The red island: 7 weeks in Madagascar ... in photos.

See what I've been seeing.

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Tenrecs, dogs and walking adventures

Today I found a tenrec. What the hell is that, you might ask. It's just like a little hedgehog. In fact this little guy is named, funnily enough, a hedgehog tenrec. Poor thing, it was curled up on the grass, in the sun, after the hotel's dog brought it over. It really didn't look very healthy. Neither would you if you were normally sleeping all day. I went and hid him in the bushes, hoping he'd escape the clutches of those curious canines for a while.

One of them turned out to be a very good travelling companion (well mostly, when she wasn't hassling the island's other canine inhabitants) for our walk around the island. The three of us set off reasonably early this morning, headed north and then out across the island toward the east coast. We'd walked for 2 1/2 hours and attempted a bit of tyre rolling before feeling a bit like we had no idea where we were ... which was actually true. So we tried to find someone to point us in the right direction - how the hell do we actually get to the east coast?! We could see it but we were skirting it, and knew there was a lagoon to negotiate if we wanted to swim...

I fortunately came across a lovely old gentleman who was a headmaster at the local school, and could speak both French and English, so we got along fine. He suggested that further down the road was the Paradis d'Ampanihy, where we found some great hospitality and the 'specialite du Chef': Poisson avec Saus Coco. WIN.

Enroute to the mangroves after lunch, we discovered what a vanilla plant looks like. It's actually a liana, a rainforest plant that's classified as an orchid, but looks like a vine; the locals boil the pods up and then set them in the sun for three weeks to dry out and blacken. All I wanted to know was who discovered that then?! Unfortunately vanilla season isn't til September. boo. But vanilla is one of Madagascar's biggest exports, and while every mug on the street wants to sell you some, it's hard to know what's fresh and the best value. We keep asking different people to find out! And in fact, I don't even know if I can bring it into Australia or not. Quarantine is really strict on the importation of any type of plant material. But I like the idea of making my own rhum arrange - vanilla flavour - and knocking the socks off my housemates in Sydney.

Random holiday reading...

Ahhh, I got around to spot (or ten) or reading on Ile Saint-Marie, and having read all the books that we both brought with us, I did find myself a big fat book by an author I would normally baulk at - Marian Keyes and her self-obsessed, girly, relationship-focussed rubbish - but to her credit the book seems fun so far, and I must admit I enjoyed it in the end.

But what treasures a hotel's bookshelf can hold. I came across a rather interesting book called "Les Apparitions d'Humanoids: 202 recontres du 3eme type, 26 Portraits-Robots". RANDOM! Its full of kids'-style drawings of UFOs, aliens, maps of alien sightings in France and other strange bits of information. Eric Zurcher, author, must be an interesting fellow, and possibly a man-child, given his drawings.

The cover even says "COLLECTION Connaissance de l'etrange."

Something for all you UFO-obsessed strange people out there.

Six days in beautiful Ile Saint-Marie

Our final Madagascan destination, Ile Saint-Marie, and the hotel in which we planted ourselves, did not disappoint. The island is a beautiful place, wit ha small population, green, lush vegetation and beautiful palm-fringed beaches. I'm sitting here by the bay sheltering Hotel La Crique, the sound of the calm ocean lapping at the shore, birds singing in the trees, four gay French and Malagasy men frolicking in the shallows (ooh delete that part, it's ruining my description!), the sun slowly making its way down to the horizon. A short swim out to the various rocks scattered in the bay revealed sea urchins on the sea floor and some beauitful, small, neighbouring bays to explore by snorkel tomorrow. Aaaahhh, paradise found. And we still have five more days of it. I might need to find another book to read.

 

 We've never been at a loss for things to do in our little slice of paradise. Lots of swimming and snorkelling in the beautiful bay on which La Crique is situated. On the northern end of the bay there are many huge slabs of rock underwater, harbouring the hardy corals that grow on it; and between the rocks protruding out near the shore, beautiful black and white sea stars wave their arms in hope of catching some passing food at low tide. The southern end, and around into the next gorgeous bay (from where the sunset is even more beautiful) the snorkelling is the most amazing.

I think in the past it would have been a lot more so, as it seems that the marine life is in recovery mode, with quite a lot of dead coral scattered around the sea bed. The typhoons - especially the major ones in 08-09 - probably did quite a lot of damage. Still, there are many beautiful coral communities growing here on the large rocks that seem to have been planted randomly in the bay by a giant hand. Quite a few beautiful fish inhabit this underwater world, including some peculiar lobster-like creatures, mostly green with a piercing stare as they glare up at you with their Chinese-New-Year-dragon faces and try to wave their 'swimmers' at you - har har, no claws! Yeah, you better run, you little bugger, you'd taste good.

We hired a couple of mountain bikes one morning and rode the 15km to the main town, Ambodifotatra, for a look around. the town has a nice feel to it, well spread out around the harbour, and more to it than you realise. I also got the feeling that it - and the island generally - are quite wealthy compared to many other parts of Madagascar. I guess its not surpirsing given a lot of wealth flows here from the main economic activity - us spending money! But in the interior are apparently a lot of rice and cassava farms, and I think for those on the land (or fishermen, for that matter), life is still pretty difficult.

We spent the afternoon cruising round on our bikes, across the causeway which provides access over Baie des Forbans, the check out the now defunct and terribly small (and possibly quite inadquate in its time) lighthouse. Gold. Why not hang your washing out on the lighthouse.

Then we went on to our #1 destination.

 

Ile Sainte-Marie is part of Madagascar's 'Pirate Coast' (also known better as the Vanilla Coast) and it is said that there was much pirate activity here in the past, with many buried here in this picturesque location. Despite the stories of our guide, who was quite indignant at having to be our guide after we turned up, paid for a guide but none materialised!, there is no evidence that any of the stories are true, nor that any of the graves actually did belong to pirates.

I was happy to believe that they do, though. Especially the grave with the skull and crossbones on it, the grave apparently belonging to William Kidd, and the female pirate's grave, my favourite. Not only were the pirates Malagasy, but French and English pirates also got in on the act, and some of them even pilfered local people to sell as slaves, or to take as wives (though the latter never did the former crime!).

 

Funnily enough there was a long, steel 'gangplank' whose rusted, narrow length had to be navigated before reaching the actual cemetery, from where we could also see the 'pirate island' where they used to hide out after docking their boats. Arrrr!

We also checked out the cemetery for normal people, at the rear of the Catholic church, with its interesting Muslim and chinese sections (where evyerone is named Chang Khan) before heading off on a long, bumpy, circuitous ride across to hte eastern side of the island, passing through small villages, stopping off for yummy cold yoghurt to cool us down. This road definitely wasn't cut out for bicycles. Luckily - and first time for everything - our bikes were good quality, with working brakes AND gears. Woah! It made it easy to conquer the hilly ride home, which was tough after a long day's riding, but even tougher in the dark with no lights... neither on the bikes themselves or on the street. We managed to make it back without riding into any ditches. Nice one.

The countryside of Ile Saint-Marie

Ile Saint-Marie's countryside is quite similar to the rest of Madagascar; most of - actually no pretty much all - of its native forests are gone, and are now replaced by introduced trees. Interestingly the eucalypt and pine plantations of the 'mainland' are nowhere to be seen. Instead, three other trees dominate the hillsides:

1. the symbolic Ravinala, the travellers' palm, which seems to grow incredibly quickly after the forest has been decimated.

2. a silver-green feathery tree that looks very much like a silky oak or grevillea, apparently with white flowers - its everywhere, and I don't know if it was planted for firewood, but it sure has taken over the joint.

3. Again, interestingly, another Australian import: the paperbark. This tree is grown for its medicinal properties, and I was very surpirsed to recognise it here.

I'm finding it increasingly distrubing that so many foreign species have been introduced here, at the expense of replanting native forest. In many places on the mainland there have been no attempts to reforest at all, the bare hillsides glaring down at you as you chug along in your taxi brousse. The zebu may like it, but I rarely saw any of them up there. I just don't understand it. The results are spectacularly destructive in other ways ... oh the landslides! The gully erosion! It's like the earth has opened up raw wounds as a cry for help. It really makes me feel sad.

But here on our sheltered little piece of paradise its easy to leave all that behind. 

 

Traipsing around Tamatave ... and escape to Mahambo

After running the gauntlet of pousse-pousse drivers on arrival and jumping through muddy puddles to reach our hotel in Tamatave, we set off to explore the port town, heading straight for the beach; and it was indeed the port that we found first! It was pretty hard to miss. The beautiful beachfront promenade was packed with Sunday afternoon revellers, playing soccer, drinking beers under the tents erected for the weekend, riding the merry-go-round, playing sideshow games and ordering food from the wandering women and children balancing trays carefully aloft. It was a great atmosphere to enjoy a few THB beers as the sun went down and the ever-looming port slowly illuminated the shoreline with its bright lights.

Dinner at a nearby restaurant immediately alerted us to the fact that Tamatave, like Morondava and Toliara, was home to a number of ageing French men with white hair, beer guts and inappropriate clothing, either already together with, or trying to pick up, beautiful Malagasy women - many of them over twice their age. Sadly many Malagasy women attempt to take advantage of this fact, wearing extremely tight and revealing clothing in order to attract their attention. Most of htem can pull it off, but the odd one ... no. sorry love. We were consoled by the fact that the food was really good and for once, cholocalte mousse was both on the menu and available!

The next day we booked our onward travel to Ile Saint Marie via the little beachside hamlet of Mahambo. I was more than happy to be getting out of there, as while this large, seaside town provided us with the opportunity to use banks, develop photos and book flights back to Tana, it was just another city. Insert Paul Kelly quote HERE. Still, getting ourselves organised involved wandering around and getting lost (oops I mean seeing the sights), and its central, wide, palm-lined boulevards and most facilities left me with the feeling that it wouldn't be too bad a place to live - provided you could put up with the seediness of the place and the regular influx of lusty sailors!

... some of the fabulous street art advertising in Tamatave

I was even happier to have left Tamatave when we eventually set foot on the golden sands of Mahambo Beach. It had taken a few hours by taxi-brousse and a 2km walk from the main road with heavy packs - but it was definitely worth it. The only word I could think of was ... SCORE! The village was small and quiet, and while it obviously attracted a number of visitors, judging by the hotels and restuarants scattered along the dirt road, it was not yet high season in Madagascar (and since the political problems and typhoons in 08-09 led to a dearth of visitors) and we were two of a total of around ten vazaha in the place, most of whom stayed in their fancy pants hotel at the other end of the beach.

Our bunglaow was (almost) right on the beach, and we spent our time in Mahambo lounging around, swimming, enjoying local delicious seafood, nice long beach walks, reading books and hanging out with  local tourists. I love being able to order barbeque fish, have it delivered to your door, and eat it by candlelight. Why is it that we only do these things on holidays?! We tried to perfect our time in Mahambo even further by throwing in a G&T at said fancy-pants hotel - but our expensive taste in gin (well, in our defence, they for once had Blue Sapphire!) did leave a sour taste in our mouths when we received the bill (almost the same price as our bungalow for the night! d'oh!). At least we had the absurd-sound-making black and white-ruffed lemurs to keep us entertained; the hotel had two pet ones that leapt around in the palm trees. They're rather big 'cats'!

But lounging around on the beautiful beach had to end ... mainly because we wanted to go and lounge around on another beautiful beach. So we set off to meet the Cap St. Marie bus that would whisk us to the ferry landing at Sanoeira-Ivongo. Ater two police checks (in case our ferry sank, I guess) we boarded the boat and glided over to the beautiful Ile Saint-Marie, aka Nosy Boraha.

Indri-spotting in Andasibe-Mantadia

Our reason for coming to Andasibe village was simple: we wanted to see Madagascar's largest lemur, the Indri. Parc National d'Andasibe-Mantadia is the last remaining park in Madagascar that is home to this beautiful creature. The reserve that we could easily visit, Reserve Speciale d'Analamazaotra (what the?!) is only small, at 810 hectares, and is a pocked of forest separated from the Park which is 13km away but almost 13,000ha in size. But a four hour walk through the reserve's secondary forest (the only primary rainforest left in the east of the island is in the National Park) gave us the opportunity to see the large and very beautiful black and white Indri leaping around up in the trees, sometimes coming down lower, allowing us to see them at a reasonably close distance. The most hauntingly beautiful and incredible sound that I have heard in a long time came in the form o the Indris calling across the treetops to other family groups, both identifying their locations and warning the other Indris to keep out of their territory. The calling went on for about ten minutes, the males with their lower pitched calls and the higher pitched calls of the females.

During our misty early morning walk, we also saw other lemur species; the beautiful golden, white and brown Diademed Sifaka, with its black face and bright eyes, not to mention a snow-white tail (interestingly, the Indri have no tails, only a patch of triangular-shaped fur and a patch where it seems someone has removed it!); and the Eastern Woolly Lemur, a nocturnal species, three individuals huddled together, the baby and its mother peering down at us with their big brown eyes, while they tried to sleep (stupid noisy tourists!). We also came across numerous bird, insect and interesting medicinal plant species on our walk, as well as some chameleons - including the largest one I've seen here - right at the park entrance!

A night walk also provided us with the opporutnity to see two other nocturnal lemur species - the elusive mouse lemurs, their tiny eyes glowing red at us in the torchlight as they peered out at us from the roadside vegetation. No night walks are allowed in National Parks since a 2008 directive from Madagascar National Parks, stating that they were too disruptive to the flora and fauna. I couldn't agree more... and therefore night walks are always along the road, on the park boundaries. The Hotel Feoriny Ala - "Song of the forest" - was also set up on the park's boundary and in the morning you can hear the Indri calling across the forest to each other. Nice.

We wanted to go walking in Parc Natinal d'Andasibe-Mantadia, but its quite a distance from Andasibe and there is no public tranpsort to the Park; you need your own vehicle. Plus the Park closes at 4pm each day, apparently meaning that there are no multi-day hikes permitted at this stage. This is a real pity, as its the largest and least touristed area of remnant forest in this area, and it would have been a beatiful place to visit. The relatively new parks system in Madagascar still has a long way to go - but it's off to a good start.

Still, we had our eyes on Ile Saint Marie - a beautiful island resembling a mildly pregnat woman sleeping! - to spend the last few days of our time on this island, preferably lying on the beach, cocktail in hand. First though, we had to make our way to Toamasina, or Tamatave as its also known, on the est coast.