Published in SA 4x4 magazine

Mad, Strange World

If you're looking to do something completely different, experience something weird and wonderful, Madagascar is the place to go. It's a rough trip, but you will see a place so unusual, you'll think you're on another planet.

Story: Keri Harvey

A 4x4 vehicle is an absolute must in Madagascar. But not always for its intended purpose. In the capital you need it to bear down on traffic and intimidate lesser vehicles into giving you a gap. You'd be excused for believing you'd arrived in traffic hell, as Renaults and Citroens in varying degrees of disrepair clog the narrow streets, and tempers fray in the heat. This is Antananarivo, an enormous sprawling city of multi-coloured, multi-storeyed houses clinging desperately to the hillsides. In between on lower, more level areas are rice paddies, resembling patchwork quilts in shades of green.

Antananarivo is home to two million of the country's 14 million people and is rated by many travellers as one of the most charming Third World cities. The colours are vibrant, though permanently shrouded in pollution, and the atmosphere is buzzing. But you don't visit Madagascar for the city life or impressive traffic jams.

This Indian Ocean island has of the most unique and eccentric fauna and flora to be found anywhere on earth. That's really why you go there. Dancing sifakas, piebald indris, lemurs aplenty; tangled rainforests, surreal spiny forests; avenues of baobabs, wild roses and trumpet lilies, neon-coloured frogs, two-foot long chameleons, carnivorous pitcher plants and an array of animals that consider camouflage an art - these are all fine reasons to visit Madagascar.

Berenty Reserve in the south has been welcoming visitors longer than any other place in Madagascar. A 4x4 vehicle is necessary to get there as the road has had no maintenance in 30 years and boasts impressive dongas. Still, the 265 hectare reserve is one of the best protected and most studied areas in the country, and is home to the strangely human sifakas - the creamy-white lemurs that are said to 'dance' whenever they need to cross open ground. Though they spend most of the day feeding on leaves and shoots in trees, sifakas sometimes descend the trees and 'dance' to their next dining venue. Since their feet are designed to grasp tree trunks, sifakas are unuable to stand or walk. Instead, they use their hind legs in a sideways skipping movement to get around at ground level - this is their 'dance' and one of the truly comic sights of Madagascar.

Ring-tailed lemurs are also at home in Berenty. They walk on all fours, have the swagger of a bandy-legged cowboy and the thick-skinned attitude of a monkey. With their tails held up straight, swaying like reeds in the wind, the ringtails filter through the reserve on morning and evening sortees and will pilfer whatever they can - miaowing like cats as they go. The brown lemurs are different. They're more elusive and stay in the dry gallery forest, though their pig-like grunting can be heard long before they're seen.

Also unique to Madagascar is the spiny forest of the area. It resembles a prehistoric scene; tall spires of thorn-covered woody forest tower into the air and appear quite surreal - especially at night. This is where the noctural lemurs of the area live, and their shining eyes can easily be seen in a torch beam at night. The grey mouse lemur and white-footed sportive lemur are regularly seen, and identified by the reflective colour of their eyes in the torch beam.

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. 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 live in the montane rainforest of Perinet Reserve in central Madagascar and share the rainforest with giant Parson's chameleons - up to two foot long - and an assortment of brightly-coloured frogs, birds and boa constrictors. These elusive lemurs spend their lives high up in the forest canopy, and only descend to the ground to lick soil for minerals.

Indris don't 'dance', but 'sing'. Because their territories are huge, they defend them with song, rather than scent. Their 'singing' is reminiscent of whale song, with occasional shrill siren sounds, and is most often heard just before dawn. The indris provide a haunting start to the day and leave a lasting memory of Perinet - 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 lemurs, the island is also an Eden for eccentric flora. Most famous and most photographed is the Avenue of Baobabs, near Morondava on the west coast. Madagascar has seven species of baobab not found in Africa, three of which are in Morondava. The tall slender baobabs that form the famous Avenue stand proud and regal and at sunset form the subjects of a display of light and colour that is pure art - or at least the stuff of perfect postcards.

The nearby town of Morondava is a quaint seaside village, splashed with the colour of roadside stalls. The people are friendly, animated and wear big smiles. They work only in the early morning and late afternoon, and spend the rest of the day resting in the shade. Morondava is debilitatingly hot in summer, even for locals - 'frail' foreigners take even more strain. 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'.

Though the sea invitingly laps the Morondava shore, its temperature is in the late thirties so offers little refreshment. Coolest of all is on the Chinese junket-style boats seen carving the horizon, en route to drop off goods further south. Though an island, Madagascar is strangely not a seafaring nation, with their staple food being rice. Lemur is never on the menu, as it's taboo to kill or eat the animals. The ancestors would not be pleased with such practice, and keeping the dead happy is paramount and an integral part of Malagasy life. After all, it's their mad and magical island - the rest of us are all just visiting.