Josh - Road to Toamasina

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Road to Toamasina

We left the capital city Antanarivo (Tana) fairly early in a nine passenger van and headed out to gather the troops for the District Rotary Conference in Tomasina (called Tamatave by the French but Tomasina by the Malagasy). No exaggeration, it took an hour and a half just to pick up the four Rotarians we were traveling with and get to the outskirts of Tana. Tana is located in the highlands plateau of Madagascar at about 4000 feet elevation and Tomasina is Madagascar’s major port located on the East coast.

The first few hours drive away from Tana led us through similar small hills and expansive rice patty lowlands that makes up Tana itself. This topography of highland hills and lowland rice fields is accentuated by a particular style of home construction in the roadside villages. The homes here are made with bricks cut from the rice field clay. The supports for corners, headers and rafters made with small diameter poles, and the roofs are made from thick piled rice stalks which look a lot like hay. These homes are generally only about 8x10 (or about 80 square feet).

Gradually the hills became larger and the flat valley lowlands became smaller as we climbed towards the first pass. The hilltops became more exposed granitic outcrops and less soil, eventually becoming smooth monolithic domes popping up from the countryside like gravestones. The first mountain pass lead us into another highland plateau, this one covered in eucalyptus plantations on ragged looking hillsides. The Malagasy people use charcoal as their main source of cooking fuel. The eucalyptus is grown to about four inches in diameter, harvested, turned to charcoal and distributed throughout the country. This is an incredibly labor intensive process utilizing logging by axe, carrying the poles to the roads by hand, carrying the poles on the roads by oxcart, and finally burning the eucalyptus into charcoal manually. The village homes in this highland plateau are constructed in a similar way to the homes surrounding Tana with a few major differences. The major structural components are the same concerning the rafters, doors and house corners but the walls are made with small sticks wrapping the home almost like very loose wicker. There is an inside wall of sticks and an outside wall of sticks and clay is packed in-between the two much like our fiberglass insulation packed between sheetrock. To me it is like an exoskeleton home. This process appears to be a combination of two building techniques and a product of the landscape. In this highland pass there is not very much high quality clay for bricks like in the lowlands near Tana. However, because the plateau is so high (I am guessing about 6000 ft) the homes still need insulation. The people in this region are much less dependent on rice as they are unable to grow it in the small valleys. My assumption is that they trade eucalyptus charcoal for rice.

The second mountain pass drops dramatically toward the East coast down a huge thousand foot drop. The wall of mountains trending north to south must have been a natural border for people and tribes of the past. and is now the border between two Malagasy states. The topography of the eastern side of the pass has much less exposed rock than the two plateaus before it which I suspect is due to a fault and change in geology. From the border pass to the sea the landscape slowly changes, the mountains still tall but slowly dwindling towards the coast and the ecology slowly trending into tropical. The forests became more and more dense as the humidity increased. The vegetation became more like rainforest than temperate forests. Ferns and creepers gradually appeared. Village homes began to change as well. Built a foot or two off of the ground, the walls are made from woven grasses and reeds rather than clay, and the roofs from thatched palm fronds. As they are built on small stilts they can be built on steep hillsides and are often seen high on distant mountains. Though the mountains were covered in thick jungle we began to see the major environmental degradation in Madagascar, the enormous amount of deforestation and subsequent landslides. In the few areas where the road took us high enough to see surrounding mountainsides we saw massive amounts of bright red scars dotting the landscape, each adjacent to a large area of harvested forests.

For the last stretch to Tomasina the road nears the coast but then turns northward and stays somewhat inland all the way to the city. It travels through rolling hills of thick second growth jungle. All sorts of palms, numerous types of trees, ferns, vines, and air plants grow everywhere like most tropical coastal jungles. The national tree in Madagascar is the Travellers Palm. It is a palm who’s fronds grow in a linear fan, it is a very two-dimensional tree. It stands around 40-50 feet tall, its fanlike fronds spreading out above the rest of the jungle like a billboard.

Tomasina was a very hot and humid city. Despite being Madagascar’s major port the town is very run down and dirty, mostly due to the annual cyclones which ravage the coast.

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