Day 11. Living Painting
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| Zebu
market |
After breakfast we reconfirm our flight from Tulear to Tana
and go on our way to Parque National d'Isalo. The road is beautiful
again and i notice that Madagascar can be best described as a
living painting; everywhere you look you see picturesque villages
in a sloping landscape full of colorful people.
We arrive in the village of Ambalavao from where we'll visit a private reserve. A guide steps into our car. We see a heavily damaged taxibrousse. The guide tells us the driver fell a sleep and drove into a 15 meters deep ravine. Their are no fatalities but many injuries amongst the 15 passengers. Again we're glad we didn't have to deal with the local transport.
We pay a visit the zebu market, the biggest of Madagascar.
There were about 2500 zebus here yesterday, but a lot less today.
That's because they were displayed and selected yesterday, today
they're paid for and loaded up. The price for one zebu is between
120 and 300 euros, depending on the amount and size.
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| Anja Reserve |
Mini reserve Anja consists out of a large amount of big rocks with jungle in between, situated at the foot of a mountain. Ringtail lemurs are living here but were being eaten by the locals, and so, 6 years ago, the area got protected. With success, because the lemur population since then expanded from 175 to 650.
Armed with bananas we walk through this pretty piece of nature and it doesn't take long before the ringtail lemurs show up. Some of them jump on our arms to eat the bananas. There are a lot of them and we take our time to see them perform tricks, fight, and swing through the branches. We take plenty of photos. Some of the lemurs are bathing in the sun - arms and legs spread. We climb up a rock using a liana and we get a wide view on the area.
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| Ringtail Lemur |
We continue our way and are approaching southern Madagascar.
The nature is again different than before with rough mountains.
The vegetation is slowly disappearing and the villages we see
consist out of prefect square, red-brown houses with reed fences.
In front of us a huge massive appears and with the kilometers
long road heading towards it, this must distantly look like
the Grand Canyon.
At a certain point we turn away from the RN7 and follow a short
detour. The reason for the detour is a collapsed bridge which
has been blown up with dynamite during the 2001 commotions.
Today, 3 years later, they're apparently still busy repairing
it.
We stop in Ihosy for a short lunch of Malagasy food: rice with meat and green pepper. The people look at us as if we're complete idiots when we feed the leftovers to a dog. Outside on the street are big speakers from which extremely loud music is playing. We can't hardly hear ourselves talking, but the rest of village is visibly enjoying the music.
As we continue our way, the road promptly stops and changes into a wide sandy path. There's absolutely nothing here but endless field of grass to our left and right.
In the afternoon we arrive in Ranohira, a nondescript, pover
town. There's one hotel, l'Orchidee, with rooms that
resemble mountain chalets. We organize a busy program for
the following 2 days.
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| Road to Isalo |
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