I checked out of my hotel at 8am, ready to be collected by
Maya. I was a little taken aback when I realised the hotel doesn’t take payment
by card. It’s a good job I changed some cash yesterday. It’s pretty good value
though – 50,000 Ariary a night (about £18).
The MFG site at Parc Ivoloina is a forestry station covering
almost 300 hectares of mainly secondary forest. It incorporates a small zoo, an
environmental education centre, a conservation training centre and an ecoagriculture
research and training facility. It is located approximately 12 km north of
Tamatave in the Northeast of the Madagascar.
The first section of road from Tamatave is pretty good. Although
it is very busy, and driving is not for the fainthearted, it is tarmac and
relatively smooth. All changes after the turning for Parc Ivoloina though. The
road is sand, with potholes large enough to lose a mini in. Technically people
should drive on the right. In reality everyone swerves backwards and forwards to
avoid the worst of the holes and the person with most confidence takes right of
way. Visitors to Alton Towers would pay a lot of money for a similar
experience!
The road runs alongside the river and initially appears picturesque.
However only a little way further on there were some heartbreaking scenes. Lining
each side of the road were heaps of rocks. Whole families, including very small
children, sat breaking the rocks with hammers into smaller pieces of gravel,
for purchase by construction companies. Maya told me that they do this all day,
every day, to try to make enough money for food. It was my first encounter with
real, desperate poverty and one that will remain with me forever. I have no
photographs of this sorry scene because the villagers requested none to be
taken. It is, however, etched indelibly into my memory.
When we arrived at Ivoloina we were met by two of the MFG
managers, Veronique and Mamy. They were both most welcoming and Veronique
showed me to my accommodation in a little, very basic bungalow. My room was
great – bunk bed, table, shelf, candle and resident geckos. I had the use of a
small kitchenette, which I shared with Christof. He showed me how to store my
food to keep it safe from rats. Unfortunately rats are a big problem at
Ivoloina. Now don’t get me wrong – I like rodents and do admire rats’ tenacity.
However they can carry disease and I didn’t want them in contact with my food.
In addition, the rats on Madagascar are black rats and bubonic plague is
present on the island: a thought that kept me awake some nights when I could
hear them scampering over the bunk bed above me! Toilets were in the nearby
dormitory (flushed with buckets of rainwater) and washing was also via a
bucket.
I spent the afternoon exploring. I had free run of the
entire forest so could go wherever I wanted. Immediately outside my room was a
lychee tree (litchis in Madagascar) and here I saw my first lemurs – a troop of
white-fronted brown lemurs visited several times a day to gorge themselves on
the ripe fruit. That afternoon I also came across a small thin snake with vivid
yellow longitudinal stripes and huge two tree boas. Best of all I found and
managed to photograph some amazing invertebrates called giraffe-necked weevils.
They were much smaller than I had expected them to be and had made a real mess
of the bean plants in the ecoagriculture potager. On my way back a small group
of white-faced whistling ducks flew over.
That evening I had my first bucket shower by candlelight.
Christof kindly cooked dinner – it’s my turn tomorrow. After dinner I sat
outside for a while watching the fireflies dancing among the trees and marvelling
at the amazing display of stars. No light pollution here!
Tiredness soon got the better of me though and I lit my
mosquito coil, climbed inside my mozzie net and fell asleep to the night chorus
of frogs and crickets.
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