July 25, 2007
Only a mad gardener could have designed the valley in which we camped for the last five nights. There was a huge diversity of flora: water plants with leaves as big as bath towels; fan palms; tall, slender rainforest trees with only leaves at the top; tall tubular cacti covered in fleshy green ovals, each hiding a thorn; pretty trees that dropped spiked balls, which when dried reveal barbed thorns (I dubbed them painful velcro); split personality botany, which grows a thick tree trunk and halfway up bows down to the ground becoming a vine; pad cacti, similar to the ones, with which I grew up; and much, much more. The fauna was just as impressive: butterflies, lemurs, ducks, sunbirds, lizards (one with a black body, white spots and a shiny copper-colored tail). Best of all, each night hundreds of egrets loudly arrived, squalking and pecking at each other, until they were all spaced equidistant to each other, pretending they hadn't just squabbled like a huge, grumpy family and then slept. The gardener's results were sublime.
The area is called Tsimelahy in Andohahela National Park (recently made a UNESCO world heritage site) and properly termed a transitional forest, the confluence of rainforest and spiny desert. Our tent was pitched in a purpose built clearing with fire pits and stone paths. One short path led to a natural swimming pool about 150 meters in diameter and was flanked by gently sloping waterfalls. The soft roar from the falls was heard from every point in camp (and some distance beyond) in a slightly different way. It was paradise and the (nearly) perfect place to repair and recover from extented travel.
Leah needed the repair more urgently, since on our first day there, without apparent cause, she suffered disabling back pain. She lay flat either in the tent or on one of the shaded picnic benches by the pool, only moving to inch her way with a makeshift cane back and forth and to the bathroom--I offered to carry her, but she absolutely refused and it probably would have hurt her more, anyway. At length, she recovered with time, yoga stretches and hot compresses made from the boiled bark of a special tree that one of the friendly park rangers, Charles, collected from the forest. (Charles carefully explained to us that he was responsible for everything in the forest, which for the moment included us.)
Charles and another ranger, Jean, led me to see lemurs one morning before they woke and left to forage for the day. The six lemurs, balled in three pairs for warmth, were adorable, mostly white fur with black or brown caps, black ear tuffs, palms and faces. Some had faint red-brown-orange patches on their chests. On the walk back, Charles picked mountain oranges and gave me four. Their scent was so good they seemed fake.
At the end of the week and with our food supplies nearly depleted, Jean carried Leah's pack back to the entrance, in case she had any lingering problems, where Charles had arranged for seats in a taxi-brousse to return us directly to Fort Dauphin for our flight on Saturday to Isle Sainte Marie.
Kudos to the mad gardener.
