The Grand Canyon of Madagascar

Thus far, my voyages had been mainly in the Eastern rainforests of the country. Now, I was in the North, a far drier and more mountainous area. (Drier is a relative term. As it stands, the north gets plenty of water. However, nearly all of it (64 inches out of a total 74) falls between December and March. So in fact, the north it both the wettest (by volume) and driest (by length of arid season) place in the country.) Thus, the parks up here were more succulent and rock-formation heavy. The king of said parks is by far the one in Ankarana, just a few hours by taxi-brusse south from Diego.

I spent a couple days just outside the park (not so much a town as a store and some huts), in a lovely little bungalow that featured its own bizarre insect life. Meanwhile, the park itself was incredible, the highlight being the tsingy (rock formations) which are giant limestone peaks that have been eroded (due to the vehemence/ph of the rain and the softness of the limestone) into millions of tiny pinnacles, fields of which stretch out as far as the eye can see. The pictures don’t quite do it justice, but I’ve tried to get a few vantages up here.





There was also some great vegetation, including a little red, coral-like plant that is only found on the tsingy. Also posted is the vazah (the Malagasy equivalent of “goyim”) tree, so named because it “peels just like a vazah when it’s hot;” a couple interesting/alien succulents; some massive mangrove-y trees; and my first baobab. There are something like 11 species of baobabs on earth, and 7 of them are endemic to Madagascar.














And no park post would be complete without a few lemurs. The little “sentinel,” as my guide called him, is a nocturnal lemur called the sportive lemur (I would see many more in action a month down the road), while the active fellows (with baby) are a type of crowned lemur. I saw the couple kiss, but, when I’d taken the picture, I saw it was of a different bodily function… Other interesting finds were a bizarre bat-cave that was noisy and smelly and all-around terrifying, especially because there were human bones lying around (from a group of locals who hid out in the cave during a tribal war – they were subsequently canonized (“ “), hence the money and the rules forbidding the eating of pork and the having of sex inside the cave).










The odd-colored blue water is also from the cave, and has been there since the previous year. I also saw a few tenerecs, which are like big hedgehogs, but tastier, and nice birds.








My favorite creatures, though, were the small, white-tufted insects that I found crawling around a tree. The cockatoo-esque tuft is designed to be removed by birds of prey so that the insect will survive (its first) avian attack.

Diego… Sua-a-a-rez*

Some of you may recall how, in my planning days, I described a single road that wrapped around the entirety of the country of Madagascar. This has turned out to be untrue. Not only is there no ring-road, but the road that does exist in stretches is hardly worthy of the name. All of that being said, the next town following my northern route was the former port Diego Suarez, the 3rd largest city in Madagascar. The road from Sambava, however, runs out of pavement after about 4 hours of travel, making the other 15.5 hours feel quite long. (That’s right, the car ride was 19.5 (nineteen and a half) hours.) Now I’m no stranger to long car-rides, and even enjoy them on occasion, but it’s a different story when you’re traveling ala illegal immigrant, namely on a bench in the back of a pick-up truck with luggage where your feet should (need to) be (hence the duck-and-cover sitting position I used for a long stretch of the trip), and with 13 other people.

But enough about the means. What about the ends? Diego Suarez was the first actual city I’d been to in a while, and it was strange to suddenly see lots of cars and hotels and tourists, as well as, at times, off-putting, especially with the price of things (meals, rooms, etc) suddenly being more than a dollar. Still, the place was not without its charm, especially with its lovely views of the bay and old-style architecture. I particularly liked (and photographed) the palm-tree-ransacked space by the waterfront.

*the spelling here is meant to give the town’s name an illusion to the song Rico Suave

Let's Get Out of the City

Just outside of Sambava, in an area that locals refer to (very adamantly, it seems) as “the bowl,” lies Andapa, a small mountain-surrounded town (hence the name), and, just outside of Andapa, lies the park Anjanaharibe-Sud, and, just inside this forest preserve, lies the Takhtajania, one of the first trees to ever grow flowers. That seems like a big evolutionary step. As a testament to my high school nerdiness, I actually remember reading, in 1997, that scientists had rediscovered the Takhtajania, a 120 million year old species first found in 1904 and thought since to be extinct. 120 million years. When you think about the dates of the ice ages and of man and the fact that some people (including, perhaps, the future Republican nominee) believe the world to be 60,000 years old, that’s a long time to survive.* So I suited up the backpack and headed out. As it would turn out, the park is not so “just outside of town” as I initially thought, nor is the tree so similarly “just inside” the park. But, after 20km of hiking (all of it in mountains, the last quarter of it through pathless rainforest) I finally found the Takhtajania. At first, my response was, “This is it?” but then it became “This is it…” and finally transformed into “This is it!” Yes, the tree wasn’t flowering (rain’s been slow this year, delaying the event until January), and yes, it was small, but it was also, perhaps because of my dehydration and fatigue, somehow awe-inspiring. (Hence the amount of pictures, particularly of its millipede-style sproutings and its colorations.)
On the way down, I noticed some more pretty flowers and decided to take a few shots of the path I’d taken (for evidence of its lack of existence, note the picture of random forest and the one of the ubiquitous ferns)


as well as a little clip of a curious chameleon. Did I mention that half the chameleon species in existence worldwide are endemic to Madagascar? All told, the hike was about 10 hours, not including the 1.5 hour car ride each way with a taxi driver who liked to blare out Omega and had a cracked (passenger side) windshield.
Luckily, I had eaten a big breakfast of soupy rice and diced-up re-fried meat. Who knew the best way to heat something up was to put it in a wok full of hot oil?






*(I should add that there were other trees with the same idea, some of which are far older, for example the 300-million+ year old ginkgo tree.)




PS
There were also some kids playing dreidle in the village with halved litchi pits! Terribly cute...

AND!
If you were impressed by THIS tree (and I know you were), then you should totally check out THIS! tree, which I haven't seen in person but which my friend Suzie just told me about!
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=2008-01-16_D8U7D9100&show_article=1&cat=breaking