The family road trip continues through crazy rock formations, huge lemur groups, and to the top of the second tallest peak in Madagascar

Our hike in to Isalo

The valley behind our campsite at Isalo

Oasis pool at Isalo

We’ve made it through 3 of  4 parks on our road trip!  I’m writing from Fianarantsoa (the city of good learning), which is just south of the capital and has served as a rest/clean/wash point before continuing on to the final rainforest park of Ranomafana.  The first park that we visited after Tuléar was Isalo, which is located about 5 hours drive almost directly east of Tuléar, finally on a really good paved road!  There weren’t many villages along the road, but there is really almost no forest left: the land has become mostly dry grass, with some brush coverage closer in to the coast and some random thickly forested patches which are taboo for anyone to enter or damage.  Just when we were starting to get really depressed wondering what Madagascar would have looked like with thick forests everywhere (only 10% of the original forest remains in the country, most of it having been chopped down by the French colonials for mining or agriculture in the first 30 years of colonization), we entered Isalo National Park. This is the most visited park in the country, with up to 30,000 visitors per year before the political crisis in 2009 (now down to about 3,000 but slowly rising again), and it is made up of beautiful rock formations that reminded a lot of us of the southwest of the United States, almost like Bryce Canyon. We hiked in to our campsite 3 km into the park next to a hidden natural pool, which you would never guess existed because the whole area looks so dry and rocky, but amazingly this fantastic little oasis at the bottom of the valley kept on running clear and cool.  We did a small circuit which led us through some rock formations to the next valley where we saw even more rock, as well as the damage inflicted by a huge fire that had burned the main campsite and 600,000 hectares of park.  These fires are not uncommon, especially in drier areas, and are not always caused by local people trying to burn new pastures for their zebu, though this has been an enormous problem throughout Malagasy history.  Quick swim in  the pool, where we did see several other, mostly European, tourist groups.  This was great to see because every tourist group needs a guide, therefore implying some employment for the people in the area.

Mama and baby lemur...taken without zoom!!

We continued on Route Nationale 7 to Anja (AN-za), a community managed park 4 hours east of Isalo.  This park, more than Isalo, seemed like a small island of protected area in a sea of rice paddies and sweet potato and corn fields, but it is famous for the large ringtail lemur groups which live inside its boundaries.  Having arrived late in the day we had to wait to do our little tour of the park, but we all used that time to finish writing up our first Independent Study Project proposals (YIKES!), because in just over one week we’ll all be heading off in different directions to independently study some aspect of Madagascar’s environment, people, culture, etc.  I’m thinking that I’ll be studying the relationship (if there is one at all) between formal schooling and the lifestyle of the fishing people in the Vezo village where Michael Johnson (who I made up that his last name was Mitchell, super strange, but its actually Johnson) lives just south of Tuléar, interviewing kids and adults of varying levels of education on why they went to school, what they want to be when the grow up, etc, and hopefully sitting in on some classes in the local school.  It seems like a crazy amount of logistics to do in a week and a half, but our academic director doesn’t seem too worried that I don’t have a translator or a solid housing plan yet (and neither do a lot of the students).  Real school isn’t as interesting as lemurs, though, so I’m skipping forward and I’m sure I’ll bore you all to tears with the ins and outs of social science studies with my November blog entries, if I have internet access at some point.
Our tour through Anja started out pretty normally, with nice trees and cool looking plants, but we are starting to get used to crazy looking plants and it’s getting to be harder to impress us, which is terrible.  We rounded a corner in the path, and one of our guides pointed up into a tree pretty far away where a ringtail lemur was sitting.  We all kind of oohed and ahhed, but we had seen ringtails before at Berenty which were closer to us and seemed more photogenic than this one individual.  After some people took a couple pictures we kept walking up the path, and all of a sudden the lemurs were everywhere!  There were at least 20 individuals in the trees, on the ground, in bushes, all around us, with a few babies that were just starting to test out their running climbing skills and some groups grooming each other.  We must have sat and tiptoed around the group for at least half an hour (with the guides, who really are habituated to the lemurs, looking more bored by the second) taking a million pictures and having some lemurs throw fruits at us from the trees.  Because they have never been hunted in this area, the lemurs were fearless and some came within 5 or 6 feet of me!  There are about 400 individuals living in groups of between 10 and 20 in the forest, and because it is baby season, there were little guys everywhere.  We eventually had to leave the lemur group to continue on the trail, which led us to a “belle vue” on a rock, but this supposed gorgeous panorama really just showed how small the park really was.  The whole mountain behind us was protected, but the rocky cliffs aren’t really desirable farming areas anyways: the flat, fertile valley ground had almost no forest remaining.  Hiked down as fast as we could to start on the long route to Andringitra National Park, where Peak Boby (Imarivolanitra, almost-touching-the-sky in Malagasy), the second tallest mountain in Madagascar is located.

The view of the mountains and
river/pool next to our campsite
at Andringitra

Americans at the top of Pic Boby

Coolest grasshopper EVER
that we saw on the hike down from
Pic Boby

We had to deviate from the main road for this trip, but the 3 hours on the bumpy road were completely worth it.  We parked the bus at the foot of the mountains, which were really like steps, in that they went up one level, then there was a flat valley, then another level with another flat valley area, and finally up to the peaks.  We were camping in the first valley, so we hiked 3 or 4 km almost straight up the steep first step, passing 2 gorgeous waterfalls and some amazing views until we came to our campsite.  Our tents were set up next to another natural pool in the river, but because we were at such a high altitude it was actually cold (ish) and more alpine, which made me miss Northern California a lot!  The next step of mountains was really huge granite cliffs that could have inspired rock climbers anywhere, but climbing isn’t allowed because they are supposedly too brittle. Slept through a fantastic thunder and lightening storm, and then under beautiful stars, before an early wake up call to climb to the top.  The whole hike took about 5 hours round trip, with plenty of breaks along the way (a few too many breaks for my impatient self), but we were allowed to run up the last bit without the guide, which was awesome.  The views were, once again, mostly all foreign, almost martian looking rock, but we really were almost scraping the sky.  A picture’s worth a thousand words (probably at least 100,000 of my words) so I’ll leave it to the pictures for the rest.  More thunderstorms that evening, and even hail (!), but Mamy (our Malagasy logistics director who is the nicest man in the whole world) surprised us with s’mores ingredients, which was amazing!  The marshmellows were a little funny and kind of tasted like sweet cough medicine, but buttery sugar cookies might out-do graham crackers on the deliciousness scale for s’mores.  We woke up in puddles but to another beautiful sunrise and even fuller waterfalls for our hike out of the park.  Drove to Fianarantsoa, where we’re taking our break before our last bit of family adventure continues in Ranomafana.

Miss you guys so much, and I’m thinking about everyone every day.  Hope your Halloween costumes are ready and your clocks are starting to fall back at the right pace…I’ll try to bring some Madagascar summer back with