To the Red Island

Some call it the Red Island because of its laterite soil, but others prefer the moniker ‘the eighth continent’, owing to the multitude of species of flora and fauna that have evolved here during the millions of years of the island’s isolation. Call it what you want, but Madagascar certainly boasts of plants, animals and particularly, landscapes that can only be seen here, and that is one of the reasons why I embarked on my two-month adventure to this exotic land.

Arriving in Antananarivo or Tana by flight with a friend, we were welcomed at the airport by Christian, who would accompany us for a week to the Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park. Getting there was not going to be straightforward, and in Madagascar, the journey is quite often the destination.

We went to the taxi-brousse station and sat in a sort of bush taxi, waited for nearly two hours for passengers to be stuffed in like sardines and the roof to be loaded with bags until it was almost double its height,  before leaving for Antsirabe. Nobody complained and the people’s patience seemed boundless. The Route Nationale (RN) 7 was in acceptable shape compared to other roads in the country,  and we drove past brick huts that looked exactly like houses that children draw. A scary number of trees had been burnt down to create space for rice cultivation and to feed zebus, two of the Malagasy people’s staples. They practise slash-and-burn agriculture to cater to their insatiable appetite for rice.

Villages many
In Antsirabe, we went to a house which belonged to Lanto, a young guide and tour operator, and were welcomed by his wife Tojo and their children. She cooked us dinner, rice and zebu, of course, and hosted us for the night.

In the morning, Christian took us to his brother’s handmade paper workshop, a well-known product of his
Antaimoro ethnic group. We then took another taxi-brousse to Miandrivazo village and reached in time for an extraordinary sunset. The next morning, yet another taxi-brousse took us to Masiakampy,  where we climbed into a pirogue (a dugout canoe) to float down the Tsiribihina for more than two days.

While rowing down, we encountered fishermen and pirogues transporting food and people. Christian cooked us a sumptuous vegetable, fish and egg salad, and rice with a zebu sauce. After lunch, it got very hot, so we opened our umbrellas for protection. But in the evening it was more pleasant as we entered the Bemaraha gorge, whose wall blocked the sun. We spotted our first lemurs here — beady-eyed baby brown lemurs which frolicked on the rocky gorge wall. We soon reached our campsite, a beach by the river with a beautiful waterfall further inland, which served as a shower.

The next morning, we were off early and visited a small dusty village called Begidro, where kids who were used to Western tourists were perplexed by our appearance, thinking we were some unknown Malagasy ethnic group! It was only when I took my camera out that they came running, calling us vazaha (or foreigners) and asking for sweets, photos and whatnot. In the evening, we saw baobabs for the first time just before reaching our campsite, an enormous stretch of sand by the river. The night sky was clear and dark, and we sipped our rhum arrangé — rum with various ingredients, this time milk, orange and ginger. The next morning, we had just an hour on the pirogue, and I saw a huge crocodile basking on a sandbank in the middle of the river. We soon arrived at a spot where a cart pulled by two zebus awaited us. Riding through a village with people following us, we reached our four-wheel drive in Antsiraraka, which took us across the Manambolo river on a motor-driven platform to Bekopaka.

The next morning, we drove 17 km to the national park entrance. We barely started walking through the dry forest when our guide, Laurent, pointed to lemurs. We saw the white cuddly Decken’s sifakas up on a tree, unperturbed by our presence. The social primates were grooming each other and paused for a few seconds to look at the unexpected visitors before getting back to their business. Inside the forest, we saw more brown lemurs before reaching the tsingy — pointed limestone formations sculpted by the rain. Unlike other limestone blocks that are white, oxidation has turned the tsingy grey.

Sculpted by time
Millions of years ago, Madagascar separated from Africa and its western part was covered by the sea. The Mozambique Channel receded, revealing a flat limestone platform with fossils of corals and sea creatures, with some crevasses. Rain eroded these fissures, thereby creating some strange pointed formations.

Ages ago, the Vazimba tribe that lived here had to walk on tiptoes, which in their language is called ‘tsingy’; hence the name. It was exhilarating to climb these structures with a harness and carabiners. From the belvedere at the summit, I was treated to a spectacular view of a forest of big or grands tsingy. Climbing across the pointed stones, we crossed a bridge suspended around 80-100 metres above an abyss between the tsingy.

We climbed down through narrow passages to the forest and rejoined our car to drive back to Bekopaka. Here we visited the small or petits tsingy, just 15-20 metres high. Although they are less impressive than the grands tsingy, this maze-like area with narrow passageways has interesting flora and fauna like pachypodium and various lizards native to Madagascar.

The next day, we crossed the Manambolo and the Tsiribihina to race across a sandy track to visit a 700-year-old enormous baobab called baobab sacré and a couple of them in a loving embrace called les amoureux. We reached the avenue of the baobabs where tall Grandidier’s baobabs, with their resplendent golden trunks shining in the setting sun, stand like sentinels along the dirt track.

In a week I had used seven modes of transport to visit two unique sites. Madagascar is a complicated country to visit, but the incredible array of landscapes here makes it well worth the effort.