Northern Madagascar - Montagne d'Ambre, the Tsingy Rouges and Ankarana

The distance between Sambava and Diego Suárez is just 160 km, but I had booked a place on the weekly flight, after having read on the internet several accounts of 12 to 18 hours land trips. So far, my experience of Madagascar roads hadn’t been bad – the roads from Antananarive to Anzojorobe and from Sambava to Marojejy were pretty normal – but more on Madagascar roads later.

Upon landing in Diego, I was greeted by Patrick, a cheerful 57-year-old Malagasy that would be my guide for the next few days (I had booked with Evasions sans Frontières). Diego Suárez is a small uninteresting town over a beautiful bay; I just went there to pay the agency, then off to the Park Montagne d’Ambre. There, a quiet hike through a forest much tamer than Marojejy, where I saw a number of beautiful trees, some lemurs, the Brookesia (the smallest chameleon in the world, just a couple of cm long), several birds and mongooses, and the Europlatus, a gecko deservedly known as the “king of camouflage”. There is a sacred lake – as usual – where people leave offers to the spirits of the ancestors, like money and bottles of wine. The Montagne d’Ambre is a peaceful place, the source of all the water used in the Diego region.

I slept at the Nature Lodge, near Joffreville, a small quasi-ghost town once inhabited by people from Reunion that left in the early 70s, and the next day I visited the Tsingy Rouges, a most amazing place reached by a bumpy dirt road. It’s an eerie place, of extra-terrestrial beauty, where the erosion created strange shapes from the red limestone cliffs and the water runs over red and ocher sands.

Then I went to Park Ankarana, another stunning place. Goulam Lodge, inside the park, was a very basic lodging – no running water, 2 hours of electric power each day, but I’m experienced with bucket showers so I managed. And Ankarana was really worthwhile, I had two days of splendid hiking. The park guide, Joaquim, was an intelligent and witty humored young guy, we talked a lot while walking, and talking to him, and Patrick and a couple of other local guys, was interesting and instructive: they are intelligent people, angry about their corrupt government, the permanent African neglect and inefficiency, trying to get by in rough circumstances. As for the nature at Ankarana: chameleons, lemurs, birds, dry savanna and green forest, bat caves with stalagmites and ancient Antakarana tombs, and the amazing tsingys, black and sharp-edged this time but no less eerie. And walking miles and miles conveys a great feeling of physical bliss, while the mind wonders… Ankarana was a really great experience.

Madagascar - Sambava and Marojejy

Air Madagascar is notoriously known for its frequente delays and cancellations, but my flight to Sambava was right on time (as was later my flight from Sambava to Diego Suarez, and the flight from Nosy Be to Tana was just 30 minutes late, so I cannot complain!). It’s only a 1 hour flight from Tana to Sambava, and a short taxi ride took me to the Orchidea Beach 2 Hot el, a very nice hotel by the beach I had booked from Lisbon. My first view of the Indian Ocean, just outside my bedroom.

So I changed into my swim trunks and had my first dip in the ocean. Pleasantly warm water, they say there are riptides and sharks, so no swimming offshore. It was Sunday, and as time passed, the beach became filled with locals – I was the only Caucasian around. Lots of people came to the beach, but only kids were bathing, the rest were strolling and chatting, as you would see in Lisbon mall. And a chameleon fell from a tree on the sand, eliciting giggles from two pretty girls sitting next to me… My first chameleon in Madagascar!

I had dinner in a local small restaurant, a tasty mine sao with THB (Three Horses Beer, the most common beer in the country); there was a party celebrating a football match, and I got lost on my way back to the hotel, and a nice man drove me there in a packed Renault 4 with his wife and four children…

I met a nice young French couple at the hotel that was also heading to Park Marojejy, so we went there together. The car that took us was an old Renault, whose speedometer needle didn’t move and whose windows were stuck – “nous n’avons pas d’argent pour voitures neufs à Madagascar!” – but it got us there, through a beautiful vanilla-scented country.

From the Park bureau, where we hired our guide, to the park entrance, at the foot of the Marojejy mountain, it’s a 9 km hike. It’s a beautiful walk, we passed two villages, poor houses made of bamboo, people grinding cassava and washing clothes in the river, vanilla drying in the sun, lots of smiling children hailing us with “salaam, vasaha!”. The valley was really beautiful, and it was sunny and hot, so we reached the park tired and drenched in sweat (I kept thinking: these guys must think Europeans are crazy, having nice comfortable houses and coming here to do forced marches in the sun!).

Entering the park, the trees were a welcoming shade. But there were also the mosquitoes who, not knowing they should be repelled by our mosquito repellents, had a great time feeding on our calves. But the hike was great, the rainforest beautiful, with birds, millipedes and lemurs, and a refreshing dip in a cool lake with a cascade. We reached the 1st camp, where we stayed for the night, sharing a tuna and pasta dinner cooked on a charcoal stove and sleeping in the small bungalows, listening to the soft rain that fell during the night. Our guide was a young guy, with a somewhat unpleasant smell, but funny and very proud of his English speaking skills.

The next morning, after a summary wash and a summary breakfast, we hiked up the mountain to the second camp. The rainforest at Marojejy is incredibly beautiful and wild; we spotted some lemurs, several beautiful birds and lots of huge millipedes. The second camp is in a stunning place, by a cascade with amazing views over the mountains. I had to pull a couple of leeches from my legs… It’s really true about their anti-clotting properties, the blood flowed extremely smoothly. Then we headed on our search for the silky sifaka, the white lemur we can only find in this park.

It was quite an epic search! We started up the track to camp 3, which is a really steep climb. And, after about 1 km, we went off the trail into the jungle. And THAT was quite an experience! Crawling through roots and lianas, muddy ground, using hands and feet, sometimes I asked myself “what the hell am I doing here?”, my glasses sliding with the sweat… But at the same time, it was exhilarating, the walk (or crawl…) through sheer wild nature. After despairing to see the elusive silky sifakas, there they were, a whole family, idling in the trees, complete with a baby playing. It was a moment of pure delight, well worth the trouble to get there. We just stared at them for a long time, feeling happy and accomplished.

After the no-tracks-jungle, the trail back to the camp was extremely easy. And we were even rewarded with a group of albiphonse lemurs crossing the trail, moving gracefully above our heads. It was a peaceful hike back to the villages, passing some nice zebus grazing – I touched a zebu calf, and his fur was surprisingly soft. Tired but happy, we drove back to Sambava. Marojejy will always remain in my mind as a magical place.

Madagascar - first couple of days

What’s in a name, that sometimes keeps whispering in the back of your mind “I should go there someday”? Is it some form of the magic of words? I don’t know, but somehow I’ve lived with that name of Madagascar ever since, at about 9 or 10 years old, I watched a TV series of Paul et Virginie, and heard someone say “votre mari est mort, de la fièvre, au nord de Madagascar”. Through the years, that sentence, its sound, kept resurfacing again and again, as I looked at world maps as a child, or planned trips as an adult. Then recently, a young friend has been actually living in Madagascar, and I asked myself: “why not now?”.

So I went to Madagascar, a very real place, more reknown today on account of a few animation movies. And it was a great and very interesting trip. It was my first experience of a “real” African country (even if it’s not exactly Africa, but it’s more so than Morocco or Cape Vert), and it lived up to my expectations.

I landed in Antananarive, the capital, known as Tana. I guess it’s more or less like most 3rd world capitals – big, poor, with some islands of secluded prosperity, polluted and traffic ridden. Poverty is always disheartening, even if expected. This could be a beautiful city: spreading over several hills, a pleasant weather on a plateau, a soft and clear light, with lots of beautiful colonial buildings and the bustling activity of the ubiquitous street markets and stalls.

But one cannot stop noticing the pollution, the garbage, the young unemployed people idling on the streets, the beggars, the passed-out drunks on the sidewalk, the open-air sewers, the men urinating anywhere, the buildings unkempt and ruined. I walked a lot around the town, through the daedalus of small alleys and stairs on the hills, from the markets and shops downtown to the more quiet streets of the Haute Ville, dominated by the charred walls of the Palais de la Reine, a 19th century symbol of the wealth and power of the ruthless queen Rovalonna I. As the Lonely Planet guide says, in Tana all the world is a market, where you find on street stalls everything you can think of plus probably a few you wouldn’t remember; also meat and fish stormed by flies.

But you can also enjoy coffee and croissants at the French-influenced patisseries and eat excellent food at a number of restaurants. The French cuisine, combined with African and East Asian influence, is great. (You also find what it looks like the whole of old Renault s and 2CVs that disappeared froEurope, but I guess there must be others in other former French colonies). And, even if I had “vasaha” (the Malagasy word for “white”) written all over my T-shirt, shorts and backpack attire, I actually felt quite safe and at ease everywhere, even if sometimes annoyed by the frequent “la vanille, voulez vous la vanille?”. Maybe it’s because of the European former colonization, or because we’re used in Portugal to Africans, but I felt at home, unlike in Marrakech, for instance.

Then I went to Anzojorobe, about 80 km north of the city. Lots of traffic getting out of town – narrow streets, cars parking anywhere, taxi-bes stopping, men pulling loaded carts… But once passed the long suburbs, we drive through a beautiful plateau landscape, unfortunately mostly devoid of trees – deforestation is a huge problem in Madagascar, due to the use of charcoal as the main energy source and the smuggling of rosewood and palissander. Anyway, one hour after leaving Tana one feels in a different world, of wide landscapes and small ocher-colored villages.

We reached Anzojorobe, a forest reserve, then a short walk in the sunset light till the Saha Forest Camp – a very pleasant lodge in the forest, by a river with green rice fields, whose “tents” have canvas walls but all the comforts of civilization.

The next day, my first hike – an easy track through the forest, and my first sightings of lemurs (idris and sifakas) and several beautiful birds. The Anzojorobe forest is beautiful but not especially wild, it was a nice introduction to Malagasy nature though.

And after a good lunch and some idling, back to Tana, where we were greeted by a typically huge traffic jam. Plenty of time to watch the roadside stalls and the myriads of people walking by, many of them dressed up, many of them tipsy. It’s Saturday evening, and the driver tells us there’s a lot of people celebrating famadihana, the strange Malagasy ritual that consists in the yearly unearthing of the ancestors’ corpses, enveloping them in new shrouds and burying them again. I’d like to take lots of photos from all those people coming and going and making business, but I’m always shy of taking people’s pictures, always fear they feel I’m behaving as in a zoo or something.

So, after a very tasty dinner at Kudéta restaurant, and a few hours sleep, taxi to the airport and off to the North!

Les Caves du Vatican, by André Gide

André Gide is a most famous writer, and very influential in his time and to the next generation of French artists and intellectuals, so I always thought that not knowing his work was a serious lack in my culture. But what I read from him never impressed me - La Porte Étroite and Les Faux Monnayeurs, that I completely forgot soon after having read them. I tried again, with Les Caves du Vatican, and this time I started to understand why he was so considered.

It's a somewhat strange book, alternating between a serious, even dramatic, and an ironic, even comic, tone. Sometimes hilariously funny, it nevertheless poses some very serious and interesting questions - about human nature, religious feeling, the nature of morality and free will. All in all, I liked it, and it made me curious to read more of his work.

The Devil's Star, by Jo Nesbo

Another great thriller by Jo Nesbo, the third I've read, after The Leopard and The Redbreast. He's the greatest thriller writer since Raymond Chandler, and Harry Hole is a terrific modern Philip Marlowe. A real page turner! I will soon read another, already on my shelf. (This was the first ebook I purchased for my new kindle)

Voyage au bout de la nuit, de Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I had heard this book praised for a long time, but somehow I had never felt a wish to read it; maybe because of the author's fascist fame, maybe because I once read a book by him, Casse Pipe, that I didn't like. But I kept it on my "mental" list, and last May, when buying pocket books in Paris, I saw it and bought it.

I must admit it was quite a pleasant surprise. It's a great book, intense, beautiful and a most enjoyable read. The narrator tells his story of the First War experience, the African colonial set, a short stay in America, and the pettiness of the Parisian banlieue while being a poor doctor. His views and his observations of the human condition and nature are deeply pessimistic and pitiless, but expressed in a finely ironic humor and pervaded by a kind of tender sadness. His descriptions are mercilessly insightful, and reminded me of other merciless descriptions, such as by Thomas Wolfe or Jonathan Frazen.

And it was a good idea to read it in French, since the vernacular style is an intrinsic part of the book's charm. So, this good experience rekindled my wish to read another classic that's been waiting on my shelf for years: Ulysses!