July 8, 2007
We spent a surprisingly social weekend at Ranohira, the village 3 kms from the entrance to Ihosy National Park last weekend. I worry sometimes that we seem insular as a couple and so hard to approach, especially since neither of us is great at accosting complete strangers. But accost them we did; we even stalked them.
We arrived Thursday afternoon after an extra day spent in Fianar while I recovered from a mysterious and fleeting stomach bug. Somewhat to our dismay, we were besieged by men offering to be our guides, instead of being assigned one, as happened at Ranomafana NP, the weekend before. We decided to spend a day reconnoitering and also give David a chance to recover from the cold I'd given him (completely unrelated to the stomach indisposition).
Friday morning, while dithering in front of the map at the ANGAP office, one of our would-be guides mentioned there were two Peace Corps volunteers in town for a month to teach English during their holiday break. One of them even lived in Betroka, a town we were anxious to find more information on, since we wanted to travel through there on our way to Fort Dauphin. David promptly decided we should make use of my Peace Corps ties for the information. So we set about our stalking. We weren't terribly successful. In fact, after asking all and sundry without finding the volunteers, it was Kate and Shelby who found us, with the question: are you the people looking for us? We spent a very pleasant few hours in their hotel room and made plans to meet for dinner after their hike.
Back at our tent for what we thought would be a lazy afternoon, we met Ada, who'd just taken the bungalow behind the area in which we were camped. A Canadian teaching at a business college in the Emirates, Ada proved willing to hike with us the next day, so we bought our park tickets and made arrangements with Daniel, who was to be our guide, to meet at 7 the next morning. Back at Chez Alice, where we were staying, we shared the shaded picnic area with Joon, a travel writer for a Korean paper based in Seoul. The four of us shared a pineapple and oranges while we swapped Madagascar travel stories. We did the same at dinner with Kate and Shelby, though they clearly had more, and more interesting stories. We went to bed at a shockingly late 10 (the sun rises and sets at about 6), tired, but pleased.
Saturday was lovely; hot and sunny enough to thoroughly enjoy the swim in the natural swimming pool we hiked to. It was also cool enough that after our hike across the plateau from the pool, amidst the scrubby brown desert in between boulder-strewn mountains that reminded me of central Utah, we shivered in the shade of the narrow canyon on our way to the blue and black pools. David and I swam again, using a 30 foot waterfall as a masseuse by standing underneath it and letting it pound our backs. Ada decided she'd had enough cold water at the first pool and Daniel lounged on the rocks smoking. He probably thinks all the swimming is silly, anyway.
On our way out of the canyon towards the campground 2 kms from the park entrance, we encountered a troupe of ring tail lemurs. We'd gotten close views of a troupe earlier, on our water stop at the campsite before plunging into the canyon. The lemurs have become habituated to humans at the campsite and there were brown lemurs hanging about as well. One of them was cheeky enough to try stealing some food being set out for a group staying overnight. She was shooed away, but not before she snatched a package of biscuits.
The troupe of ring tails we met on the trail struck me as especially funny. The ring tails are the lemur type most people are familiar with and they look exactly like their pictures. This troupe was walking on all fours, rather like a line of cats, with tails twice the length of their bodies. Sauntering up the middle of the path towards us, they looked for all the world as though they were on their own guided hike, there to gawk at the bizarre primate species that doesn't have enough sense to use their opposable thumbs to leap to the safety of the trees next to the path. But we do have enough sense to have taken several pictures.
