From LemurstoLikoma

We landed in Tana and headed straight east toward Andasibe and our stay at Vakona, with a guide who seemed determined to explain the whole country before we got there.

He covered nickel and cobalt mining, and the vanilla, spices and bananas that leave through the eastern port. He told us about the Merina, the people of the highlands around Tana, and about cockfighting as a local pastime. Then, somewhere between the rice fields and the roadside stalls, he moved on to the afterlife. Famadihana is the highland custom in which families open the ancestral tomb, rewrap the remains in fresh cloth, and celebrate with music, food and every relative who can make it. He said it happens every seven years, though as far as we could tell the timing depends on the family. Either way, it is not something you forget once you have heard it described.

The names and places arrived faster than we could write them down.

At the Peyrieras reserve the subjects finally held still. Chameleons, frogs, leaf-nosed snakes, and the comet moth with its long trailing tails, displayed alongside its own larvae. It is a managed collection rather than wild forest, and that turned out to be useful. It showed us exactly what we would spend the next week trying to find among the leaves.

Around Moramanga we stopped for coffee, an ATM and a SIM card, and came away with local cash and some kind of signal. By evening we were at Vakona, at the edge of the forest, meeting a young guide for our first night walk.

Breakfast was at 6:00, and a little after 7:00 we were walking into the forest behind a local guide.

Then we heard the indri.

The call is a long, rising wail that carries an astonishing distance through the trees, and the animals answer one another across the forest. We had listened to recordings before the trip, and they had not prepared us. Standing underneath while a family sang overhead was something else entirely. We had time to watch them, listen to them and photograph them, and we used every minute of it.

We also found sifakas and a kingfisher. The giraffe weevil, high on our list, stayed hidden. So did my favorite floppy hat, which I managed to lose somewhere on that walk and never saw again. One elusive insect and one permanently elusive hat.

In the afternoon we took a canoe around Vakona’s Lemur Island, which is home to a lively population of ring-tailed lemurs that seemed entirely unbothered by visitors. Afterwards we walked beside the crocodile pond, where we were told more than thirty crocodiles live on a diet of zebu meat, and crossed a small bridge to see ducks and other birds kept in pens.

At 5:30 we went out again with the young guide from the night before, and came back at 7:30 to a breakfast that did not improve the morning. It was a basket of bread, some of it still raw in the middle, a pot of coffee and a single cup of yogurt.

We were on the road by 8:15. At Antsapanana the fruit stalls brought the color back, piled high alongside bundles of cinnamon and vanilla. Lunch was less inspired. We are vegetarian, and on a Malagasy roadside that tends to mean whatever can be made without meat. Pizza and samosas it was, and the samosas had absorbed a truly remarkable amount of cooking oil.

There had already been a booking puzzle. Palmarium has a beach property and a reserve, and we had been told the reserve was only available the following night. We pushed back. Lilia, who was handling our arrangements, checked again and found rooms at the reserve for both couples. We gave up a night we had already paid for elsewhere, and we did not regret it.

We reached the boat landing at about 2:40, believing the boat had been due at 2:00. Our guide assured us he was in touch with the boatmen. Our bags were carried down to a nearly empty beach, where a handful of other travelers were waiting, and within minutes the boat came around the point.

We reached Palmarium at about 5:00. After dark came the aye-ayes.

The staff told us that aye-ayes have been killed for generations, both as omens of bad luck and as raiders of coconut plantations. Here they live on a small island cut off by a channel, nine of them at the time of our visit. Coconuts are put out for them, and they come in to feed within five to fifteen feet of where you stand.

It is a staged viewing, and we knew that going in. It is also an aye-aye, close enough to see everything: the enormous ears, the round staring eyes, the coarse fur and the impossibly long, thin middle finger. Nothing else alive looks quite like it.

We walked back through the dark very pleased that we had argued for the reserve.

After breakfast at 7:15 we set out on the morning lemur walk, and the list filled up almost faster than we could keep track. The reserve’s lemurs live close to people and are easy to see. Common brown, red-bellied, black-and-white ruffed, black and crowned lemurs, the indri again, and one the guide described as a cross between a black lemur and a common brown.

The smaller residents were just as photogenic. A giant green day gecko, a young panther chameleon, a reed frog and a spiny-tailed iguana all posed for the cameras. We also learned the name ravenala for the traveler’s palm, which fans out like a giant green peacock’s tail and seemed to appear in every second photograph from then on.

At 2:00 a boat took us to Andranokoditra, a fishing village close to where the canals meet the Indian Ocean. A local band called Lalutina, together for almost twenty-five years, welcomed us with a song. Before long the audience was being pulled in to join, and the afternoon ended with a bottle-balancing act. After two days of staring up into trees, it was a pleasure to watch people instead.

At 6:00 we went back out with Ricco, the reserve’s guide and manager. In the dark he found us an eastern woolly lemur with a baby, along with small chameleons, frogs and geckos, including a white-lipped frog and an Oustalet’s chameleon.

Dinner was at about 8:45. Halfway through, Ricco reappeared at our table. He had found a fat-tailed dwarf lemur and wanted to take us to it. We left our plates and went straight out after him, but by the time we reached the spot it had gone.

Ricco was more disappointed than we were. He had wanted so much to show us the night lemurs that he kept looking long after the walk had officially ended, and that told us more about him than any sighting could have.

The plan was to leave at 6:30. We made it by 7:00, with the whole long way back to Tana ahead of us.

We had looked at flying out of Toamasina instead, the port city many people still call Tamatave. It would have meant about four hours by boat, an evening flight and roughly $300 each. It did not buy us a better day, so we stayed with the road.

On the water we spotted what we think was a Madagascar pratincole on a small island, and a striated heron along the bank. Then the boat engine stalled, and for a few anxious minutes the long drive ahead stopped being our biggest concern. Reaching it became the question.

The engine coughed back to life. Our guide told us about the Betsimisaraka, the people of the east coast, as we rejoined the road and settled into a rhythm of coffee stops and toilet stops. We passed through a busy market town full of color and people, while a steady procession of container trucks and fuel tankers ground its way between the capital and the port.

The road itself was a puzzle. It is a paved highway, but every so often it opens into a crater that we were convinced could swallow a Volkswagen Beetle whole. Even fully loaded trucks had to slow to a crawl and bend their way around them. By the time we reached Tana that evening we had learned the most important rule of Malagasy travel, which is that distance tells you almost nothing about time.

Pascale Eric, our driver in Tana, collected us at 6:30. The charter left at 7:40 and touched down at the Amborodia airstrip about an hour and a half later, where two cars were waiting to take us the rest of the way.

Our guide introduced himself as TV, which is short for Tovonasy. We drove through Bekopaka to the Soleil des Tsingy, dropped our bags in the room and went straight back out to the river.

On the Manambolo the local boats are pirogues, long and narrow dugouts that families use for fishing and getting around. For visitors they lash two of them together side by side, which turns them into a surprisingly steady little catamaran. We settled into our pair and drifted into the gorge.

This was our first look at the limestone, seen from below. The same rain that carves the Tsingy’s needles on top has also cut caves, cracks and passages through the rock underneath, and the river runs right past their mouths. A fish eagle circled overhead while we drifted.

After sunset, at about 5:45, we went out on an evening walk and found chameleons and a sportive lemur peering out of its tree.

We were in the dining room at 5:00 for coffee, bananas and cheese, with packed breakfasts for the road. On the way out we picked up two porters in the village, one for the two of us and one for Jayesh and Sangita, and by 7:45 we were standing at the trailhead.

The Grand Tsingy is not a place where the camera gets all of your attention. The trail threads between grey limestone blades, squeezes through narrow gaps, crosses bridges strung over the drops and climbs to platforms that look out across a whole forest of stone. You learn quickly to look at where your hand is going first, then at where your foot is going, and only after both are settled at the view.

The rock looks as if someone spent centuries carving it by hand, and the edges are razor sharp. We were very glad of the porters, and especially of the camera gear they carried through passages where we needed both hands for ourselves.

Later that afternoon a tiny mouse lemur appeared, small enough to sit comfortably in a cupped palm.

At 5:30 we walked up to the high point near the hotel to watch the sun rise in the east. A thin layer of cloud lay along the horizon, and the sun showed itself first through a narrow slit before climbing free above it like an orange bowl. It was well worth getting out of bed for.

We started the Petit Tsingy circuit at about 8:00, birdwatching first. A fish eagle sat far off and left the moment we got closer, but green pigeons and lovebirds were happy to stay near the lake. We followed the outer loop down to the river and ate lunch on the bank, watching paired pirogues bring other visitors back from the caves and the old burial sites.

Then we turned into the inner route. “Petit” sounds reassuring, and some of those passages most certainly were not. My fingerless gloves earned their place in the bag that day, protecting my palms on the sharp rock while leaving my fingers free for the camera. We were rewarded with three Decken’s sifakas, bright white against the grey stone, and a pachypodium, the elephant-foot plant, with its swollen trunk planted firmly in the limestone.

Back at the lodge we fell into a long conversation with Randy, a photographer from Calgary. We compared notes on offline maps and on Starlink for staying connected on the move, and then, as photographers always do eventually, moved on to RAID storage and where on earth to keep all the pictures.

The charter lifted off at 8:00 and landed in Morondava at 8:50. Those fifty minutes in the air were far easier than the drive it had taken to reach the airstrip.

Alex was waiting for us at the airport. Morondava, he told us, is home to about 80,000 people, and after the villages of the Tsingy it felt like a city. We drove out on a paved road for a while before turning onto the rough track toward Kirindy, and arrived in time for lunch at 12:30. I settled into the main lodge, where the Wi-Fi lived, while the electricity followed a schedule we never fully worked out.

Alex trains guides as well as leading tours, and he explained the west beautifully. The east of Madagascar is wet rainforest. Out here the forest is dry and deciduous, and through the long dry season much of it stands bare and dusty. That makes the animals easier to spot, and we could already see it would give our photographs a completely different look. By day we could hope for red-fronted brown lemurs and Verreaux’s sifakas, he said, and after dark for smaller lemurs on the night walks.

He called Madagascar the eighth continent, not because of geology but because so much of its life exists nowhere else on earth.

The long drive also gave him time to tell us about zebu, courage and marriage, about circumcision and the ancestors. He described savika, a form of zebu wrestling in the southern highlands, in which young men grab hold of a bull’s hump and hang on to prove their nerve, and a circumcision ceremony that one eastern community holds only once every seven years. Each story, as far as we could tell, belonged to a particular people in a particular place.

After breakfast we set out at 6:30 with Vera, one of Alex’s former students, and he gave us a generous morning. Verreaux’s sifakas and red-fronted brown lemurs, a red-tailed sportive lemur dozing in a tree hole, couas and vangas, a mesite, parrots, sunbirds and doves, and a flat-tailed tortoise making its slow way across the path.

What we did not see was a fossa.

So we started asking around. Other visitors had seen fossa near the forest entrance, and the word was that meat thrown out near the rubbish sometimes drew them in. We even asked at the restaurant by the forest entrance whether any would be thrown out, and were told there would be none the following morning. We were not exactly wildlife purists that evening, and we will not pretend otherwise.

The evening walk near the lodge found us a snake and several mouse lemurs. That guide, too, had been one of Alex’s students, and Alex was clearly proud of every one of them. At the end of the walk the guide offered to take us out again the next morning, with a chance of an owl and more besides, at Ar60,000 each. We said no. Those early hours were already spoken for.

Neeta was firm about it. Right after sunrise we would go to the Kirindy entrance, before breakfast, and give the fossa one more chance. Vololona, the lodge manager, backed her completely and promised us breakfast whenever we got back, however late that turned out to be.

Over dinner we told Alex and rebuilt the next day around the plan. Instead of leaving at 2:00 and catching the baobab sunset on the way into Morondava, we would make the fossa attempt, come back for breakfast, move to the Palissandre Côte Ouest in Morondava, and then drive back out for the sunset. It meant more driving, but it also meant the best hours of the morning would go to the animal we had come for.

We started with sunrise among the baobabs close to the lodge, and I took the best pictures I could while wondering how they would hold up against the famous Avenue nearer Morondava. The moment we had finished, Neeta wanted to get moving.

Alex had his concerns. The forestry fee would be Ar55,000 each, he told us, and he suggested stopping first at the Relais du Kirindy so the drivers could have their breakfast. We asked to go straight to the forest. Vololona had promised to feed us when we returned, and the fossa were not going to wait for anybody’s breakfast.

The forest entrance is a drive on from the Relais, with its own small lodge and a restaurant. After the turnoff from the main road, the last four kilometers seemed to go on forever.

At the entrance, Alex borrowed Neeta’s binoculars and looked down the road. A man in dark clothes was walking toward us, and something was trotting along behind him. From that distance it looked for all the world like a man out walking his dog.

Then Alex turned around and said, “Jump out of the car.”

It was a fossa.

I started shooting as we walked toward it, not knowing how it would react. The first frames were soft, because the camera was still set up for the night before, I was moving, and there was no time to think. Then a driver started leaning on the horn of his SUV, again and again. The fossa turned away into the trees, and the dry branches closed in front of it.

Another guide waved us back and around the building, and we hurried after the chance, found some clearer angles, and watched the animal cross the road and disappear.

That alone would have made the morning. Then Neeta spotted three more around the cabins behind the restaurant. Two lighter ones slipped quietly away into the forest, while a darker one stayed close and soon drew a crowd of cameras and phones, ours among them. At one point it seemed to be searching for a gap between the people so it could leave. We got our photographs, and in hindsight we should have given it more room.

The man in dark clothes, it turned out, was Vera, our guide from the morning before. He wasn’t carrying any food. The fossa had simply fallen in behind him on the road. These fossa come around the lodge and restaurant at the entrance, where there is food waste, so this was not a chance meeting deep in untouched forest. They were still wild fossa, though, walking where they pleased.

We paid the Ar220,000 for the four of us, gave Vera a tip, and went back for the breakfast Vololona had promised. We took photographs with her before setting off for Morondava, very happy people.

Through a friend we had been introduced to Danil, who owns property in Morondava, and he insisted we visit the Centre Écotouristique du Menabe, the CEM. It turned out to be the surprise of the day. Young guides walked us through the woodworking shop, the sewing and embroidery rooms, and the areas where artisans make bags and weave baskets. The center trains local craftspeople, including people with disabilities, and meeting the makers was a pleasure. Danil’s group is closely connected to the center, and he deserves real kudos for it. Training local artisans, and making room for people with disabilities, is a genuinely progressive way to think about what tourism can do for a town. Naturally, we ended up buying. We could have bought a great deal more, if not for the luggage limits on the small planes ahead and the piles of things already waiting at home from previous trips.

We checked into the Palissandre Côte Ouest, had lunch, rested for a while and went back out at 4:30.

At the Avenue of the Baobabs my problem turned out to be wonderfully ordinary. Shrubs. They kept interrupting the clean horizon I wanted beneath those enormous trees, and I walked back and forth until I finally found an angle that worked, then caught the sunset and the soft light that followed. All around us, loud music, dancers and acrobats had turned the Avenue into something close to a fairground.

After dinner Danil sent someone to bring us to his villa, which was furnished with pieces from the craft center, and later drove us back to the hotel himself.

It had been a very long day, and Neeta had her fossa.

We left the hotel at 4:45 and reached the Avenue at about 5:30, by which time red had already been spilling across the eastern sky for ten minutes. To the west, a nearly full moon still hung above the baobabs.

The night before, I had asked ChatGPT where to stand for sunrise, and it drew me some beautiful pictures with the sun rising straight down the line of the Avenue. In the field, the real position of the sun decided things, along with the shrubs, the water and the paths. We scouted several spots before finding a flooded patch that gave us reflections and light coming through the trunks, and I tried to catch the bicycles and zebu carts as they passed. Being at a famous place at the perfect moment, it turns out, does not hand you the picture you imagined. It was more stressful than we expected.

We started back toward Morondava at about 6:30 for the drive of forty-five minutes or so, stopping at the town sign by the beach. After breakfast we walked along the shore, and Neeta stood at the edge of the retreating waves, shoes and all, and lifted seawater in her cupped hands to the sun.

Vendors kept us company for most of the walk. One enterprising woman had small T-shirts printed with lemurs and “Madagascar” laid out for our grandchildren almost before we had asked, and Jayesh bought some too. Nearby, fishermen were bringing in the morning’s catch.

At 10:00 we left for the airport. Our checked duffles were fine at ten and twelve kilos. The trouble was what we were carrying by hand, about fifteen kilos in my backpack, laptops included, and ten more in the camera bag. Then we discovered our tickets were business class, which meant a shorter line, a quick reshuffle of laptops into Neeta’s bag, and no extra charges at all.

A sixteen-seat plane was sitting on the apron while more than fifty people waited. Alex had told us there was only one flight out, so for a moment we thought that was it. It wasn’t. Once we were on board, rows 18 and 19 turned out to be at the very back, behind a curtain. Business class was at the back of the plane, something neither of us had ever seen before.

We landed in Tana at about 1:15, and Pascale Eric was waiting again, this time with a new guide named John, whose Malagasy name is Herijaona. At 2:30 we set off on a tour of the city.

John had a real gift for explaining things, and he made Tana make sense from the top down. The Rova and the Upper City on the hill were the royal heart of the old kingdom. On the slopes below stood the historic houses, the churches and the Prime Minister’s palace, and down in the valley were the markets, the government buildings, the railway station and the Avenue de l’Indépendance.

At the Queen’s Palace he explained why the building materials mattered so much. The original palace was wooden, built by the Frenchman Jean Laborde, and the stone shell came later from the Scottish missionary James Cameron. In highland tradition, wood belonged to the living and stone to the tombs of the dead. Fire gutted the palace in 1995, and John pointed out the newer stones among the old ones, each a slightly different shade.

He walked us through the kingdom’s long dance with Europe. Radama I welcomed the British missionaries, Ranavalona I banned Christianity, and later queens converted. Then the French took the island and sent the last queen, Ranavalona III, into exile. She died in Algeria in 1917.

Through all of it John kept coming back to family. Ancestors, circumcision, marriage and famadihana were all held together by fihavanana, a word for kinship and the obligations people owe one another.

And then there was Borneo. Malagasy belongs to the same language family as the languages of southern Borneo, and the island’s earliest settlers came from that part of the world. We had been to Borneo, and here we were at the other end of that ancient voyage.

Traffic made the drive back slow. We had planned a farewell dinner with Jayesh and Sangita, but they had an early airport run to pack for and decided to skip it, so we said our goodbyes and promised each other the next adventure.

The two of us took a hotel taxi to dinner. The rooftop was closed, so we ate downstairs in a busy room, and halfway through the meal the lights dimmed for someone’s birthday. Candles, singing and applause, ours included. Then back to the hotel for an early night.

We were both up at 5:00, me to work and Neeta to catch up on her calls. The hotel Wi-Fi and our VPN needed the usual negotiation, which goes something like this: get one working, add the other, and hope they both stay up.

Then came the Kenya eTA for our stopover on the way home. We had needed one for the Nairobi transit on the way out too, and had been through exactly the same dance before leaving home, which I had somehow never written down. This time I took notes.

Uploading the documents and photos went smoothly enough. To pay, I had to confirm two tiny test charges on my credit card, and to see those charges I opened my bank’s app, which immediately demanded an update. The hotel Wi-Fi worked fine on the laptop but refused to download the update to the phone. So I tried the bank’s website instead, entered my username and password, and was asked to approve the login with a push notification. Sent, of course, to the app I was trying to update.

Eventually I got in, only to find the charges had not appeared yet. When they finally did, it turned out the form did not want the amounts at all. It wanted a three-character code from the transaction description. I paid in the end, and it took most of the morning. That sequence deserves a blog post of its own.

We checked out at 2:00 and shared a car to the airport with a man from outside Dallas who works with Mercy Ships, the hospital ships that bring free surgery to ports around the world. Some of the crew live aboard for years, he told us, while surgeons join for a few weeks at a time. It was an absorbing conversation.

That evening we said goodbye to Madagascar and flew to Nairobi for the night.

We left Nairobi at 6:15 and landed in Lilongwe at 7:10 local time, after setting our watches back an hour for Malawi. From there a small plane carried us on to Likoma Island, out in the middle of Lake Malawi.

At Kaya Mawa we were looked after by Foster, who took care of meals, plans and everything in between. She grew up in Mbungo, the village that is home to Katundu, the workshop that supplies much of the lodge’s craftwork.

Our room was called Nkhwezi, which we were told means fish eagle. It had corners that made you want to sit down and stay, a small round pool, and an outdoor bathroom that was open to the trees and still completely private, with birds calling all around. After two weeks of early starts and long drives, simply staying in one place felt like a luxury of its own.

Many of the things in the room had come from Katundu, from the chandeliers to the textiles to small details everywhere we looked. The workshop trains and employs local artisans, most of them women, who work with recycled glass and reclaimed metal. Katundu, we learned, means luggage. We visited the workshop and met the people making the pieces.

We also went to St Peter’s Cathedral, built between 1903 and 1911 by Anglican missionaries and far larger than you would ever expect on a small island. Our guide explained where people sit on Sundays, who leads the services, and the small chapel kept aside for private prayer.

We finished at the market, where a small dried lake fish caught our eye. Our notes call it utsiba, though we suspect it was usipa.

At 8:30 we set out by boat with Lucas at the helm and Foster along with us, to go around the island and snorkel.

We passed Mbungo and the Mango Tree lodge, then followed a shoreline of villages, rocks and small bays. A fish eagle sat in a tree by the water, the very bird our room was named for, and it obliged us by staying put for photographs.

Foster named each place for us as we went by, like a chaperone introducing us to her neighbors: Khuyu, Ulisa and the Ulisa Bay Lodge, Makulawe up in the rocky north, Yofu, Menjia, and Bamba near the cathedral. A new jetty was going up along the way.

We snorkeled off a small island, and after two weeks of carrying cameras through forests and over limestone, it was a real pleasure to float in a lake and carry nothing at all.

After breakfast we said goodbye to Rob and Frank from the Kaya Mawa team, whose office has a baobab growing straight up through the roof, built right into the entrance. After all our efforts to frame baobabs in Madagascar, it made a fitting last picture.

At 9:15 we left for the airstrip, where Mhape, the pilot who had flown us in, was ready to fly us out. Bad weather in Lilongwe had held up his flight the day before from 2:00 until 5:00, so leaving early felt like the right call.

In Lilongwe the fuel shortage was impossible to miss. We passed stations with no petrol at all, stations with long queues, and stations where people waited simply because a delivery was rumored to be on its way. Our driver had spent three hours in a queue the day before. Five liters from an informal seller, he told us, now cost about MK75,000, compared with around MK30,000 normally. He talked about tobacco, maize and cotton, and about the shortage of foreign currency that makes imported fuel so hard to pay for, while the queues outside the window made his point for him.

At the Kamuzu Banda Mausoleum our guide explained the four pillars of Banda’s rule: Unity, Loyalty, Obedience and Discipline. There were lions everywhere, for the man known as the Lion of Malawi. He spoke warmly about the Indian traders who once carried everyday necessities out to the villages, a detail that felt personal to us.

Banda’s own story is an unusual one. He earned a medical degree at Meharry in Tennessee in 1937, trained further in Scotland, and came home in 1958 to lead the push for independence, which came in 1964. Two years later he was president, and in time president for life, with little tolerance for anyone who disagreed. It took the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter of 1992, a referendum in 1993 and an election in 1994 to bring that era to an end. The mausoleum tells the first half of the story.

We stopped for Indian tea and a cappuccino at the President hotel beside the convention center, then went on to the National War Memorial Tower, where a volunteer guide gave us his own account of the country’s history before we climbed to the top for a view out over the city.

We skipped one last souvenir stop and reached the airport at about 3:00. Check-in was painless. Our last kwacha went on a single chocolate bar, which came to about $8.

The 4:45 to Nairobi was delayed. The estimate slipped to 7:00, and in the end we took off at about 6:15.