifaka photo when the little one came jumping at me and almost scared me to death.  I was having flashbacks to monkey assaults in Zambia and India and to gorilla completion in Uganda.  Of course I jumped, and when I did so, we bonded.  Every time I tried to get a picture of the active little guy, he’d run at the camera or he’d run up and grab my pants leg.  The park guide was about to hit the ground laughing.  She was supposed to keep me from playing with the juvenile, but it was just too funny watching him tag me and expect me to chase him and then to watch him do the same thing again.  And he didn’t want to play with Solof or the guide; it was me.  What a cute and funny animal.

  We went on a little way further and came to the turtle enclosure where the park had three of the four endangered Madagascar turtles.  I’d seen the radial turtle at other sites, but the great thing here is that there were some really small babies.  We watched for a while as a baby who’d fallen into tiny basin of water worked to get out.  The poor thing would get about 49.9% out but fall back in every time with its legs waving.  Solof was for an immediate extraction, but the guide told us to wait.  Sure enough, it got out on its own.

We then headed back into Tana, where Solof invited me to stop by his place.  I went, and I had a fine visit with his wife.  They make banana chips when Solof isn’t doing the tour thing, so we had some of their chips and some beer.  DELICIOUS!  I’m bringing a big bag home.

Walked to the Sakamanga afterwards though the Av de la Independence and caved for the night.

25 May—Vanilla Day (Tana)

Took a down day today to just hang around, read, and watch CNN International on my TV.  My room is spacious, tasteful and comfortable.  I met Solofo (who got to town about the same time I did) to talk about the next part of the trip, but that was about all the vacation-y stuff I did.

Well, except for dinner.  Decided to live dangerously and try chicken breast with vanilla sauce since Madagascar produces so much vanilla.  I learned somewhere here that vanilla actually comes from an orchid and isn’t native here but thrives.  In any case, I thought I’d see what it does to chicken sauce.

The answer is that it makes chicken taste like meat dessert.  And the taste infects everything.  I had a dry white wine with the meal, and though there might have been other elements in its bouquet, I certainly couldn’t taste them; it tasted like vanilla.  I even ordered my fav dessert – crème brule – and IT tasted like vanilla.  Lesson learned.

24 May – Monsters (Tuléar)

This is such a great country full of one-of-a-kind stuff.  I had a late, slow, big breakfast in the garden of Chez Alain and then went to see more uniquity.

I have to thank Totsie for this one because she and Winn were in town the weekend I left and she asked me to take a photo of a coelacanth for her while I was here.  A coelacanth is a really primitive, mostly fish animal presumed extinct and known only from fossils until some fishermen off the coast of Madagascar pulled one up several years ago.  Turns out that one’s here in Tuléar, so I got in the littlest Renault an American could fit into and crossed town to the Musée de la Mer to see it. 

In fact, the ride itself was fun with a perky little driver playing reggae and afrobeat music though an mp3 player hanging out of the cigarette lighter while shifting gears every 5-15 seconds because of all the pousse-pousses (hand-pulled rickshaws).  He didn’t speak a lot of French, but what he lacked in grammar and vocabulary he made up for in personality and volume.

When we got to the Musée, I discovered that it wasn’t what I expected but what I should have expected.  There was a kinda cool whale skeleton outside, and as I went in the door, I was greeted by a friendly woman manning the ever-present ticket counter.  Five bucks.  The museum looks like it might have been a fish-processing location at one point: a large rectangular room with an inner rectangular room outfitted with built-in cement tables covered with white tile.  As part of the museum-ification of the fish abattoir, they had moved in big, hardwood shelves that were filled with specimens in bottles of formaldehyde along with some display case for dry specimens.  Of course, Lou would have swooned at seeing this place.

There were a lot of lumpy, wavy, crusty things in the jars and display cases, and they didn’t mean much to me.  Nor, for that matter, did the signs, which I wouldn’t have understood even if they’d been in English.  The back hall, though, had some stuff I recognized like big, ugly fish and some very specimen-ized birds.

The crown jewel coelacanth was locked in the inner sanctum, and the minder opened the door for me and even let me take some photos in exchange for a tip.  I’d expected the coelacanth to be in formaldehyde, so I was surprised to find that there were not one but several specimens on view there.  In the last few years, researchers have pulled more coelacanths up, freeze-dried them and put them on display, so I saw 3-4 specimens, though I still liked the formaldehyde one the most. 

And I learned several cool things about them.  For one, they have primitive lungs.  For another, though they use egg reproduction like fish, they carry their young.  And if you don’t believe this, you can see a couple of coelacanth babies in formaldehyde right there, babies that were removed from a pregnant female who was caught.

Thanks for putting me on to this, Totsie!

The rest of the day was just travel details.  Hung around the hotel til the reggae Renault guy picked me up and dropped me off at the airport for the flight to Tana.  Wow!  Where did all those tourists come from? 

The flight was, er, unusual.  For one, there are no seat reservations, a fact that some of the German visitors didn’t seem to be able to understand.  I didn’t get it either until I got to the back of the plane (my boarding pass listed the last row as my seat) and the flight attendant told me to sit wherever.  So I sat down beside something I’d never seen before: a stretcher set across the window seats of three rows with a very ill man on it and a very distraught wife beside.  We soon found the intercom didn’t work, so for the safety instructions, a steward walked up and down the aisle waving the paper from the seat back with the emergency and safety procedures.  The flight went just fine, but I was a little surprised that the seat belt sign didn’t come on when we hit some pretty substantial turbulence; I had visions of the pilot struggling to control the aircraft and so not being able to alert us in the back.  I was also glad that the ill gentleman had been secured to his stretcher.

Arrival was fine, and I was back at the Sakamanga pretty quickly.

23 May – Lunch at Paradise (Tuléar - Ifaty)

This was the day that Solof headed back to Tana and I dealt with details and learned to vacation with no car.  Our first stop was the bank, where I was quickly served and changed more $$$, and then I went over to Air Mad to reconfirm tomorrow’s flight.  That took two minutes.  Why aren’t things always this simple?  We then had to extend Solof’s car insurance as the owner of the car hadn’t done it and Solof had to buy his way out of the roadblock that caught that.  I watched some children dancing in front of a little music shop while Solof did the insurance thing.

I had the hotel hire me a 4WD car for a trip to Ifaty and the Reniala Preserve which is just north of it.  I had a friendly, toothy driver who showed up promptly, and we headed up the state road.  Not much of a road.  In fact, it was so bad that most vehicles drove beside it in the dust when they could because the dust was softer than negotiating all the potholes and kicked up rocks.

I had the driver stop at the Paradise Hotel just south of Ifaty since I’d read it was pretty swank and wanted to see it.  Why not lunch there?  And it was swank, for sure.  The road was hot, but when I walked into the hotel, it was immediately cool because of all the thatch and the high roof, so I installed myself on the veranda overlooking the Indian Ocean and watched the boats of fishermen at their work with waves breaking on the reef a ways off-shore.  Talk about an idyllic setting.

Lunch wasn’t bad either.  I felt safe ordering seafood here by the ocean, so I got grilled shrimp.  What feast…and a feast of the eye.  The presentation was immaculate, and the shrimp weren’t half bad either with their slightly grilled taste.  And I’m not much of a dessert hound, but I wanted to linger, so I also ordered an île flottante, a little meringue floating in some custard.  The custard didn’t have the best taste in the world, and I was half done and feeling somewhat iffy about it when I discovered a little roach leg in it.  Oooof!  That was that for the île flottante (which, nevertheless, looked fab).

So much for luxury.  I headed back out into the heat with the sound of the poor cook being fried in the background and profuse apologies from the staff, who offered to comp my whole meal.  Next stop was the Reniala Preserve – another spiny forest, but a real forest that had been protected as opposed to one that had been reconstructed for the specific purpose of collecting species like the arboretum had been.

And this visit was very worth the effort, too.  In this preserve, there were the same 25’-30’ cacti I’d seen earlier, but they were even bigger here.  And in this environment, they were in the context of the huge trees that develop big water-storage trunks: the baobab, a type of flame tree, and another tree.  My helpful guide here gave me a lot of details.

For example, I had no idea that there were some eight species of baobab – I thought there was only one.  But I guess I can be forgiven because, of the eight, six are only found here in Madagascar.  And my erstwhile guide tried to get me to learn the difference between the three main, large-trunk trees here, but I kept flunking the test.  It seems that one tapers at the bottom like a carrot….and I have no idea about the other two.  Honestly, they mostly all look like baobabs to me.

The forest is absolutely wonderful, though.  The giant cactus trees stretch up toward the sky and lean in the direction of the wind, and the large baobabs just thrust directly up toward the sky.  These two majestic forms create the upper story of the forest and leave the understory to shrubs, euphorbia and dry forest birds.  It was a great experience to be in this environment.

As it was starting to get dark and people don’t travel the roads at night in this part of the country, my driver wanted to head back to Tuléar, so I packed it in, and we started back.  People everywhere were doing the same, including the fishermen who were coming back to shore after their afternoon efforts.  And it was then back to Chez Alain and the great garden.

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!