Tana to Ansitabe

December 02, 2018

Tana to Ansitabe

Staying in nice hotels doesn’t always guarantee good or any wifi - so I have found out and am only back in relative cyber civilisation for the last day or so!

So the story so far……

Stew turned up from his Air France flight at 1.30am on the Friday morning, it was great to see him after 11 weeks apart. In our schedule it said that there was a later start to allow him to rest but we were on the road by 10.00am which meant by the time we had finished chatting at 3.00am he hadn’t had much rest!

The first leg of our trip in from the capital Tana to Ranomafana (via Antsirabe) and it was all by road (4x4 admittedly, no tuk-tuks for Stew). We started off and went through Tana, the city has grown in the last 13 years since we last came and so has the poverty and pollution. We witnessed the poverty first hand watching people rummaging through rubbish tips to find anything to eat or to sell, it is so so sad. The rubbish dumps were the source of the plague that hit Tana and surrounding areas the year before killing many people and if they don’t do something to sort out the poverty and help people being able to survive the plague will continue to come back and kill many more Malagasies.

We got through the other side of Tana and found the open road which would take us to Antsirabe. This is a Hauts Plateaux Norwegian Spa town founded by Norwegian missionaries and has thermal baths in the town. The roads were fine to drive on and the scenery was lovely, although the rolling hills which were farmed to within an inch of their lives with steps of rice paddies everywhere as the farmers use every available inch of land to farm to be able to earn a living. On the road side there are people sitting with their produce waiting for trucks and cars to stop and buy their wares. They must sit for hours just waiting in the hope that someone will buy something.

One thing we did find very odd was each 20 miles or so there were a bunch of stalls on the side of the road selling things like musical instruments, toy trucks brightly painted the size of a large tonka toy and garden gnomes / virgin Mary! I’m not talking one of two stalls in each area, there were 20-30 stalls in the same area selling exactly the same wares!

After a night in Antsirabe we drove another seven hours to Ranomafana (stopping to see a marquetry display on route) through paddy fields and many villages. The differences in the villages were noticeable as we travelled through them though and brick built houses gave way to more mud and wood until there were wooden shacks only showing that the richer areas are closer to Tana and the further you go away the poorer you get.

Once in Ranomafana we started some serious animal trekking and were climbing up and down steep hills to catch glimpses of lemurs, birds, chameleons and geckos. It is hot and humid here and we were both pleased for a shower at the end of the day. There are eleven species of lemur in Ranomafana and we managed to see them all while we were there even though some of them were briefer than others!

While we were in the area we had a chance to see the Aye-aye so we travelled 2 hours away to the Kianjavato forest where they are being tracked and researched. Aye-ayes are nocturnal so we knew we were on a night walk this day what we didn’t realise was that the trek up to the nest was almost vertical in places! The problem I could see was that we would have to come down this in the dark…. The walk was about 45 mins and the mozzie cream I had put on had all but sweated away by the time I got there, I must admit that I did think about giving up on a couple of occasions. We perched on a ledge on the side of the hill which had a really steep drop by the side of it and settled down waiting for dark and it wasn’t comfortable at all. The only thing that made it better for us was seeing a black and white ruffed lemur chasing red bellies away across the canopy. Then a troop of red bellies came up and were really inquisitive why we were all sitting on a ledge and they moved around watching us for ages. There was a young one that seemed captivated by us and kept getting closer, it was magical.

Kianjavato forest is doing a similar project to the project that I was working on at Sainte Luce but on a much bigger scale, they plant 12,000 trees a week an are trying to bridge a gap between two forests so that the lemurs can move freely between the two.

Our guides were busy talking in Malagasy and then suddenly they sprung into action as they had missed that the lemurs had left the nest. One of the lads almost lost his rucksack over the edge of the ledge and I saved a load of his belongings. We watched as the mother and baby faffed around the nest and we could see the mother and baby clearly through the binoculars. Then all of a sudden they left the nest and started moving across trees, we followed much slowly as we had to negotiate the hill and clambered/teetered on ledges and steep parts of the hill and across fallen trees in the dark. We finally caught up and saw the lemurs clearly running along branches high in the trees. Aye-ayes are big lemurs and ugly and one of the most endangered primates on earth. It was such a privilege to see them in the wild and know that they are finally being protected. Excitement over we had to negotiate getting down the hill, this wasn't for the faint hearted!