Madagascar Minus One

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for September 27, 2024. After a two-day air transit debacle, our travel krewe (Lea, KT, Melissa, and I) arrived in Madagascar for a two-week bus tour. Anticipating that we might miss one of our flights, we arranged to land in Antananarivo (hereafter referred to as “Tana”) a day early.

Despite the universe’s best attempts to foil us, we made it to Tana on time. The rest of our group managed to get some rest along the way, but at this point, I hadn’t slept for approximately 48 hours. At least I got to sit down with our luggage and relax under a bright, blue Madagascar sky while everyone else stocked up on cash from the airport ATM and stood in line for SIM cards.

We had no plans for “Tour Day Minus 1,” thank the Malagasy gods, except to reach our hotel and crash. Once everyone had everything they needed from the airport, we squeezed into a taxi, and off we went. (To be clear, when I say “squeezed,” I mean it: The cab wasn’t big enough for the driver, four of us, and our luggage, but we made it work by being extremely friendly.)

The ride gave us our first view of Tana. I didn’t have any expectations for the city, but I was still surprised by how hilly, winding, and crowded it was. In many ways, Tana reminded me of La Paz, Bolivia, except that Tana isn’t in a deep mountain valley. The buildings are mashed right up against each other, the narrow streets curve and twist like hiking trails, the roads are unbelievably crowded, and market stalls line the front of every building, barely leaving room for cars to pass.

We kept our eyes open for restaurants, taxi stands, grocery stores, and the like, trying to get the lay of the land, but it was hopeless. We just had to cross our fingers and hope that wherever we ended up, there’d be a place to get some food.
To be clear, our tour came with hotel reservations, but the tour didn’t start until the following day. Since we were early, Lea had booked a place in town to crash, and our cabbie finally found it.

Our hotel sat atop a local bar and was right next door to a karaoke club. The rooms were surprisingly spacious and reasonably clean. There was no A/C, but that was expected. There were also mosquitoes and nowhere to hang a net over the bed, so we just had to cross our fingers and hope that our malaria meds would do their thing.

Two doors down from our hotel was a French restaurant. (Though independent, Madagascar still feels like a French colony in all but name.) This wasn’t fine French cuisine, but there was a decent selection of Western-style “French” on the menu. Unfortunately, the wait staff didn’t speak a word of English or, as it turned out, French. Nevertheless, they’d nod their heads and agree with anything we said – and do nothing. Ordering, receiving, and paying for our meals was something of a challenge.

By this point, I may have already been in R.E.M. sleep and just somnambulating between the restaurant and our room. You’d think that sleep would come easy…

BUT.

BUT as soon as we were ready for bed, Tana’s very active night life went into gear. For us, this meant trying to sleep above the very loud bar directly below us and the even louder karaoke going on next door. I probably did sleep somewhere between the thump thump thump below and the hoots of laughter from all around.

Around 2 or 3 in the a.m., blessed relief arrived in the form of the neighborhood’s power going out. (Apparently, Madagascar was in a drought, and the lake that fed the hydroelectric dam was too low to maintain power 24/7.) The power outage meant that our room’s fan and my CPAP stopped working, but at least we had a few minutes of silence.

Then the karaoke club turned on their generator, and the party recommenced. No sleep for the wicked, nor the world-weary traveler.

Day Zero: Lemurs

If I were to say we woke up Saturday morning, I’d mean that we simply stopped pretending to sleep. We went back to the French place for breakfast, this time forewarned by experience about the language barrier. Here’s an interesting after-effect I’ve noticed from the year Lea and I spent in South America: Any time I try to talk to someone who doesn’t speak English, I reflexively default to whatever Spanish I remember, even if I know damn well that the other person doesn’t speak it. I guess this is my personal version of the age-old trope of people talking really loud as if that’ll make their language more intelligible.

Anyway, the manager of our hotel (a helpful guy named… Morris? Maurice?) arranged an all-day cab to drive us around. And where did we want to go? To see lemurs, of course! Our tour promised lemurs aplenty, but those would all be in the wild, and though Lea and I have had fairly good luck with wildlife in the past, we knew not to count on it. Plus, just outside of Tana, there’s the Lemurs’ Park, a botanical reserve where rescued lemurs are nursed back to health. They have over eight different varieties, most of whom have become acclimated to humans—at least well enough to get close and take photos.

Here they are:

The lemurs aren’t kept in cages or pens; instead, the park’s natural boundaries and loads of easy food keep them close. There are also tortoises and several of Madagascar’s omnipresent chameleons. (Chameleon fatigue would set in fairly quickly on our tour, but as of Saturday, it hadn’t happened yet.)

In short: We can’t recommend Tana’s Lemurs’ Park highly enough. If you want to come to Madagascar for the lemurs, but aren’t prepared for some hard, hard travel, here’s my suggested itinerary:

1. Arrive on a flight that lands early in the morning.
2. Take a taxi to the Lemurs’ Park.
3. Go back to the airport and fly out in the evening.

But enough about the lemurs. Let’s talk about the traffic.

As we saw the day before, Tana’s streets aren’t designed with heavy traffic in mind, but heavy traffic is what they have. Part of the problem is that the streets are so narrow that passing isn’t usually an option. Also, most of the cars are very old and not in the best repair. So, if one car breaks down, everyone stops. Our 22 km trip to Lemurs’ Park took at least two hours, and most of that was simply crossing from one side of Tana to the other. At times, our driver simply turned the car off, and we got out and stretched our legs while waiting for traffic to start moving again. It was the same on the way back—the streets grew narrower and curvier as we made our way to the Au Bois Vert Hotel to meet the rest of our traveling companions.

In the interest of protecting the innocent, I’m not going to use anyone’s real names, even though I could easily look everyone up on our group Whatsapp chat. The tour was arranged by Explore! and you can book one just like it here. We four were the only Americans; the rest were a collection of Brits, Australians, and New Zealanders. There were twelve of us, plus our drivers and our guide, Armand. That night, we introduced ourselves, talked about why we travel, and waited on dinner. Our rooms were resort-style spacious, but a little lacking in mosquito protection, so we hung up our net, crawled into bed, and got an actual night’s sleep before the official start to our grand adventure.

Next time: “What goes down must come up.”