Festival of Wildlife - Expert Blog - Jonathan Scott
Angie and I just completed a remarkable safari to Madagascar as participants in Wildlife Worldwide's 5th annual Festival of Wildlife, bringing together wildlife photographers, artists and journalists and guests for a week of workshops, lectures and game walks. Highlights of the Festival were visits to Andasibe-Mantadia National Park where we enjoyed close encounters with lemurs and the incredible vocal chorus of the indri, followed by three days enjoying the rocky coastline and sandy beaches around Anjajavy in the company of fish eagles and sacred giant baobabs. We then departed on an extension with nine of the Festival participants - many of them old friends from previous journeys - to a number of key locations around Madagascar to give us a better understanding of the incredible diversity of landscapes and wildlife that the country has to offer visitors.
This was our first visit to Madagascar, an island nation the size of France lying 200 miles off the east coast of Africa. Famed for its lemurs and giant chameleons, many of Madagascar's animals and plants are endemic - unique to the island. My overriding impression of Madagascar was biased by National Geographic images of a heavily eroded landscape, an island that bore stark testimony to the ravages of its human inhabitants. Ninety per cent of the island's forest cover has vanished since humans arrived here from Malaysia to the east and Africa in the west barely 2,500 years ago. As we flew over the interior of the country on a crystal clear day we were offered a stark reminder of the damage that man has perpetuated here - rolling green hills that were once cloaked in a swathe of rain forest now whittled down to the occasional patch of trees in the valleys or along the hill tops.
As we drove from the airport at Antananarivo to our hotel I soon realised that Madagascar was nothing like I had expected. I had travelled from our home in Kenya with thoughts of Africa very much to the fore, instead we were greeted by sights, sounds and people who overwhelmingly reminded me of the role Malaysia has played in moulding Madagascar's culture on this part of the island. Rice fields and substantial brick-built houses dominated the landscape - all green and watery with ducks and cattle grazing the lush rice fields. Many of the people spoke French as easily as their native Malagasy, and our hotel boasted a patisserie with mouth-watering pastries and home made chocolate and ice cream to compete with anything you might find in a Parisian boulevard cafe.
Like everyone who visits the island, Angie and I had come in search of lemurs of which there are nearly 200 species once the 'splitters' among the scientific community have given a name to them all. We were not to be disappointed. All of us were captivated by these irresistible woolly-coated creatures that resemble monkeys 'without the attitude', and bear witness to the islands genesis dating back to the break up of the ancient continent of Gondwanaland some 160 to 180 million years ago. Separating first from Africa then India, Madagascar eventually became marooned in the Indian Ocean, an island paradise and evolutionary wonderland boasting a myriad of unique animals and plants. Nothing epitomises this process more clearly than the gentle lemurs that look more like a child's favourite bedtime toy than the real life, flesh and blood creatures that peered back at us with large liquid eyes.
Madagascar is not big game country in the manner of East Africa. In fact as you travel across the island by road - and what a gift the well maintained tarmac highways are for anyone who has travelled Kenya's battered road network - there are landscapes here that remind one of the American West. You half expect a posse of cowboys and Indians to gallop into view. There are grassy savannas too, a vision right out of the Mara-Serengeti - but without the massed herds of wild animals. Madagascar's wide open spaces are recent creations by evolution's ancient standards, and the closest you are going to get to large grass eating animal are the impressive herds of zebu cattle owned by the Bara people who are renowned cattle herders. We met an army of these striking hump-backed and dewlapped bovines winding their way along a country road on our drive to Ranohira.
Some of the best places to see lemurs - such as at Ranomafana National Park - are deep within the countries tropical rain forests. Here rain is an almost daily event, and the guides get weary of reminding you of that fact as you pull on your rain gear and a sturdy pair of boots. It is walking and hiking country - no safari wagons filled with camera toting tourists. The emphasis is on the details rather than the larger-than-life lions and elephants found on East Africa's more crowded safari circuits. Giant stick insects and chameleons the size of your hand bring gasps of wonder from visitors, and for birders there's the chance to notch up numerous 'lifers' as you peer up into the leafy canopy or across the grasslands.
One of the highlights of our extension was a visit to the Centre ValBio - the International Training Centre for the Study of Biodiverstity - nestled among the rain forest at the entrance to Ranomafana. By chance we bumped into Anja Deppe over drinks at the Domaine Nature Hotel where we were staying. Angie and I had met Anja in Kenya a year earlier and she kindly invited our group to the Centre for an illuminating overview of Madagascar, highlighting some of the challenges the country faces in trying to balance the needs of its people while conserving as much as possible of its unique fauna and flora. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on earth and at times it shows. But for all the poverty there is a heart-warming gentleness and friendliness towards visitors, the dignity of the human spirit shining through the grim reality of life lived at the edge.
Our final destination was the village of Ranohira with two nights at the luxurious hotel of Renes de L'Isalo. On our penultimate day we set our alarm clocks for a 4.30am wakeup so that we could enjoy the cooler temperatures around sunrise for our morning walk through Isalo National Park. The scenery was reminiscent of the American West, a massive landscape of sandstone carved by the wind and rain into a stunning theatre of shapes. Our 3 km walk terminated where a crystal clear stream cascaded over rocks to form a plunge pool of the purest fresh water, allowing us the opportunity to wallow away the heat and dust. The following morning we departed for Zombitse Forest where we spent two wonderful hours in the company of a pair of irrepressible ring-tailed lemurs that had started life as household pets in a nearby village. Habituated to the presence of people the lemurs enchanted us with their lively antics, leaping in and out of the bus that had been our daytime home for the past week. Not content with that, they proceeded to pilfer tit-bits from our brightly coloured picnic baskets, leaping onto our heads or piggy-backing on our rucksacks as we wandered along the narrow pathways leading through their forest home, tumbling along the soft sandy pathways and leaping like gymnasts from tree to tree.
The quality of our guides in Madagascar was superb and we were fortunate to enjoy the company of Hery Adrianiantefana and his team of guides throughout the Festival. During our extension we were escorted by Rija Ratotonirina who was simply the best - able to answer all our many questions as well as being attentive and considerate to all our varied needs.
Click here for the main Festival of Wildlife 2008 Blog.
