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

And the Rain it Raineth Every Day

So it's the rainy season here. In effect what this means is that it rains a lot, at least a few hours every day lightly and then a deluge overnight. The big storms sweep in from the East (I'm on the West coast right now), and you can sit and watch them roll in and count the shortening seconds between the lightning and thunder. The lightning is larger than any I've seen, if that even makes sense. The other thing that the rainy season signifies is a massive closure of roads, but I'll send pictures of that as I take them. Meanwhile, here are some shots of sunnier times in Sambava.

Sambava
A lot people talk a lot of things about Sambava, but I’ve got to say I enjoyed my time here. Maybe it was the empty and wave-filled beach, maybe it was the delicious ice cream from Coco Vanilla, or maybe it was having to crap sitting perpendicular to the toilet seat at my cockroach-infested (when they’re 4-inches long, 2 is an infestation) and alleyway-sequestered hotel (though probably not), but I happened to really like this town. Here’s to being “Good for Little!”








Some notes: The Ny Havana building was the headquarters for ATTR, an airline set up by the president, that went defunct around the time of my arrival. It should be noted, for those of you wondering what the president is doing with an airline, that the leader of Madagascar rose to prominence on a yogurt empire. He has since branched out to sodas, ice cream, water, and just about everything else. Vanilla Mad was a truly crazy place, with dozens of women sitting around sniffing vanilla (until their cheeks were black from being imbedded in bean-pods) for quality control. No pictures allowed within the complex. As for the rooms at Hotel Florida, I was soon to find out that one of the reasons why little attention was paid to their quality was because they’re typically only rented for two hours at a time. My biggest problem was probably the two alleyways that lead to the rooms, thereby preventing any wind from circulating into them. Still, it’s hard to complain about a place that’s only $3 a night. But the most surprising thing in town was probably the sudden Sputnik building, in Cyrillic no less, which remains a mystery to me.

Aha! Antalaha!

After the dusty road of Moaransetra, it was nice to return to city life, for, even if there was still only one road, at least it was paved. Antalaha, pronounced Antala (the last laugh, as always, is silent), is known mainly for being a vanilla-producing capitol in the country. The smell is intense and wonderful. Here are some pictures of the town (a favorite restaurant, some kids sitting at night (shot with a long exposure) on the beach, the semi-abandoned district headquarters complete with tipping-over van, and a pair of stray goats, of which there were many in the area), as well as a brief clip from a Boana Beng concert. After the show, I had a chance to meet Boana, who is very friendly and probably speaks better French than I do. He was a bit upset about the electricity problems with the equipment, but seemed pleased with the performance. I did not question him in regards the skeleton-painted man who occasionally appeared on stage to dance.

On the Road to Moaransetra, Part II

Hello Again.

Before I get into things, let me apologize for the long delay between posts. I was on a lovely sojourn in South Africa for the holiday season, and have only just returned to Madagascar. But fear not! This only means a higher backlog of pictures for you to enjoy.

Thanks for reading,

Abe

As though I didn’t remember how hard it was to arrive at Moaransetra the first time around, I decided to make the trip again, this time from a different angle. Lying to the East of town is a large peninsula called Cap Masoala, containing within it the largest forest preserve in the country as well as some of the best examples of primary (ie very old) rainforest in the world. (It should be noted that Madagascar’s environmental layout derives from its departure from the mainland in that the Eastern coastline (as well as the coral reefs lying in wait offshore) is the oldest area geologically, while the east is, relatively, younger, as well as dryer and more mountainous.) Obviously this is something I wanted to see, and so I boated down to the end of the peninsula, and, after some incredible snorkeling in a stretch called Tampolo (I mean, wow), I hiked through the rain forest (and the rain) back to Moaransetra.


The trip was long and tricky, in equal parts because of the terrain, the weather, my heavy backpack, and my general lack of hiking preparation. Still, it was beautiful, and we made it in only a couple days, with about 10 hours of hiking each day, punctuated by a couple hours in pirogue/dug-out canoe (see picture). Thus, the pictures, which I took without as much care as (and with a lot more perspiration than) usual, are perhaps not as sharp as before, but bare in their lack of precision the overwhelming exhaustion of the moment.


Some highlights include the free-flowing and thirst-quenching waterfalls, the odd insect life, sitting in the rain in a canoe with my guide, Nico, singing to me James Blount’s “You’re Beautiful,” climbing a tree to pick fresh litchis (just coming into season... everywhere!), and, at night, after finding ourselves in a local village, being invited to sleep at the mayor’s house.




We made it back in less than honorable fashion – a pirogue ride down a little gray stream with an incredibly drunk guy talking, so I was told, about needing to get his hair cut, and then a 2k sprint through the rain back to the hotel, the flashlight I was holding showing signs of its electrical nature in my palm as it got steadily wetter.

On another note, the day following my return was Thanksgiving. (Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!) Though there was no turkey to be had, I did get some good pork and rice as well as a small flair of the American, coming in the form of some pick-up basketball. Although I’m a head taller than your average Malagasy, my joints were a bit sore and so I don’t think I represented the country as well as I (and you) might have liked. Still, perhaps my performance will manage to quell the locally-held suspicion that all Americans can dunk.