Antsirabe to Ranomafana, Madagascar
While I never found myself an oasis of calm in Tana, Antsirabe felt like a breath of fresh air in comparison. Well, at least the few blocks around the centre did: like Tana, a wide central boulevard leads to a disused train station. Unlike the chaos there though, I arrived in Antsirabe to find simple amusement park rides in a pedestrian area. Rather than dodging traffic, I was dodging the occasional toy cars and trains full of children and their parents.
There’s a distinctly cleaner air here too: for last-mile transport, where Tana only has taxis and Morondava and other cities have tuk-tuks, Antsirabe seems to have eschewed motors and pollution entirely and gone for the classic cyclo-pousse (bike rickshaw). It’s small enough for it, much cheaper, and friendlier all during my multiple trips to and from the gare routière — a big contrast to the frustrating experience of actually taking the onward transport from there by taxi-brousse.
It’s a shame then that Antsirabe’s former star attractions seem to be losing their shine. The city and train station were also built around some hot springs, and while there’s a beautiful colonial-era hot springs hotel and a thermal spa centre, both seem a little worse for wear. Not the nicest soaking facilities. There’s also a lake not far from the centre, and it’s just polluted.
Into the more typically chaotic streets of the rest of the city though, there’s a feeling like nothing’s changed in decades. Impromptu markets are set on cobblestone streets, and houses do have a little charm. Hidden within a bunch of these are artisans who continue their traditional crafts. There’s a family of miniaturists, who did a short demo for me on how they make their beautiful tiny bicycles out of entirely-recycled material, including discarded cables, tin cans, old batteries, and even excess (and still sterile) medical tubing. They’re also silk weavers, harvesting cocoons (a single one producing 50cm of thread!), producing fabric and embroidery.
Fares from Antsirabe. Fianar, 9-ish hours away, 5 euros.
Next door, there’s an artist producing lovely works of batik, waxing fabric and dying the exposed bits with colours produced from mostly natural sources. I’ve seen it done in other African countries, something introduced by Dutch traders, but I’ve come to learn that it’s an originally Indonesian art technique — considering Madagascar’s direct historical ties to that region, I wonder if it arrived first here, instead of by the Dutch colonisation of Indonesia!
I also saw some zebu horn carvers. While no one was on hand to show me a demo, there’s an involved process to hollow out an extracted horn and buff it to give that polished shine. As for zebus themselves — the jury’s still out on whether they were domesticated in Asia or Africa. I do have to admit, they make for very delicious steak, even if I did eventually get a little bit tired of having it so often!
I found myself passing through Fianarantsoa (more commonly just Fianar for short) twice, mostly on the way to and from somewhere else, having little daylight time there as a result. Getting in and out anytime after 7 am was an incredible headache — as a regional hub town with its narrow main commercial street also part of the national route, just getting the taxi-brousse a few blocks to the gare routière took an extra hour in extreme afternoon and evening traffic. Unlike Antsirabe and Tana, its train station, also on this same road, remains used, with trains crawling twice a week to roadless villages in the highlands en route to the east coast of the country — and a day with a train departure certainly didn’t make traffic any better. It was a steep 20-minute walk up to find accommodation in a calmer locale near the city hall. With Independence Day approaching, a crowd gathered there for some musical performances coordinated with a fountain show.
What Fianar is best known for, however, is its haute-ville — literally an upper village, as Fianar is set in the hills. While it’s definitely got some nice views, it’s home to an old town where some brick houses, churches, and cobblestone paths remain preserved, ripped from another era. My visit was quite short and in between two winter downpours, but just enough to get a taste… minus the literal sense, as unfortunately I didn’t have an opportunity to try the old town’s famed French- Malagasy restaurant.
The reason I made two visits to Fianar was because the first was an unsuccessful attempt at connecting to Ranomafana, about 2.5 hours away by taxi-brousse or 1.5 by private car. I had initially intended to stay two nights there. After visiting Tsaranoro with JB and falling sick, JB and his brother arranged a driver for me to visit just the national park in Ranomafana for a quick day trip. While a driver usually costs about 30-50 times as much as the ultra-cheap taxi-brousse, given my condition, a rainy forecast, a desire to avoid the hassle of Fianar’s gare routière yet again, and the decent price they arranged for me, I was satisfied with spending a little more for the self-care.
Unfortunately, there was one downside — my extended Tsaranoro stay meant not being able to spend a night in the actual town of Ranomafana, home to some much more utilized hot springs. It’s right there in the name too, “rano mafana” meaning hot water.
It’s amazing that so many different species of the same animal can evolve to look and behave so differently from each other, despite little geographical distance. Endemic and exclusive to Madagascar, lemurs are the world’s most threatened mammals, with 98% of its 100+ species under such designation (vulnerable, endangered, or critical). Ranomafana National Park is home to several not found elsewhere in Madagascar, including the greater bamboo lemur and the golden bamboo lemur. Indeed, minutes into a five-hour walk with my park-issued guide Jean-Claude, we spotted both in trees and eventually close up, just doing their thing.
Given the amount of visitors, the wild lemurs in the park are habituated to people, and generally unafraid. As their name implies, bamboo lemurs exclusively eat bamboo instead of leaves, so much to a degree where they’re immune to the cyanide content. One bamboo lemur in particular just casually hung out on the ground path eating bamboo shoots before moving to a branch, peeing nearly on all the spectators. It’s a bit sobering then to find out that both the greater and golden bamboo lemurs are critically endangered: as is the case in much of Madagascar, deforestation (slash and burn for farming) has been a serious issue limiting their habitat.
We were lucky to spot some nocturnal lemurs as well, a pair of Peyrieras’s woolly lemur huddling high in the trees attempting to shelter from the intermittent rain. With increasing rain, all the other lemurs were likely to be hiding as well, so our attention turned to other things. Despite the poor visibility and the natural camouflage, Jean-Claude was somehow able to spot some tiny leaf-tailed geckos before we left. Well…the name is certainly apt. Incredible little guys — about as small as my index finger!
Ranomafana is in a rainforest. Getting there felt like a sudden change from all the hilly towns and rice fields to dense tree cover. It’s hard to imagine that nature used to be the other way around — that rainforests were once everywhere, and so were the lemurs. They’re down to 10% of their original population. Some people joke that the green on the Malagasy flag represents the rainforest that used to be there, and the red on the flag just the soil that remains. They’re doing a good job of conservation at the national parks (Ranomafana is one of the earlier-established ones, but just from 1991), though they do have to deal with sneaky land-grabs by farmers and animal trafficking by poachers. That’s with resources thrown at the problem. But the rest of the country, where patches of rainforest and other rare biomes remain, is unprotected.
Visiting lemurs in the park felt not unlike visiting a few remaining preserved buildings in an old town. I hope that’s not all that’s gonna be left in the future.