Published on Nedbank Green Trust website

Dancing with Lemurs

In Madagascar, everything is unusual. From the quirky lemurs to giant chameleons, neon-coloured frogs and the eerie spiny forest, the island seems to be lost in time and entirely separate from the known world.

Story and photos: Keri Harvey

"Wake up, they're dancing. Three of them together." Through early morning eyes we saw them, sidestepping in the red dust. Then they would turn to face the opposite direction and carry on their sideways dance, arms held high and legs criss-crossing in mid-air with each strange leap. All the time they would stare straight ahead as if in a trance, their black faces mimicking the expression of startled teddy-bears. These are the Sifakas of Berenty. The dancing lemurs of southern Madagascar. They alone are worth the trip.

Sifakas have strangely human proportions and carry their young on their backs. Though they spend most of the day feeding on leaves and shoots in trees, sifakas at times need to cross open ground. This is when they 'dance'. The white furry primates descend the trees and then break into a sideways gallop on their hind legs. This is the only gait they are capable of on the ground, since their feet are designed for clinging to trees and are not at all suited to walking. Sifakas are one of the truly comic animals of Madagascar and with their black eyes and faces and creamy-white bodies, they look like soft children's toys.

"You know, in the very beginning sifakas were plain white," muses our guide Dodi. "Now they have black faces and are said to attack people, but that of course is not true at all." Pleased with our amusement, Dodi continued the legend that a newly-wed sifaka had a fight with her mother-in-law. In anger the mother-in-law hit her through the face, which is why it went black. The sifaka wife vowed revenge on her descendents, which were considered to be us humans.

Berenty Private Reserve is also home to ring-tailed lemurs, which have the swagger of a bandy-legged cat and the temperament and audacity of a monkey. With their tails held straight up, swaying like reeds in the wind, the ring tails filter through the reserve on morning and evening feeding sprees and will steal whatever they can. Not so with the brown lemurs. They're more elusive and stay in the dry gallery forest, though their pig-like grunting can be heard long before they're seen.

Berenty has been welcoming tourists longer than any other place in Madagascar. The 265 hectare reserve is also one of the best protected and most studied forests in the country. Established in 1936 by sisal farmer Henri de Heaulme in order to preserve the gallery forest, WWF awarded him the Getty prize for nature conservation in 1985. The Reserve is now also a focus area for the Wildlife Preservation Trust International, which has been working with the owner to set up a long-term management plan for the reserve. Already a wildlife census has been conducted and non-endemic plants are being removed. These moves are all quite progressive, considering that 80 percent of the Malagasy people live in poverty and conservation is not top of the priority list.

This was evident when hundreds of hectares of spiny forest was cut down and sisal planted in its place, along with aloes and cactus from Mexico. Berenty is the only place in the world where this unique and endangered forest type can be found, yet, ironically, money generated from the resultant farming operations has enabled the preservation of the remaining spiny forest and the lemurs and sifakas of Berenty.

A night walk in the spiny forest feels as if you're on a movie set. The tall spires of thorn-covered woody forest tower into the air, resembling a prehistoric scene, and you'd expect a dinosaur to appear between the spines at any moment. Instead, the forest is quiet and peaceful. Occasionally shining eyes are caught in a torch beam and identified as a grey mouse lemur or a white-footed sportif lemur, both endemic to the area. Because lemurs are so territorial, they're relatively easy to find - especially at night - as they're always in their favourite trees dining of soft leaves.

"In the day, these nocturnal lemurs are tucked up in their tree holes, snug as bugs in a rug. Then at night they come out and jump from tree to tree looking for leaves." Dodi explains that the lemurs living in the spiny forest have extremely soft pads under their feet, so that when they jump from one thorny spine to another, the spines penetrate their soft feet without hurting them. Spines penetrating hard-soled feet would cause the lemurs considerable pain.

Madagascar boasts no less than 50 different species of lemur, and at least 15 species have already gone extinct since the arrival of man on the island 2 000 years ago. The lemurs range in size from the pygmy mouse lemur, which can sit in an egg cup and is possibly the smallest primate in the world, to the piebald teddybear-like indri - weighing in at about seven kilograms.

Indris belong to the same family as sifakas, but live in the montane rainforest of Perinet Reserve in central Madagascar. They share the forest with giant Parson's chameleons - up to two foot long - and an array of neon-coloured frogs, birds and boa constrictors. But unlike the reptiles and amphibians, indris spend their lives high in the forest canopy. They seldom touch earth, and when they do it's to 'eat' soil in order to supplement their mineral levels.

These elusive lemurs have huge territories, which are far too difficult to defend by scent alone - the norm for lemurs. So they use an eerie piecing song to proclaim their whereabouts to each other, and to demarcate their territories to other indri families in the rainforest. Their 'singing' is reminiscent of whale song, with occasional shrill siren calls, and simply doesn't fit the animal's appearance. Most vocal just before dawn, the indris' song is a haunting way to start the day, and leaves an indelible memory of Perinet (Andasibe) - along with tree ferns, traveller's palms, wild trumpet lilies and roses, and a tangle of forest that is the indris' private sanctuary.

Though Madagascar is best known for its unusual wildlife, the island Eden also boasts quite eccentric flora. Most famous and most photographed is the Avenue of Baobabs, near Morondava on the west coast. Africa has one species of baobab - short and squat in stature - but Madagascar is home to another seven species, three of which are found near Morondava. Sunset at the Avenue of Baobabs is sublime, with a display of light and colour hard to match. Yet the locals use the breathtaking Avenue as their regular road. In their zebu-drawn carts they ferry baobab bark to build their houses, baobab fruit for their dinners and baobab water when times are dry.

The town of Morondava is quaint and colourful with roadside stalls selling bright cloths and an assortment of local take-aways and fruit. The people wear big friendly smiles and spend most of the day in the shade - work starts in the late afternoon when it's cooler. Before sunrise until just after dawn is also less hot, and locals fit in a few hours of work before the temperature becomes debilitating. A 5am start saw us on a single outrigger pirogue, heading for the mangroves on the outskirts of town. Herons, bee-eaters, plovers and a kite later, we were hastily heading back to shore and out of the sun. It was only 8am and the town was already settling down to 'shade time'.

In the distance, Chinese junket-style boats were ploughing the coastline, en route to drop off goods further south. Fishermen lay in their beached boats under the shade of palm leaves and dreamed of cool days, and the luke-warm sea licked the coast, slowly eating away at the mainland. Two coastal villages have already been overcome by the waters of the Indian Ocean.

Yet through the mirage of heat and tropical lethargy, staggering poverty and broad smiling faces, is a country and people difficult to define. They exude a magic and a mystery, a roughness and a realness that you both love and loathe at various times. They live in a country that's poor to the bone, yet they've made time and space to conserved its endangered, endearing and often comical wildlife in small well-tended reserves. So it's taboo in certain places to hand an egg directly to a person without first putting it on the ground, or to work in the rice fields on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But it's also taboo to kill a lemur, which is exactly why they're still there. Just where they belong.