Ranomafana - Isalo - Ifaty

December 06, 2018

Ranomafana - Isalo - Ifaty - Tana

We left the rain forest of Ranomafana and started the next leg of our trip going further south to Isalo national park, which is a runiforme limestone massif, towards the south west of Madagascar. The level of poverty that we had seen increasing as we left Tana and moved south continued on our way to Isalo. As the road trip was around eight hours long we had a pitstop and Anja park, this is a community run small park which has groups of ring-tailed lemurs living here (cue ‘I like to move it, move it’). It is great that the park is community run as it guarantees the involvement of the local people, the get income from it which means they won’t kill the lemurs.

This small park has around a hundred lemurs which are habituated i.e. they don’t run away if you are quiet and don’t go too close, but they are not encouraged to be fed or sit on visitors shoulders like some places in Madagascar. We had walked around the park and got to the last troop of lemurs just sitting around or walking over to each other but were generally docile, but we were not sure what happened but suddenly one of the baby lemurs started to race around like a mad thing! This encouraged the other lemurs and we were treated to about 20 minutes of the funniest tag/king of the castle nutty behaviour that we had ever seen with lemurs. It was magical and I didn’t want to come away from the performance but reluctantly had to go, but as we left the lemurs did too as if the performance was over. I said as I left that they would be back at 3pm for the next performance…..

We continued our long journey through many villages and got to a pass between west and south west Madagascar that we had to cross to get to Isalo. We had to be over the pass by 6pm as there are bandits on the roads that will rob and kill you in the dark so we were very glad we got across in time. We climbed up onto the top of the pass which was flat and nothing much can be grown on it at it has such bad soil and hardly any rainfall in the area. The Bara tribes live out here and they are zebu owners and we were told that to prove that they are man enough to get married they have to steal a zebu from someone, they have three outcomes:

1. They are successful

2. They get caught by the police and go to jail

3.They are shot by the owner

Apparently 3 has a bigger percentage chance of happening, if I were them I would stay single!

We did a guided tour of the sandstone canyon which was extremely hot and went to the Blue and Black waterfalls. We started off up the sandstone rock formations to the top of the canyon. The area is also Bara country and they bury their dead high in the rock formations and we saw some of the graves. When someone dies they put them in a temporary tomb while all the relatives are notified and then have to get to Isalo, once they are all there they bring the body back and kill zebu for a big feast have the funeral and bury them in their final resting place. When you see how high they bury them and how inaccessible the place, burials here are no mean feat!

We walked to the edge of the top to see the sandstone formations in the canyon which were as a result of the sea hundreds of years ago, but the sea doesn’t come anywhere near it now. You can see fossilisation in the sandstone but the fossils are marine things like shells, no animals. We had a look into the canyon and it was breathtaking. We were also introduced to a plant called pachypodium which is a baobab/cactus type thing which look like an elephant’s foot hence its common name. Wildlife included the poison dart frog, chameleon, sifaka, ring-tail lemurs and a tree boa which you can see from the photos was a real treat for me! The walk to the waterfalls was one of our top five beautiful places in the world, it was so picturesque.

We moved on the next day to Ifaty, which is where I stayed in Reef Doctor. The road journey was long to do the journey in one go and was broken up by another small lemur park visit (Zombitse). The villages through to Ifaty are mainly mining villages which are sapphire, ruby and gold mines. Madagascar has so much wealth under the ground but yet again it sells the rights to other countries, this time India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

I visited the guys in Reef Doctor to say hello, and show Stew my old home, and moved on to visiting the spiny forest down the road This forest is an ecoregion where the vegetation type is found on poor substrates with low, erratic winter rainfall and it houses the famous Baobab trees and various cactusy type of plants. Diurnal lemurs are not really found here but nocturnal ones like the mouse lemur are. There are birds indigenous to that region that bird watchers from around the world go to see and get very excited about and we are very ‘oh it’s a bird’ which does not impress the guides when they have risked life and limb to find them!. We spent a night and morning to see the flora and fauna and then had the rest of the day off to relax, this was our first ‘down time day’ in nine days and it was very welcome ! The next day it was time to fly back to Tana at the end of the first leg of the holiday… time is going fast!