First, some admin. You may recall photos of Nick and Meryl were pending (they are married). You may also recall Meryl fainted onto her face. As such, I have waited until now (until her face was better) for the unveiling, so you didn't all think she was some sort of street fighter. Also I didn't want to edit the post everyone else's photos are in in case it changed the order (people have been known to read them in reverse regardless!)
Nick and Meryl
It was a luxurious 7:30 leaving time the next day, so we chatted at the table a bit before bed. The night was actually rather cold, despite it being generally warmer here (45 degrees 3 days ago!), but still not as cold as Boby. I slept quite well, and no pigs or lemurs ransacked my tent. All was well come the morning.
Breakfast was bread with honey, or... Nutella! A rare luxury! I had 3 slices (here the bread is slightly different to further north. Still baguettes, but about 8 inches long, and quite hard outside). Before leaving camp I saw a little bird which I think was the same sort of lovebird as yesterday, but much closer up. It had a vibrant blue ring of feathers around each eye. Very nice.
After that it was a couple hundred steps back up to the plateau. After Boby, I laugh at a couple hundred steps! Speaking of Boby, I discovered today that less than 1000 people climb to the summit each year. I was shocked; I'll be almost as famous for that as I am for discovering that white sifaka in Canyon de Makis!
On the top was much the same as yesterday: flat, a few trees, and the spiderweby sandstone, though here the strata are horizontal, not vertical, giving it a Grand Canyon type feel. There were quite a few fine specimens of those baby baobabs I saw a few days back too.
I also discovered the trees than are hanging about are crocodile skin trees, due to their bark looking like, well I'll give you one guess! The bark is also very thick, which is why these trees remain. There used to be more, and this used to not be a national park, so the zebu farmers set fires that burned a lot of the trees to get new zebu farming land. Naughty, as always!
Zebus are prevalent in the area, as you may expect if you recall that on the other side of the cliffs are the great grasslands of Madagascar. The tribe here is no longer the Betsileo of middle Madagascar, but the Baro. The Baro have a reputation for not wanting to use their minds. They all become either soldiers, policemen, or zebu stealers! They are also polygamous, and the traditional dowry is a zebu. Coincidence?
We continued walking for about 3 and a half hours. It wasn't as exciting as yesterday, but we saw a few things. First, a scorpion, a very very small scorpion (not more than 1.5 inches long). It was lay very still on a rock, but still quite exciting to see. Next was a preying mantis. This seems pretty exciting, but it was VERY small, and brown. In fact I'd seen 4-5 yesterday, and never even bothered mentioning it because it looked pretty standard. Looking up close though, you could see it was an "exciting" insect after all. Finally there was a flock of Guinea fowl. Very blue heads. Who knew!
It can't even kill you with the sting. Booooring!
Our destination for the morning was the "Piscine Naturelle", or Natural Swimming Pool in English. When questioned on what I was doing in Madagascar, this was one of the only things I could think of with a name I remembered! The photos I had seen of it looked stunning, and indeed it was fantastic.
Whilst it was a lot busier than our private swimming hole yesterday, because it is only a kilometre from the nearest car park (the other way, where we were going after), there were only 3 other groups. One was a couple about my age, and only the girl wanted to swim, another was a load of old French people who just hung about and the left, then it was a lot of kind of old, very fat Czechs who went in after we were done. If you look back at all that, you will see that our group only had to share the pool with one person, and only 5 of us went in (me included), do all was well.
The girl climbed up the rocks to the middle of the waterfall, and started posing like something out of a shampoo advert. Was it Timotei, that one where the woman goes and washes her hair in the waterfall? You know the one anyway. Well I wasn't letting her hog all the good photos! She might've had her model like figure, and shampoo commercial suitable hair, but I had shamelessness, and a mighty 12 day old beard!
We had zebu burgers and rice whilst watching the Czechs floating around like whales with tattoos. The burgers were very nice, though I'm not sure about the tattoos...
After that it was a 20 minute walk to the bus. On the way there was a very sticky stick insect which the local guide spotted, then Nick pointed out some flowers the guide had pointed out to him. Little white ones. Boooring! But wait, these weren't flowers at all, they were Flower Bugs, tiny little bugs with backs that look exceptionally like flowers. They were awesome after all!
Back with our trusty orange steed.
We rode the bus back to a different hotel in the same village as before. I sang the mantra "please have wifi, please have wifi", all the way on the bus, and my prayers were answered! It is pretty good wifi too, and in fact everything about the hotel is great! It isn't like that other hotel, where I said it was great and then everything was terrible either. I already had a lovely hot shower, the room is immaculate and very big, especially the bathroom which is lovely, and dinner is free! The afternoon was free too, so I sorted out some luggage stuff, and wrote this blog entry. Now I think I will browse the Internet, which I have been bereft of for 6 days!!
Wow! I'm worn out by all the walking you've done. Great to catch up with your adventures again. My favourite were the 'flower bugs'.
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