Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park

Tsingy = where one cannot walk barefoot

How true to the Malagasy name this incredible UNESCO World Heritage Site is..... Jay and I first learned of Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park several years ago when National Geographic ran an article on the "stone forest" of Madagascar. Since reading that issue, I've pretty much obsessed over the idea of going to this country (I also wanted to see lemurs before they disappear). After traveling for days via airplane and more days via car and 4WD, arriving into this stone labyrinth was anything but a let down! No photograph can come close to capturing the awe of looking across the horizon to a scene filled with jagged peaks of weathered limestone rocks.

 

And guess what National Geographic didn't tell us? The whole darn thing is an ancient coral reef! It made so much sense to us once we knew this because when you look at a satellite image of the tsingy, they are a long and narrow geographic feature, just like a barrier reef. And when you are on the ground at the park and you look at the stones, you spot fossilized coral (Jay is demonstrating). Since Jay happens to study coral reefs, among other things, you can imagine how exciting this discovery was for him.

Getting up to this kind of view was no piece of cake - especially for us pale ass white folks from Washington who had not acclimated at all to the dry, hot heat of the Malagasy west. If we had done the same kind of hiking in WA, it would have been 50 degrees and the hike would have been moderate most of the time with a few steep sections that got you a tiny bit sweaty. Here the hike felt like the most difficult day hike of all times because the rocks were frying our fingers, the temperature was well into the mid-90s or above, and we sweat out every drip of water in our bodies within 30 minutes of starting the hike.

Heading up with our guide, Tokey (all national parks in Madagascar require that you take a guide with you, a fantastic way to encourage the park's preservation through community involvement)

To get to the top of the Grand Tsingy for the awesome view you have to scale these super steep and spiky fingers of limestone (terrifying and exhilarating at the same time). So we used harnesses and pretended that if we fell we would be O.K. even though we both knew that without helmets or better clothing, a fall would seriously hurt on these daggers.

Once you are at the top you basically stand around gaping at the view (see the photos at the beginning of this blog for a panoramic) but you don't stay too long because it is HOT and you are totally exposed to the mid-day sun. So we crossed this bridge.... 

 And headed back down, down, down, into the forest and then.....

...into a cave! Erosion is the name of the game here in the tsingy, so it isn't surprising at all that caves lie underneath this labyrinth of jagged stones. One of the things I found to be incredibly amazing about this dry and hot place was the diversity of plant life. How the heck were plants surviving amid these rocks? Well, a step into the caves gave the answer.....their roots were incredibly long, extending far down into the caves in search of water. If you look at our photos (link provided at the bottom of this blog), I've uploaded a video that shows the length of the roots in these caves. Pretty fascinating.

Find Jay.

You can't possibly go to the tsingy and escape the wildlife. The park has several lemur species, but they are not the only rockstars in the forests. The birds in Madagascar are delightful - brilliant in color, behavior, and song. And the reptiles and insects are just freaking awesome.

The birds on the left (starting from the top left and working clockwise) are: Madagascar paradise flycatcher, Madagascar pratincole, crested coua, and an unidentified tiny little cute owl. All are endemic but the pratincole - although the pratincole was still a really neat African bird sighting for us.

Our morning started out with our first lemur sighting of the entire trip - the Decken's sifaka (sifakas are simply lemurs that are mostly white in color). Our guide, Tokey, was fantastic because he never rushed us, he was very knowledgeable, and he was extremely respectful of the wildlife and the park. So when we saw the sifakas for the first time, Tokey, let us stay and watch them for as long as we wanted - which was a long time! Lemurs are pretty entertaining to watch and we were thankful to have our binoculars to be able to take in full views (i.e. it was easy to figure out who was a boy and who was a girl).

This troop had a baby in the bunch! Most lemurs have their babies in October, so November is prime time for serious cuteness. In addition to the Decken's sifaka we also saw red-fronted brown lemurs, but never got a good photograph of them. Click here to see a short video that Jay took of a Decken's sifaka grunting at the mongoose in the photo below (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXc-8XhjrFg).

This ring-tailed mongoose was really interested in obtaining pieces of our lunch. He (definitely a boy) wasn't successful. Biologists are never the type to feed wild animals, so he did not choose his tourist prey wisely.

We spent our second day in the park closer to the town of Bekopaka at the Petit Tsingy - which are mini-versions of the Grand Tsingy I've been blabbing this entire time. Numerous folks think the Petit Tsingy are not worth the visit - but Jay and I loved this entire day and the different geological features.

We started the morning out on the Manambolo River in a pirogue. Tokey was our guide again and he spent the morning identifying all the beautiful bird songs we could hear as our captain (?) poled us up the river. The river banks were tall, limestone cliffs that has eroded to almost look like the Grand Tsingy, but not quite. These cliffs were topped with a spiny dry forest containing many interesting plant species - my favorite of which became the gorgeous and funky Pachypodium.

We pulled the pirogue up to a sandy back and got out to explore a sliver of a cave in the limestone cliffs. Once we were done exploring this small cave, we headed back down the river and back to land where we headed into the Petit Tsingy for a hike.

Here is Jay exploring the canyons of the tsingy. We also discovered that you can play the tsingy like an instrument - no joke. Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erVBtNFG6bs

 Happy campers!

After our lovely morning in the tsingy, we headed back to spend the afternoon at our awesome hotel. Here is Jay with our sweet little bungalow. This turned out to be one the best places we stayed - the bathroom plumbing worked (rare!), they had great live music (performed by locals from the villages), and the woman running the place loved plants and had placed tons of different Malagasy plants throughout the grounds. It was a great place to relax and we happily took advantage of our free afternoon to do just that.

Our first view of a chameleon! This guy (gal?) visited us while we were relaxing with a beer in the hotel garden. Later on we watched it climb up into a tree, which happened to be occupied by another chameleon that wasn't happy about the newcomer, so a fight broke out and our dude lost and headed to another tree. The color changes that happened to the chameleons during all these interactions was pretty fantastic to see. 

Our next stop was a nature preserve south of the park, so we had to take the awesome, high-tech ferries again and drive through many local villages on our way to the preserve. This woman was selling bananas along the road.

Collecting firewood - probably the only way this woman can cook her food.

Kids in the smaller villages love to chase the cars and shout for empty water bottles from tourists. Jay and I try to reduce our plastic water bottle consumption by using a Steripen to sterilize the tap water we put in our reusable water bottles (single-use plastics are a serious pet peeve of mine and water bottles are at the top of the peeve list). As a result, we did not have many water bottles to give to the kids when they chased the 4WD - except this time. Just that morning I happened to notice some critters swimming in my drinking water - after we had sterilized it. I promptly decided the critter presence was an acceptable reason to buy bottled water until we got to a place that had tap water without swimming critters (for the record, we never got sick from our sterilized water, critters and all). So the kid on the left was the first to grab my empty water bottle....after that he never left my side so I was able to get a few fun photographs of him and his enthusiastic friends.

We had to load back onto the high-tech ferry by driving through a small section of the river this time....amazing. Once we were on the ferry, all the foot passengers followed and surrounded us (which I thought was quite fun). Jay and I couldn't help but notice this shirt and have a good laugh over it. We tried to explain to our guide/driver, Jack, why this was so funny....after many attempts in crappy French we resorted to a drawing of what the shirt should really look like and he finally understood what we were cracking up about. He quickly told us the shirt was from China. =) Uh huh.

Stay tuned for my next blog - which will focus almost entirely on the wildlife and plants of the Kirindy Reserve. It seems to take me about two weeks to get through a chunk of photos - so I figure that is when this next blog will happen. Happy holidays! 

You can find more photos here (if you looked at images from my last blog, you will need to scroll past those to get to the tsingy images): https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/111221596171793333099/albums/5954879783191118289?authkey=CLq91drp6pOjyAE