Notes from the big island

---

So here we are. Mango town. We have never seen so many mangoes in one place. Ever. On the trees, strewn all over the floor. Mangoes are eaten for breakfast & lunch, the after-school game was throwing mangoes at the mango tree and eating the fallen mangoes and dinner was.... Mangoes! Raay! Inevitably it stank of fermenting fruit. The local bin men were obviously on strike or something.

Following the river trip, the second half of the tour was a visit to the Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park in western Madagascar. The journey there was quite nice - initially driving along tracks past paddy fields, then lunch and a river ferry at Belo Tsribinha - Eric had to get out of the "ferry" and help push it across the river, much to the amusement of the locals onboard - unfortunately he jumped into the river with his camera and cigarettes still in his pocket. Then after another stretch of white-knuckle Landy driving down pot-holed muddy roads, our driver got us to our next stop. Bekopaka is the small village that is the base for exploring the Tsingy. It's also the second river "ferry" crossing - the ferry's just a floating platform you drive your car onto, then they motor across the river. Bekopaka is a kind of run-down, ramshackle Madagascan version of Butlins made out of bamboo. We were there before the approaching bad weather at the end of the season but the place already looked like the cyclones had been and gone. Certainly all the other tourists had been and gone.

After we had cleared away the rotting mangoes and mango stones we pitched our tent under a bamboo lean-to. Any Insectologists would have had an absolute field day figuring out what multi-legged things had created all of the tracks and trails and holes that appeared and disappeared from nowhere all over the sandy floor of the banda. Thank god for ground sheets. This would be our home for the next couple of nights. Down the road were some "showers" - oil drums filled with red-brown river water, equipped with plastic cup for pouring and home to various creepy-crawlies.

Our first excursion was to the Grand Tsingy. Accompanied by one of the driver's many girlfriends. As we headed off with our guide, driver and girlfriend stayed behind at the car to "catch up".

Tsingy is a bit of a Madagascan speciality, the name of which comes from the Malagasy "Tsingy Tsingy" which we think means pointy (depending on which guide you talk to you get a different translation. it might also mean tip-toes which would be how you would walk on it). You can find it in other places around the world but its abundance on Madagascar makes it one of the main attractions for visitors. Tsingy is limestone karst that has been exposed to the elements for millions of years and has been eroded into spectacular layered spikey formations. It's really hard to describe. And there's acres of the stuff. Criss-crossed with cracks and crevasses, and varying in height from a few metres to a few tens of metres. You negotiate a route up through the gorges onto a narrow path made from the broken tops of the formations. The plant life on the Tsingy is as bizarrely shaped and amazing as the rock formations, and birds, lizards, and the fantastically patterned Golden Orb Web Spiders occupy the nooks and crannies of the spiky labyrinth. It looks like a giant, spikey and very exotic rockery.

For the tour of the Grand Tsingy you need to wear a harness as some of the route is quite precipitous and you really wouldn't want to fall off. The tour starts by taking you up a crevasse (ooh err missus) and then you clamber up some roped routes and over a couple of cabled bridges up onto the top. From there you get an amazing idea of the scale of the Tsingy, like a sprawling citadel in miniature, and a closer look at the prehistoric vegetation growing in the crevices of the rock. Grumpy faced rollers attempted to warn us off their turf by repeatedly dive-bombing the group and parakeets made very verbal flybys over us.

Later that afternoon we visited the Petite Tsingy which is right next to the bamboo village and gives you a walk-through of the ground level caves and grottos carved out by millions of years of water etching its way down through the rock. The small Tsingy is more varied in appearance compared to the Grand Tsingy, and the vegetation on top much more dense, the enormous roots of fig trees curving their way down the contours of the walls from the plateau above. The path leads you through a real labyrinth, up and down and through gaps in the spiky rock, past pools of brackish water and lizards peering out from their hidey-holes. Not to mention the huge horror-film style spider webs strung across the path, complete with huge horror-film style spiders waiting in the middle at about face height.

When we had finished we took our guide for a beer in the nearby town, a tiny bright almost flourescent lime green chameleon crossing the road infront of us on the way there. As happened all of the way through Africa, we briefly became the talk of the town and lots of the local kids came out to have a look as we sat having a beer. Invariably the conversation veered towards education and healthcare, with us trying to find out a bit about what life is like in such a small and relatively inaccessible town. His son (who as far as we could tell was called 'building' - I think something may have been lost in translation - Batiment in French), was in school and wanted to be an engineer. Isabelle asked him if HIV was a problem in Madagascar to which he replied "No, no, we don't have AIDs here." then paused for a second and said "What does it look like?". Holy Moly. Our sex mad driver was gearing up to be a one man plague.

We had to get back for dinner, so we set off back to the camp and were briefly serenaded by a group of schoolchildren coming home from the days' lessons, singing beautifully as they passed us in the dark. We had come to realise that although it seemed Naina (our guide) was doing all the cooking on the river trip, he was actually just doing all the preparation for the boat guys to do the cooking. So when we said goodbye to the boat guys and headed off over here to the Tsingy with only Naina, we also said goodbye to half decent food for the rest of the trip. Naina seemed to have a bit of a funny turn that evening and made us a slap up dinner of potato, pasta and rice with no sauce. Yum. For himself, he had prepared a Spaghetti Bolognese, which he proceded to eat in front of us and our carb-fest. Then he gave us the next one of his "briefings". We had been with him for 5 days now and he still started it with "Thankyou for coming, I'm glad you are still with us". Still with us?!? By this point on the trip has someone normally died or got lost somewhere?!?

We were going to be leaving the village and driving towards the city of Morondava in the West. On the way we would visit the Avenue des Baobabs. It would be a long day so we needed a reasonably early start. "Tomorrow we will be getting up at 5 o'clock" he stated with authority. Woah hold on! We had gradually been getting up progressively earlier as the trip wore on seemingly for no reason whatsoever. Now none of us would mind getting up at 5 or 6 if we actually left remotely close to the time we were getting up. But every day we would end up sitting around for a couple of hours for breakfast to turn up, or boats to be packed, or mad bloke in the Landy to get back from one of his many girlfriends and pack our stuff into it. Mainly due to no planning or foresight whatsoever on behalf of our guide.

Nevertheless, we duly set our alarms for 5 and were ready with our bags packed at 5.30. We were ready to pack the bags into the Landy but the Landy driver hadn't returned from his romantic rendezvous the night before. We had breakfast of bread and honey at 6:30. So having had an hour and a bit to sort things out, you would think everything would be ready to go. Well no. Nothing could be done before breakfast, and mad bloke in the landy didn't arrive until 7:30. Finally, with car packed and ready to go, they realise the car ferry isn't ready. It isn't ready because they couldn't find the two metal ramps used to drive the car onto the ferry. The night before it had started to rain quite heavily and the river level was expected to rise. So had they moved the ramps up the bank where they would be easy to find? No. So where were they? Predictably they were buried under inches of silty river mud somewhere. So ensued an underpanted group stagger about in the muddy shallows of the river, to retrieve the two really, really heavy ramps. Which took another 45 mins.

We finally left and headed back out of the Tsingy down the dirt road. The rain the night before had made it very muddy and there were loads of amazing butterflies clustered around the edges of the muddy red puddles. There was a bit of a moment when, back at the ferry crossing in Belo Tsribinha, a rickety zebu cart carrying a precarious stack of oil drums collapsed and sent the oil drums rolling down the river bank towards us. Thomas was the hero of the day and managed to catch one before it wiped out a group of small children.

Our first stop, the Sacred Baobab, was a fairly large Baobab which was used by the locals to make offerings of cows blood, milk, Coca-Cola.... etc. Eric made an offering of a different kind... We had seen bigger Baobabs in Africa, but it was worth a couple of photos. Second stop was the 'Lovely Baobab' which sounded like something out of an episode of Father Ted. In fact they were two Baobabs which have spiralled around eachother as they've grown.

The Baobabs soon paled in terms of interest for us compared to the 'Flatid Leaf Nymphs' that Marianne nearly trod on. I challenge you to find a stranger insect on the planet. These small insects are about an inch long and covered in a white powder with black antennae and markings on their face. They have what looks like curved horns on their back which are also covered in white powder which disintegrates when touched. These freaky looking things metamorphose at some point in their life cycle into a shiny rose-pink butterfly shaped thing, which then in turn changes colour to green. Neither of us had seen anything like it. Infact we nearly didn't see them at all because they tend to all stand very still together on twigs, looking just like blossom. Honestly the weirdest looking insect any of us have ever seen. Apparently they are also called planthoppers.

Third stop was the avenue of the Baobabs. This is a section of track that passes through a large group of Baobab trees of various sizes. Impressive if you like large strangely shaped trees. You get there at sunset so the light on the baobabs and red earth does make for some nice photos, if you can dodge the other 4WDs and tourists.

Finally we finished the tour in Morondava, a town on the coast. After 8 days of camping, canoing, scrambling around rocks and eating Naina's weird and wonderful food, we were excited to be in civilisation. We ate pizza in a restaurant near the beach, and then worked our way through some of the rhum arranges in a local bar of ill repute. It actually had booths with beds in! Next day, instead of returning to Tana by road from Morondava we chose to fly to Toliara a bit further South (over land this can potentially take weeks) for some beach time.

---

Photos

Action Maz
Grand Tsingy

Erosion...
...it does weird things

On top of the Grand Tsingy
Adam, Tom WL, guide, Danger Eric, Isabel

Comments

[Alelx]

Great pictures! Thanks for your contribution for the ignorant like me. Alex

[Alelx]

Great pictures! Thanks for your contribution for the ignorant like me. Alex