Our final national park was Ranomafana, which is a rainforest park southeast of Tana and east of Fianarantsoa. The drive in was easy, and the boundaries of the park were, once again, pretty crystal clear, with degraded forest coming up to a straight line where the thicker forest started. For a first rainforest ever, the experience was pretty cool! The first evening we did a night walk to find chameleons and frogs, and as a group, we felt the most touristy we’ve felt since we arrived. There were other groups of tourists, and we just walked right along the main road and looked in to the bushes, which didn’t feel too adventuresome, but the actual park interior is closed at night because of wood and lemur poachers. We ended up seeing several species of chameleons and another species of mouse lemur, which was really cool even if it did have to happen right along a paved pathway.
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| Chameleon at Ranomafana |
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| Leaf tailed gecko |
In the morning we went over to the Stonybrook College (SUNY) abroad program base, which is in the national park, and came away really excited that we had picked the program we did. They have a really cool nature experience, but are entirely based in one area without much contact with Malagasy people or culture. They did have running water, a dining hall, and the option to get their laundry done for them, which made us a little jealous for a couple minutes, but wouldn’t trade for it in the end. Took a hike through the rainforest and saw FOUR MORE species of lemurs, which brought our entire count up to 10 species, more than I ever thought I’d see. These ones weren’t too photogenic because of how thick the forest is and how many zillion people there were around also trying to get pictures, so I’m sorry to report that I didn’t get any of these ones. We did, however, see a satanic leaf tailed gecko, which had the most absurd camouflage that I had ever seen. The guide pointed us to the general direction of the gecko, and then had us try to find it, which was so hard! After the hike, we went into a couple villages and interviewed a few people on how the park has impacted their lives. The villagers were not, overall, very happy with the park, which had kicked them off of their land, shown them where to live, told them to do agriculture, asked if there was anything it could provide for them, and then never filled their promises! The woman with which I spoke cited the fact that they had asked for a school seven years ago, and still no results from the park. The guides also said that they worked independently, rather than for the park, because the park managers were corrupt and didn’t pay them nearly as much as they should have: they make as much in two days independently as they would working for the park. Because we had been reading about all the community based projects with protected areas and the focus on helping the people, it was really good to get a realistic view into how the park system currently works, and how much room for improvement there is in community relations.
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One of the adorable kids at the
orphanage wearing Gracie's sunglasses |
Left Ranomafana for the 10 hour drive to Tana on a pretty windy, but luckily well paved, road, arriving at night for the most american dinner we’d had all trip! It was Elizabeth’s birthday, so we ate at an Italian restaurant with pizza and pasta and then had chocolate cake for dessert, which felt unreal! It turned out that most of our Tana week has been like that: the city definitely shows signs of globalization, but luckily no health codes have come in to stop people from selling delicious street food (the best mango’s I’ve ever had for less than 10 cents each). We had a few lectures about the economy and poverty, talking about how the huge informal sector (street vendors to farmers) of the economy hampers the overall growth of the country, but the formal sector of the economy isn’t really stable or lucrative enough for people to get one job and keep it, unless they’re all the way at the top. Some more about medicinal plants (we all feel like experts now), but mostly just working on our papers and getting our independent study project logistics together. We did visit an environmental, education based orphanage, which was a really great experience and the kids, who had originally come from abusive families or been exonerated from the corrupt judicial system, were all incredibly cute, friendly and smart, and now all I want to do is start an orphanage when I get back to the states!
We also got to visit Andasibe, on the way to which we went to a reptile zoo/farm thing and saw huge chameleons. At Andasibe, which is another national park, we saw the Indri Indri lemur, which is the largest lemur left in Madagascar, some other sifaka species, and a really beautiful orange lemur. Of course my camera was out of batteries for that!!
People started leaving for their ISPs yesterday, and the last four of us are leaving in about 5 minutes for Tulear, which is a 20 hour trip on taxi-brousse, so should be fun! I’m staying south of Tulear and studying education and living in a fishing village, so no internet or posts for a while, but as soon as I get in to town I’ll hopefully have more to say about that!
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