Hlane National Park, Swaziland
Marvellous Marojejy
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| Madagascar from 33,000 feet; not much forest cover! |
We were a bleary-eyed couple of
backpackers on the morning of Wednesday, November 16
th. Alarms hauled us from our beds cruelly at
4:30 am and 5 am found us in another decrepit taxi rattling through the
surprisingly thronged streets towards the airport. We checked in by 5:40 and sat down to await
our 8:00 am flight. We were two of the
four white faces on the flight, along with a British couple (Nic and Mandy) who
were also headed to Marojejy National Park.
The flight was quick and calm, with good views out through the dappled
clouds to the denuded hills below. As we
got closer to Sambava the cloud cover solidified and we landed in persistent
drizzle. We caught an overpriced taxi to
the Orchidea Hotel, checked in, then walked out along the surprisingly busy and
unpleasant main road to the Chez Mimi hotel in search of a man, Bruno, who allegedly
had good information on visiting Marojejy.
We hadn’t been able to contact the Malagasy National Parks to arrange a
guide or porter, and Terri was concerned.
We had a nice Chinese lunch at Mimi, but Bruno was taking a siesta and
his young assistant didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. We caught a local minitaxi back to the
supermarket, bought some food for our upcoming hike in the national park, and
then went out for a run along the beach.
It was a rough sea on a dissipative beach, so swimming wasn’t too
appealing, although I did throw myself in briefly to cool off after
running. Sambava is supposedly one of
the most prosperous towns in the country, growing rich on the vanilla trade,
but it wears its alleged wealth very discreetly. It’s full of retired Frenchmen, living with
their younger Malagasy girlfriends/wives; it looks like a pretty dull town to
retire in, but to each his own. I sat in
the bar of the Orchidea sorting photos and writing up my diary over steak
frites before we retired early to a rainy night.
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| First view of Marojejy from the trail |
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| Beautiful lizard |
We slept well, lulled by the roar
of the surf, and by 6:40 the next morning we were in a local taxi to the
taxi-brousse stand. It was an uncommonly
uncomfortable ride to the park, crammed into the back row of seats which had barely
enough legroom for a double amputee; my legs stuck sideways out into the aisle,
which was fine at first but then as more and more passengers were picked up it
became a game of Twister to weave my legs around those of the extra passengers. Luckily it was a fast ride on good pavement,
and within two hours we were tumbling out of the taxi-brousse at the Marojejy
National Park office with our luggage and our food, ready to start hiking. First, though, we had to fork out big wads of
ariary for national park entrance fees (45,000 MGA per person each for 3 days),
a guide, a porter for Terri, camping fees and cooking fees. It all added up to 484,000 MGA (about 140
euros) for both of us for 3 days, so not cheap but not outrageously
expensive. We had a moment of comedy
when the guide first selected for us, an English-speaker, told us that we had
to hire a cook, as cooking for himself was beneath his dignity, and that we had
to buy him food since his food allowance was insufficient. We quickly canned him and hired another less
stuck-up Francophone-only guide, Patrick, along with a young and enthusiastic
porter (and wannabe-guide) named Dany.
We stored excess baggage such as our tent and cooking stove in the
storage room at the park office and set off by 11, keen to get up the mountain.
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Beautiful day gecko
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| Gecko and millipede meet each other |
It was a pretty walk right from
the beginning. We hiked through a
landscape of lush green ricefields lined with hilly plots of vanilla and
lychees. It was lychee season and we
were already indulging in them as we marched along through the village and its
seemingly infinite supply of small children.
Eventually, an hour down the track, we started to leave behind the dense
settlement of the village and headed into a bit more forest. We entered the national park and proceeded uphill
through dense rainforest. Madagascar has
two rainfall gradients, one decreasing from north to south, and the other from
east to west. Up in the northeast
corner, where we were, is the wettest bit of the island, and it rains pretty
much year-round. This shows in the dense
vegetation, flowers and orchids. Dany
was a star, finding much of the wildlife that we saw: numerous chameleons, a big boa constrictor of
some sort, plenty of lizards and lots of birds, including the brilliantly
coloured Madagascar kingfisher and several of the bright, long-tailed
Madagascar paradise-flycatchers that we had seen in Andasibe. We also saw a couple of species of frog,
including one small and beautiful black and green frog of the Mantella genus
for which Marojejy is renowned.
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| Eastern lesser bamboo lemur |
The path was fairly gentle and
led through dense jungle that eventually gave way to bamboo thickets. We saw a number of Eastern lesser bamboo
lemurs (
Hapalemur griseus griseus),
most of whom fled fairly quickly. They
are interesting animals who are somehow able to stomach the high levels of
cyanide found in the local bamboo shoots.
We also caught a glimpse of the white-fronted brown lemur (
Eulemur fulvus albifrons). After a short snack stop at Camp One the path
got a bit steeper. We had started the
walk at less than 100 metres above sea level, and most of the climb to 800
metres (the altitude of Camp Two) happened in the path between Camps One and
Two. It was sweaty work in the steamy
humidity, but it was pretty, and just as we approached Camp Two, we ran into
the tracker who showed us (at a distance) our first examples of the very rare
silky sifaka (
Propithecus candidus). The silky sifaka is very rare (somewhere
between 100 and 1000 individuals exist in the entire world, confined to
Marojejy National Park and its immediate surroundings), quite large (second
only to the indri among living lemur species) and very beautiful, with long
white fur and very long tails. We
admired the sifakas from afar for a bit, and then continued on to Camp Two.
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| Mantella frog |
Most hikers at Marojejy choose a
four-day itinerary, with a first night at Camp Two, a second night at Camp
Three, the summit on the third night followed by a retreat to Camp Two, and
then a walk out on the fourth day. With
Terri’s leg still bothering her and the climb to the summit steep, we had opted
out of the summit in favour of two nights at Camp Two in order to have time to
see the sifakas. We settled into our
cabin (a strange mixture of wood and waterproof canvas tent material) and wandered
over to the cooking area to start working on supper.
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The view from Camp Two
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| Ring-tailed mongoose, mischievous camp visitor |
It had been a glorious day of
hiking, past waterfalls and streams, with beetles and butterflies and orchids
to please the senses, through a rainforest absolutely pulsing with life. It reminded us of what we hadn’t been doing
enough of recently in Africa, constrained as we often were by national park
regulations from wandering around freely.
We cooked up rice and lentils over the camp’s charcoal cookers beside
the cooks from another hiking group. The
setting was perfect, overlooking a stream that pooled into a perfect little
bathing hole, and both Terri and I slipped away from cooking duties to immerse
ourselves in the cool water, surrounded by more Mantella frogs. It was very idyllic, and the final piece of
perfection was a playful, curious and mischievous ring-tailed mongoose who
patrolled around the cooking area, looking for any unguarded food or empty tin
to nip in and steal. The only blemish on
our happiness was finding a couple of leeches when we peeled off our hiking
socks.
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| Our silky sifaika crew: Patrick, Dany, Janvier and me |
After dinner we went for a brief
spot-lighting walk around camp with Patrick.
We were hoping for leaf-tailed geckos and tiny Brookesia chameleons, but
neither were to be seen. Instead we
consoled ourselves with a couple of nocturnal frogs with huge eyes, a big toad
and a brief glimpse of a fat-tailed mouse lemur’s eyes glinting in the
spotlight before he moved into the shelter of the vegetation. We returned to our hut for an early night.
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| Silky sifakas |
We slept well that night in our
little cabin, glad for the waterproof tent roof when the heavens opened for a
torrential downpour sometime after midnight.
We awoke at 6, breakfasted on baguettes, jam and fried eggs, then set
off with Patrick and Davy in search of the silky sifakas. The camp’s resident tracker, Janvier, had
already been up and found the nearest group not far from camp, and we followed
the sound of his voice to where a group of 3 sifakas was sitting high in a tree
eating and grooming. We spent nearly two
hours watching them, with a number of close encounters when they dropped down
close to the ground. They are truly
beautiful animals, their white fur contrasting with their black faces, their
gentle nature obvious from their grooming interactions. They are, like all sifakas, prodigious leapers
and we watched them hurl themselves across many metres of open space to get
from one tree to another. They also
performed impossible gymnastics as they hung in all possible orientations to
get at leaves to eat, or to groom each other in interlocking balls of silky
fur. It was frustrating trying to
photograph them in the low light of the forest, with big contrasts in light
from sunny patches to shade, but I got a few decent shots in the end. Eventually I ended up putting my camera away
and just watching them with my naked eye or through binoculars, feeling
privileged to be so close to such a rare and beautiful animal. It felt, Terri agreed, a bit like watching
mountain gorillas, as though we were intruders in the tiny patch of wilderness
that we humans have left to these precious animals.
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Silky sifakas are high on the cuteness scale
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| Brookesia minima chameleon: check out the fingernail for scale! |
On the way back we saw a greater
vasa parrot flying through the trees, and then Davy spotted a
Brookesia minima chameleon, the tiniest
species in Madagascar, barely the length of Terri’s thumbnail. We watched in fascination as he crawled
determinedly among the leaf litter in search of insects to eat. We had a snack in camp, then set off uphill
in search of the red lemur. We had no
luck, despite hearing them in the distance a couple of times, and eventually we
admitted defeat and trudged back downhill.
Success was had on the chameleon front, though, with a couple more tiny
species of Brookesia, as well as several more frogs. We ran into a researcher carrying several
more species of frog and chameleon; apparently Camp Three is a big research
base for herpetologists who are particularly keen on Marojejy’s endemic frog
species.
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| White-faced brown lemur (Eulemur albifrons), Marojejy |
We spent the afternoon pleasantly
in camp cooking, sorting photos and watching the mongoose and a truly beautiful
green day gecko. The diversity and
beauty of the wildlife in the jungle was absolutely outstanding, and we were
very happy to have the privilege of being part of it for a few days. That evening in camp we ran into Nic and Mandy
who had summited that morning, as well as a pair of French hikers who had just
arrived from below. We had a pleasant
evening around the cookhouse cooking, eating and swapping stories.
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| Helmeted vanga sitting on his nest in Marojejy |
Our walk out the next morning
began with a leisurely breakfast, and didn’t really get going downhill until
about 8:30. It was much quicker going
downhill than up, and by 12:40 we were back at our starting point at the park
office. Along the way we had quite a
close encounter with the white-faced brown lemur (
Eulemur albifrons), finally giving us some decent
photos. We also, after much searching,
spotted one of Madagascar’s iconic birds, the helmet vanga. With its outsized blue beak, it is
unmistakeable, and since it nests at the top of the trunk of one particular
species of palm tree, Dany and Patrick kept peering hopefully up at every one
of these trees until we were finally rewarded with a view of a huge blue
bill. We then saw another pair flying
through the trees, too quickly to photograph, but the vanga on the nest stayed
helpfully still for the camera. We also
saw a tenrec, the small hedgehog-like animal that bumbles around amiably
through the undergrowth. He was too fast
to get a photo, but we got pretty good views.
In the BBC TV series Madagascar they get great footage of a pair of
adults leading a party of 15 or so babies around; litter sizes of up to 30 have
been recorded, very unusual for a mammal.
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| Marojejy is famous for its frogs |
I was sad when we left the park
behind and rejoined the busy, noisy world of the village. Marojejy had been everything I was looking
for when I came to Madagascar: hiking,
wilderness, rainforest, lemurs and a plethora of other animals. Terri was sad when we got to the park
entrance and her backpack, which had been carried by a new porter instead of
Dany (there is a strict rotation system among the porters, and it was the other
guy’s turn) wasn’t there. The porter had
apparently stopped off in the village for food and to see his family, and Terri
was not at all impressed with his work ethic.
Eventually Dany walked back and repossessed the backpack, to Terri’s
delight.
We had anticipated catching a
crowded taxi-brousse back to town, but since Nic and Mandy had arrived at the
same time as us and had arranged a lift back to Sambava in a comfortable Toyota
Land Cruiser, we were glad to accept their offer to ride along with them. It was a much quicker, more comfortable trip
back to Sambava. We both checked into
Chez Mimi, visions of a delicious Chinese lunch dancing in our heads, only to
find that the restaurant was closed until 6.
We found a few pastries to eat in the bakery next door, then had a nap
until supper. Once the restaurant had
opened, they served up a delicious repast.
Nic and Mandy were at the table, and we were entertained by some of
Nic’s more outrageous travel stories.
He’s a judge in real life, but certainly lets his hair down on holiday.
More lemuring in
Daraina
Sunday, November 20th
found us a bit groggy after a night of poor sleep on a really lame excuse for a
mattress. We breakfasted, then caught a
local taxi to the chaos of the taxi-brousse stand. We were headed north along the coast to Vohemar,
and it didn’t take long to get a full taxi and set off with us in the prime
front seats. It’s only 90 km or so from
Sambava to Vohemar, but it took almost 5 hours of leisurely travel with an
endless series of stops. I was watching
our driver fiddle with the money he had collected from passengers, and realized
that every time there was a police roadblock (which was very frequently), he
slipped 2000 MGA (about 50 euro cents) into the pages of his car
registration. When he got it back again,
the money would be gone. Multiplying by
the number of cars that the cops stop every day, the obvious conclusion to draw
is that being a traffic policeman is a job of great monetary potential in
Madagascar, while imposing a significant cost on road traffic.
Vohemar is where the pavement
ends if you’re headed west towards Ambilobe.
At the junction, a number of 4x4s tout for business. This dirt track is renowned as one of the
worst “roads” in all of Madagascar, and the 4x4s charge accordingly. While the taxi-brousse from Sambava to
Vohemar had cost us about 7000 MGA, a seat from Vohemar to Ambilobe was going
for 60,000 MGA for a distance that was only 50 percent further. What made it worse was that we wanted to hop
out in the village of Daraina, about one-third of the way along the track, and
the 4x4 operators insisted that we had to pay for the full distance since they
wouldn’t be able to pick up any passengers in Daraina. Then, when we had finished in Daraina, we
would have to phone back to Vohemar, make a reservation and pay another 60,000
ariary. It was a pretty expensive trip
for something that looked as though it was going to be excruciatingly
uncomfortable.
We sat around for a couple of
hours waiting for our vehicle to fill up, and finally drove off around 5:00. Terri and I were wedged onto the single front
passenger seat of a Ford Ranger, but it looked a lot more comfortable than our
fellow passengers wedged in the back.
The first 30 km of the road were actually quite decent, but then the
real horror began. It took three hours
to cover the next 25 km, with the driver carefully negotiating huge holes,
metres deep, that had appeared in the track over the previous rainy
season. At one point most of the
passengers leapt out and started hiking through the bush by the light of their
mobile phones, leaving Terri and myself and two other passengers to continue
with the driver over particularly steep and difficult terrain. We followed a convoluted squiggle of a track
downhill and eventually stopped, waiting for the pedestrians to appear out of
the night. Finally, after 9 pm, we
stopped outside a small hotel, Le Lemurien Blanc, and Terri and I got out into
the dark. The night watchman let us in,
and the manager appeared, showed us to a room and conjured up some food from
the kitchen. We ate and then crashed,
worn out by the energy-sapping process of moving from place to place by public
transport.
We slept well that night and
awoke to a sunny, warm day. The whole
reason we had chosen to stop in this small village was that we had been told
about a lemur reserve just outside town by Nic and Mandy’s guide in
Marojejy. As we breakfasted, a local
guide, Amidou, appeared and we sat down to discuss logistics. The lemur forest is 12 km from town, so
walking there and back seemed out of the question, especially as we wanted to
do a night walk to spot the fabled and elusive aye aye, the strangest of the
lemurs. We eventually decided that we
would rent one scooter for Terri, while I would ride as a passenger on Amidou’s
slightly larger motorcycle. We had a
reasonable spaghetti lunch, then set off at 1:30 for the park.
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| Heading off to see lemurs in Daraina; I rode on the back of Amidou's bike |
It was a fun ride, first towards
Ambilobe on the main road, then on a smaller track off to the right. The “road” part was in awful condition, but
Amidou was a careful driver, and Terri was a picture of concentration, picking
the best line through craters that gave the scene the look of Passchendaele,
1916. It was a relief to turn onto the
less destroyed tertiary track. At the
end of the road, we parked the bikes beside some abandoned huts once inhabited
by gold miners. This area, despite being
officially a nature reserve, was invaded by many hundreds of gold panners some
years ago. Most of them have now moved
on to the next gold strike closer to Ambilobe, but a handful of miners still
remain, and the ground of the reserve is a treacherous labyrinth of
two-metre-deep pits. The riverbed, dry
in this season, is honeycombed with such holes, but the higher ground beside it
is more selectively excavated. It’s sad
to see, once again, mining trump nature, but at least the miners don’t seem to
be hunting and eating the lemurs as has happened in other parts of the country.
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| Golden-crowned sifaka in Daraina |
The forest here is much, much
drier than in Marojejy, but it’s full of lemurs. The main species here is the golden-crowned
sifaka (
Propithecus tattersalli), and
they are not difficult to see. It took
less than ten minutes of walking to spot our first group, high up in the
branches of a tall tree. They are big
sifakas, not quite as large as the silkies, but close. They are also white of fur, but with a crown
of golden brown fur atop their heads.
They are quite curious, numerous and apparently doing well on the breeding
front, as every one of the four groups we encountered had at least one baby
riding on its mother’s back. They are
ridiculously agile, leaping big gaps between adjacent trees without any
apparent effort, and quite curious and unafraid of people. They are apparently protected by a strong
local
fady (taboo) about hunting and
eating them. We spent a lot of time
watching them feed on leaves and fruits, climb around the trees and bound
acrobatically across gaps, getting some good photos in the strong light.
As the time wound on towards
sundown, we eventually said goodbye to our last group of sifakas and set off in
search of an aye aye tracker. Some of
the local miners supplement their incomes by watching for signs of aye ayes
nesting in the treetops and then reporting this to guides and tourists for
tips. We passed a couple of teenagers
with headlamps setting off hopefully in search of aye ayes, but Amidou figured
that one of the older trackers would be a surer bet. Eventually we found our man, a middle-aged
man with a bright headlamp, and the four of us set off through the bush peering
upwards into the canopy in search of a fresh aye aye nest. Twenty minutes of tramping brought us to a
point in the riverbed where both Amidou and our aye aye man pointed up into the
trees. “Fresh nest. You can see the new leaves.”
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| Waiting for the aye aye to emerge |
I wasn’t convinced, but they were
certain that there was an aye aye slumbering inside, so there was nothing to do
but lie down and wait, staring up at the untidy jumble of vegetation. As we waited the daylight began to fade, but
not before another lemur species made an appearance. A hyperactive feeding party of crowned lemurs
(
Eulemur coronatus) came crashing
down through the trees, and we got quite close views of their faces and their
red-brown crowns. Amidou told us that
they were one of few lemur species that was active both by day and by night.
We were lying on our backs,
staring up into the canopy, when suddenly our aye aye man got excited, as did
Amidou. “Get your lights ready! He’s moving!”
And then, quite suddenly, the aye aye was out of the nest and moving
rapidly through the trees in search of tasty insects to eat. With our spotlight, the aye aye spotter’s,
and two very bright lights in Amidou’s possession, we had enough lumens to
light up the animal quite well, even if it was too far to get a decent photo. We scrambled around through the undergrowth,
following our moving target and trying not to break a leg in one of the many
gold-mining pits.
The aye aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a lemur, but a very unusual-looking one. There are five families of lemur
(Daubentonidae, Indriidae, Lepilemuridae, Lemuridae and Cheirogaleidae) with a
total of 98 species. One family, the
Daubentonidae, contains only 1 species, the aye aye. It is considered to be the most ancient
lineage of the lemurs, having split off from all other lemurs a long time
ago. It is nocturnal and insectivorous,
with long, slender fingers for digging insects out of fruits and wood and
leaves, and huge leathery ears a bit like a bat for hearing the faint sounds of
bugs. We got an excellent view of his
sharp-featured face and his big ears, his dark grey body fur and his lighter
face, as well as the glint of his eyes in our lights. We followed him for a good 15 minutes before
we finally lost him; he was quick and very agile, leaping from tree to tree,
and eventually we couldn’t keep up anymore.
An aye aye may cover 30 kilometres or more in a night’s foraging before
he constructs a fresh nest at dawn to protect him during his daytime snooze. We were lucky to see one; they’re notoriously
hard to find, and Daraina is one of the few places where, thanks to the
spotters, you have a better than even chance of seeing one on a given evening.
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| Can't get enough pictures of day geckos! |
We were elated as we started
walking back to the motorcycles in the dark.
The show wasn’t over yet, though, as our spotlights picked out a lot of
different eyes shining back at us. There
was a rufous mouse lemur (
Microcebus
rufus), a small Daraina sportive lemur (
Lepilemur
milanoi), another fat-tailed dwarf lemur, an Amber Mountain fork-marked
lemur (
Phaner electromontis) and
then, right at the end, the eyes of a Malagasy civet (
Fossa fossana), the smaller of the two main carnivorous predators
of Madagascar (the larger is the fossa,
Cryptoprocta
ferox, which we sadly never caught a glimpse of). We got back to the motorbikes absolutely
ecstatic at the number of species we had seen.
The ride back was challenging in the dark, but the stars were glittering
in a moonless sky with Venus shining very bright in the western sky so at least
we were surrounded by beauty. We made it
back unscathed to Le Lemurien Blanc by 8:30 and tucked into a big meal that the
manager had waiting for us. It had been
a red-letter day for scenery, for wildlife and for fun. We chatted at dinner with three French
tourists who, incredibly, had just driven the miserable track in a two-wheel
drive Citroen 2CV, a car that barely looks capable of climbing a moderate
incline on a paved road. The driver,
Bruno, was a real character and we had a great time chatting with him, his
sister and his friend.
This Ain’t No
Technological Breakdown…..
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| The drier countryside around Daraina |
The next day, Tuesday November 22
nd,
was not a red-letter day for anything.
It was, instead, one of those awful days that try the souls of
travellers and make you wonder if all the lemur species in the world are worth
a miserable 4x4 ride. We had sent Amidou
off the previous morning with the mission of booking us seats on a 4x4 coming
through, and he had done so. We had two
front seats in a 4x4, and we had slept on this assurance. In the morning, though, Amidou was back with
bad news. The 4x4 we had reserved had
just called him to say they had broken down and wouldn’t be driving that
day. We had him call another outfit in
Vohemar, and he was able to pin down another vehicle that was about to leave. We asked to buy an extra seat to give
ourselves some extra space and a modicum of comfort. We had to pay for one seat up front by a
telephonic money transfer which Amidou handled.
Then we sat and waited. We had
hoped to leave in the morning so that we could do most of the trip in daylight. Instead, it was almost 2:30 in the afternoon
when a tiny short-wheel-base Land Cruiser drove up with an impossibly
low-ceilinged enclosure around the back.
There was no sign of the extra seat we had been promised, and in fact I
could not sit in the back at all, as the ceiling was far too low. We started off with a flaming row with the
driver, who was about to return us our deposit money and leave without us. We weren’t having any of it, and insisted
that he honour his commitment. After
much shouting and grumbling and translation (he spoke not a word of French), he
relented. I ended up sitting on the
floor of the back, between the two rows of passengers, with nothing to hold
onto. Terri was crammed onto the end of
one of the two benches running the (very short) length of the back, with
nothing to hold onto and barely any space to perch. There were three other people on her side,
and three very chubby ladies on the other side.
It seemed impossible that there were any spaces at all for us, let alone
the three we had been promised.
It was excruciatingly
uncomfortable for Terri, whose leg was being mercilessly tenderized by a metal
pipe behind her, and who clocked her head a few times when we hit particularly
big bumps. We were bounced all over by
the huge chasms in the roadbed, and after an hour I couldn’t take it
anymore. When the jeep stopped to wait
for another vehicle to cross a narrow bridge, I hopped out and perched myself
outside the back of the vehicle, with one foot on the back bumper and one butt
cheek perched on the spare tire, my hands gripping the metal of the roof
rack. It was a bit precarious, but at
least my legs were comfortable and there was space for my head. I spent the rest of the trip, all eight
hours, hanging off the back and it was infinitely superior to being
inside. I put on my iPod and worked my
way methodically through hours of content to try to escape from the
never-ending horror of the road. It got
dark by 6, and for five and a half long hours we continued through the dark,
bouncing like demented pinballs across a surface that (allegedly) had been
smooth asphalt back in the days of Francois Mitterand, but which was now more
or less undriveable.
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| Loading up in Daraina: 7 people sat in the back! |
I was a complete zombie, coated
with dust and diesel exhaust, my hands blistered from gripping the roof rack,
but Terri was much worse, unable to sit upright, bruised and battered and
constantly fighting her seatmates for sufficient space to sit. We stopped once for a quick dinner stop at a
filthy roadside diner, and that was about it, other than one bathroom break. It all blurred into a hallucinatory nightmare
until finally, well after 11:30 at night, we arrived at the far end of the
track in the unlovely junction town of Ambilobe. We pulled into a tiny roadstop hotel and
booked a room, only to have a much bigger fight with our driver. We paid him for the second place we had
occupied, but he demanded payment for the third space. Since we had really only had one space, not
two, and there was absolutely no way that we had had access to three seats, we
refused and he went absolutely mental, screaming and thumping his chest and
barging into me. I have limited
tolerance for bullying, and I was much bigger than him, so I pushed him back
and began screaming myself. Neither of
us understood a word of what the other was shouting, but it didn’t matter: the meaning was clear enough. Then the driver grabbed Terri roughly by the
arm and then she was shouting at him and I had had enough and ran him across
the courtyard and up against a wall with my forearm across his neck. The hotel staff and fellow passengers were
watching this all agog. We stormed off
to our room, only to find the driver hammering and howling at the door. We opened the door to find him drawing a
forefinger menacingly across his throat in an unmistakeable gesture of
threat. Terri was outraged, and I again
manhandled him away, half-convinced that it was about to come to
fisticuffs. Eventually the driver was
dragged away, but not before both of us had threatened to bring the police into
the story. We bathed and went to bed
still dirty, bone-tired, stiff and sore and wired with fight-or-flight
adrenaline. It had been a truly horrible
day, and the only thing to do was to fall asleep and hope the driver didn’t
return to batter in our door. I
remembered how much I had hated this sort of travel in Indonesia back in 1996
(fights with drivers and dishonest touts included); I had hated it so much that
I had taken up bicycle touring instead.
Practical
Information
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| A cluster of silky sifakas |
Marojejy is a must-see, one of
the great wildlife parks of Madagascar.
It makes sense to fly to it, despite the exorbitant cost, at least one
way, as there is no short way to drive to it.
For trekking, the only obligatory hire is a guide (30,000 MGA a day if
he’s going to feed himself); porters are optional. The park isn’t cheap, but it’s not crazy
expensive either; we spent 484,000 MGA (about 160 EUR) between us for 3
days. I think that taking 4 days and
climbing the peak is a good idea (which we would have done except for Terri’s
sore leg). The sifakas are amazing and
worth spending another 30,000 MGA on a specialized tracker. The park entrance is easily accessible from
Sambava by taxi-brousse. There’s one
tiny supermarket in Sambava, so camping supplies are a bit limited. You don’t need to carry a tent or stove as
they’re supplied. This is one of the
best places on the island to see a helmet vanga, so try to see one on the way
up the mountain!
In Sambava we found the Orchidea
Beach Hotel to be a much better place to sleep (better beds, quieter) than Chez
Mimi, as well as having a much nicer location on the beach. Chez Mimi does have great food, though.
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| Day geckos have amazing colours! |
In Daraina you have little choice
in where to stay; all tourists basically stay at Le Lemurien Blanc which is
clean and reasonably priced, and guides can find you there; we found Amidou to
be an excellent, knowledgeable guide. If
you have your own transport, you can stay out near the lemurs at Camp
Tattersalli (as Bruno and his 2CV crew did), but we didn’t have that
option. Getting out to the lemurs we
thought that renting a scooter was the cheapest, most comfortable and most fun
option, although there are 4x4s available too at a steeper price. The night walk in search of aye ayes is a
must; we saw a ridiculous number of species as well as the amazing aye
aye.
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| Fleeting view of a snake in Marojejy |
Getting to and from Daraina was
where we adopted a sub-optimal method.
In hindsight, the way to go is to ride on the back of a dirt bike. It’s more expensive (200,000 MGA from Vohemar
to Ambilobe, instead of 60,000 MGA), but much faster, more comfortable and you
see more, plus you are less likely to come to blows with your driver. If you have a heavy backpack, it might be
worth sending it ahead on the roof of a 4x4 for a small fee. The other nice thing about the motorcycle
option is that you won’t be asked to pay the full fare twice (once
Vohemar-Daraina, and again Daraina-Ambilobe).
It’s hard to describe how awful, uncomfortable and deeply unpleasant 9
hours of bouncing around the back of a 4x4 can be, but believe us: you don’t want to do it. Just say “moto, please!” and save yourself a
stay in the Eighth Circle of Dante’s Hell.
It is worth seeing the lemurs in Daraina; just keep reminding yourself
of this.
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