Mad about Madagascar

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Issue 30

First-time visitors to Madagascar should prepare to be bowled over. Its forest reserves, baobab-studded plains and faraway beaches are an adventure traveller’s dream. What’s more, as Melanie McGrath discovers, its wildlife is utterly irresistible – if a little weird. This summer, Steven Spielberg’s film company, Dreamworks, releases a new animated feature about a group of African animals who wash up on Madagascar’s shores and find they can’t make head or tail of the place. It’s certainly not the Africa they know. Is it really Africa? Or some place altogether different? The truth is that Madagascar is both Africa and not-Africa. Sure, the wildlife, the culture, the people and the landscape are African, but they are also very distinctly and for the most part uniquely Madagascan too. And so, for even the most seasoned Africa traveller, there are surprises. You just won’t see anything like Madagascar anywhere else. Geologically, Madagascar is the wild child of Africa, South America and India. As part of ancient Gondwanaland, the island was once attached to all three continents and each left its genetic and evolutionary mark. History has played its part too. The first people to arrive on the island came not from Africa but from Indonesia or the Mayalan peninsula. They were still arriving from Indonesia as late as 500 years ago. Africans followed, then Arabs came to trade with them. The Brits and French rather shamefully squabbled over who owned what and the flourishing petri dish that is modern day Mada acquired several new dimensions. And when you think about it, is it so surprising that a place with three parents turned out to be a little odd?   I found a good way to sample Madagascar’s very varied offerings was to take a tour from the capital Antananarivo (most people call it Tana) to Toliara, roughly following the RN7 road. The southwestern route, as it’s called, is a Mada meze of culture, landscape and wildlife. Some of it you’ll love, some not, maybe, but you’ll get a taste of everything and you can always go back later for the main course. Tana is most definitely a fusion dish, the result of packing layers of Indonesian-style two storey brick houses onto a series of craggy hillsides, lowering it all into a puddle of emerald paddy fields and sprinkling over some French and African flavourings. It’s a bewildering city, but it soon comes into focus and after a day or two Tana reveals itself as a lively, smoky, self-confident capital with no great sights (the much-talked about Queen’s Palace may be swell in an African context, but to a European eye it looks pretty much like a Scottish railway station) but with plenty of character, a great artisans’ market and a few fine, French-inspired restaurants run for the most part by Tana’s Reunionais and Mauritian ex-pat community. The ex-colonial French influence is everywhere, from the bidets in the hotels through the gaggles of ancient Renaults backfiring their way up cobbled hills, to the ubiquitous and delicious offerings of croissants and vienoisserie at breakfast time. (I had virtually to beg to be allowed to sample Malagasy variaminanana, a delicious soupy stew of rice, meat and ginger). But it’s not really the French stuff that grabs the eyes or the imagination, it’s the intricate jigsaw puzzle of Malagasy life itself. There are eighteen tribes in Madagascar, and you are never in any doubt as to who lives where. In Tana the Merina dominate. Ask a Merina man where he’s from and like as not he’ll say Madagascar first and Indonesia or Malaysia second. This isn’t as preposterous as it sounds. Tana’s cheery pousse-pousse rickshaws, terraced rice paddies and baskets of  braying ducks call Asia to mind and the distinctive Merina architecture of two storey red brick and thatch houses with ornate wooden balconies is honestly more reminiscent of the Malaysian city of Melaka than of neighbouring Mozambique. We head south from Tana and the mix becomes more baffling still, as rice paddies give way to vineyards and terraces, meandering rivers and high-walled courtyarded brick houses and we find ourselves in sixteenth century France or Italy.   A few kilometres further south along sinuous roads we leave that behind. We’re still on Madagascar’s cool High Plateau but we’ve left Merina land and now we’re in Betsileo country where everything is subtly different. The land here is dominated by jewelbox rice paddies, laid out along the river beds and up onto deforested terraces and the view is not at all dissimilar to Vietnam. Betsileo women wear shawl-like lambas printed with improving messages (‘respect your mother and father’) and the houses are a little more modest, though elaborately decorated, in the pretty little town of Ambositra in particular, with painted wooden fret work and carved gabling. We press on, because there is so much still to see and so many winding roads to negotiate in order to see it. Further south, the landscape widens and dries, baobab trees appear and yet again we’ve mysteriously crossed borders, this time into Bara country. The air no longer smells of thickly burning wood as it has done all the way from Tana, partly because the land is more sparsely forested the further south you go and partly because so many trees have been cut in tavy (slash and burn agriculture), that there are few left to burn. The landscape here in central southern Mada is reminiscent of the Serengeti, with flat-topped acacias and long silvery grass. There’s the same apparent emptiness, too. Towards the end of the afternoon, we pass twenty men grouped around a body wrapped in a shroud waiting, our guide tells us, for five o’clock, after which, in Bara culture, it’s safe to bury a body. The Merina regularly exhume their dead, wash the bones and wrap them in new cloth and the Bara go in for bone washing and fancy tombs too. In other ways, though, the two tribes are very different (the Bara, for example, have a reputation as fierce zebu rustlers) but neither are any more or less Malagasy. Each has its place in the island’s jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps the most exciting thing about Madagascar right now is that new pieces in the jigsaw are still being found. Just off the RN7, still in Bara country, lies Ranomafana National Park, which was created in 1991 in response to the discovery there in 1986 of a new lemur species, the golden bamboo lemur. To reach the park, we cut through dry highland vegetation to a spectacular oasis of mid-altitude rainforest and the sudden jangle of green isn’t just a relief, it’s also a shocking reminder of how much deforestation we’ve witnessed on the drive across the High Plateau. There are twelve species of lemur living at Ranomafana and our guide Jean-Claude has seen all of them bar the elusive nocturnal aye-aye. To get to the forest proper, we have to cross a well-made bridge across the Namorona river and proceed through muddy paths into the forest. Not ten minutes in, we come across three Milne-Edwards sifakas eating flower petals. A little further, a party of grey bamboo lemurs sleeps in the trees in plain view. Lemurs seem remarkably relaxed around human beings, but these are relatively habituated. They’ll happily sit in a nearby tree watching you. If you haven’t gone after a few minutes, they may grunt a bit and leap off at a leisurely pace, but they won’t make a big thing about it. We, on the other hand, definitely do make a big thing about them. Aside from their outrageous cuteness, and considerable weirdness (the sifakas, in particular, look like something your dad might string together from a bottle brush, a kid’s pyjama case and the family cat) they are living fossils, hints of what we might have become if the African branch of the primate family had taken another tack instead of evolving into monkeys, apes and us. To subscribe or order this issue click here When night falls, Jean-Claude takes us out again to spot nocturnal mouse lemurs, not so difficult given the guides’ habit of rubbing bananas on a few conveniently low-slung bushes. In all honesty I found the rather tawdry setting (mouse lemurs manically licking off banana bits and squabbling for whatever might be next) rather disturbing; it seemed to me to be more of a zoological than natural experience, a confusion between wild and tame.   I later voiced my disquiet to the Technical Director of Conservation International in Madagascar, Dr Frank Hawkins. Hawkins disapproves of such heinous bribery and corruption in the national parks (and says he thinks it will cease to be the norm once the growing quotient of English speaking tourists outweighs the French and Italian speakers who, says Hawkins, take a ‘different view’ of animal viewing). But he was quick to note that the disturbance and stress caused to the few mouse lemurs who come for bananas is outweighed a hundred times by the positive impact of eco-tourism on Madagascar’s conservation efforts. Anyway, none of this altered the fact that mouse lemurs are the dinkiest, most darling creatures you’ll ever see and while tutting self-righteously at the guides I was, in fantasy anyway, busy boxing the little critters up into gift sets and sending them to my friends. One of the more fascinating things about lemurs is just how many species there are and how precisely and exactly each fits into the lemur community. Three species of bamboo lemur live at Ranomafana, each surviving on a different part of the plant. To see only one of these was still an unbelievable thrill to me. The fact that we didn’t see a golden bamboo lemur seemed rather irrelevant. From the park we head south through painted sandstone desert to Isalo. Here is yet another Madagascar, an Arizona-like terrain of pink and orange canyons dotted with blue-grey endemic satrana palms. Isalo National Park opened in 1992 to 85 visitors. Now it’s Madagascar’s most visited (which means it’s still pretty empty) and it’s not hard to see why. The park sprawls over 81,000 hectares of impressively eroded sandstone canyons and forest. The area is a great treat for birders – we saw crested coua, Madagascan kestrel, malachite kingfishers, Madagascan coucal, Madagascan red fody, the Madagascan bul-bul (locally nicknamed ‘the Italian bird’ for its propensity for non-stop chatter), a black-necked heron, the rare red-billed teal and the even rarer Benson’s rock thrush, which is endemic and confined to Isalo. The park is also a good place to see endemic pachypodium shrubs and the quaint salotse palm for which Isalo is named (I Salo means ‘there’s a salotse!’). But for me the lemurs were the thing. There are seven species in the park, including the famous ringtail. For the most part they hang out in dense forest between sandstone cliffs. Again, we weren’t disappointed. After only a thirty minute walk along the canyon bottom our guide, Tina, pointed out a family of four ringtails, a male and a female with rare twins, eating from an introduced fig tree. Not far from the ringtails, another family of white sifakas dozed in a mango. Twenty years ago, only 30 or so species of lemur had been described. Naturalists suspected there were more but had not been able to access the forest areas to locate them. Since the end of Madagascar’s unhappy experiment with ‘Christian Marxism’ another forty species have been catalogued and Dr Russell Mittermeier, President of Conservation International, says that, as an educated guess, as many as 15 to 20 remain to be found. Madagascar is almost certainly the only place in the world where there are still undiscovered primates. And what is true of the lemurs is doubly true of Madagascar’s reptiles, birds, insects and invertebrates. If you spend enough time walking in Madagascar’s forests like as not you’ll pass wildlife as yet unknown to science. Leaving Isalo on the RN7 towards Toliara we enter baobab country proper. Madagascar ‘invented’ the baobab. The only two species to live off-island, one on continental Africa and one in Australia, were both originally Malagasy. In Madagascar itself, there are six species, three in the north and three in the south. To an untrained eye they can look quite similar but after a bit of peering I soon realise it’s quite easy to distinguish between the three. They are a very important commercial tree in southern Mada and several tribes attach spiritual meaning to them too. Somehow, they even look less weird here than they do on the mainland, if only because almost everything Madagascan looks as though it got designed in a fairground mirror. A new national park has recently opened along this hot, dusty stretch of road, at Zombitse-Vohibasia. Zombitse’s guide, Flaubert Vohanson, explains that there is currently no accommodation at Zombitse but there are plans to open a lodge and like as not this will happen this year. In 2003, Madagascar’s new president, Marc Ravalomanana announced he would triple the size of Madagascar’s protected areas if he could get $50m funding to do it. Fourteen months later, $30m had already been raised and so far Ravalomanana has been true to his word.   More and bigger parks will mean more visitors. 120,000 came to Madagascar last year and the numbers are predicted to rise by 50% this year. Madagascar, it seems, has woken up. Which means the next year or two will be the perfect time to visit the island. The parks will be trailed and made more accessible, the guides will be better trained (at present many of them are self-taught and work freelance) and visitor accommodation will open in the newer or more remote parks but the numbers of visitors will still be nothing like the major parks in Kenya, Botswana or South Africa. Zombitse marks the boundary of another tribal land, that of the Mahafaly. The land folds and undulates here, and the golden grasses give out to a vegetal fuzz the colour of seal fur. Life is clearly very tough for the Mahafaly, which might be why they celebrate it on elaborately carved and painted tombs scattered along the roadside and also why, if you should stop to take a picture of one, a hundred children will instantly emerge from nowhere demanding money. The town of Toliara, on the Tropic of Capricorn, isn’t Madagascar’s prettiest and the people here, from the Mahafaly and the neighbouring Sakalava tribes, are Madagascar’s poorest. Unlike the Merina in the High Plateau, these people originated from East Africa and though there are tensions between the coastal and inland peoples, they are equally attached to the idea of being Madagascan. Toliara has a dusty, African backwater feel, but the relentless sun is relieved by the red-flowered flamboyant trees lining the roads. The market is lively and, in any case, the town is the gateway to what is probably the strangest and most mesmerising piece of the Madagascan jigsaw, the spiny forest. Forest is a misnomer. This is rather a scrubland of dead-looking sticks and thorn-covered truncheons competing for space with elephant trunk branches and pronged vegetable maces. The greatest contributors to the extraordinary grey and buff-coloured tangle are the Didiereaceae, a family of arid-area plants found only in Madagascar. Instead of storing water in swollen stems, like cacti do, these unworldly plants grow virtually naked but for the thick forest of thorns whorling round their branches and a comical offering of two or three thumbprint sized leaves sprouting apologetically somewhere near the top. Like the sifakas, they too look as though they’ve been cobbled together from a few spare parts by a rank amateur. Which is a mile from the truth. Just like the local lemurs who manage to leap between their thorns without getting pierced, the Didiereaceae are unique and magnificently adapted and I wanted to spend more time with them. Sadly, we didn’t have long in the arid spiny forest. If I’d had those ten days over I might have chosen to stay longer in one park, rather than whisk through four, then had more time perhaps for the spiny forest towards the end of the trip. But the distances in Madagascar tend to confound the best plans and we had seen so many more varied landscapes than one would witness in a week and a half on the road in most of Africa. Besides, travelling on all those windy or rickety byways is tiring and I was ready for a flake-out on a beach. Anjajavy proved just the thing. It’s hard to fault this fly-in lodge, set in the midst of its own dry deciduous forest reserve on Madagascar’s northwest coast, except that it’s not as eco-friendly as it claims to be. The two-storey beach side villas are spectacular, as they should be since it took a great many rare tropical rosewood or pallisandre trees to construct them. (Anjajavy’s owner, Dominic Prax, bought the wood from a logging concession further along the west coast, but really that’s no excuse). Still, what’s done is done, and the result is stunning. The bathrooms, the stairs, even the beds are made from the same oily wood whose smell is so heavenly that it’s hard to motivate yourself to get out onto the beach, even though there it is right in front of you, a crescent of white sand and rock overlooking the vivid, gentle waters of the Mozambique Channel. The sea is a bit tricky to access but an infinity pool serves for those who’d rather take a swim than a tumble on the rocks. Food is French. Crab and fish dominate and the daily choice is fairly limited, though delicious. Service is efficient, friendly and informal. Barefoot staff help set the atmosphere. This isn’t just another luxury beach hotel, though. Anjajavy’s owner has been sensitive to the needs of locals. Apart from creating local employment, the hotel guarantees to buy whatever fish, fruit and vegetables locals bring, the hotel bush plane occasionally doubles as a medical evacuation aircraft and the management have established constructive relations with the local village which now, thanks in part to Anjajavy, boasts a clinic and a solid school building. Anjajavy’s greatest selling point, though, is its surroundings. Enclosed on all sides by forest, the place is a haven for wildlife. On just one short boat trip out (Anjajavy runs fishing and boat and kayak trips as well as nature walks) among the islands around the peninsula, we see five of the world’s only remaining two hundred or so Madagascan fish eagles, as well as grey herons, a pair of Madagascan pratincoles, vasa parrots, lovebirds, some diamorphic egrets and so on. Oh, and yes, there are lemurs too. At four in the afternoon, several families of common browns come leaping through the trees towards the pond to drink and meet the Coquerel’s sifakas dancing along the ground nearby, and I fancy them saying to each other, “Well, so what if we’re Africa’s oddballs? We don’t care! We’re from Madagascar, after all!” Read our Madagascar Factfile To subscribe or order this issue click here

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