September 29th

Today we visit the Tsingy National Park.
Went to breakfast a 700. It was little-finger-length bananas; three kinds of bread with butter, jam and honey; lemongrass juice; and coffee and tea. Finished we met up with George and loaded up. George told us it is only 20km, but will take one hour! That means still bad roads. Five-ten minutes in we picked up our guide, Zarra (this is spelled phonetically). When he got in he talked about the village: 14,000 population, and has a primary and secondary school. High school is in another town. A bit further there was another school. He said it was donated -built by some tourists who saw kids outside trying to learn.

Anyway, we arrived and had to HARNESS up! Jeff purposefully said he did not tell me this!! HUMM! We took off. First is an easy trek across a flat path. As soon as we arrived at the trees, we saw lemurs!! First one was a brown spotted lemur. Zarra said he is nocturnal, so we are lucky to see him. I told him we were blessed!! I don't know if he understood this. Next we saw two white lemurs. These are the largest of the lemurs at this park. They turned shy and “moved” away. They are impressive – how agile and fast they can go from one tree to another and another (it takes me longer to describe it than they did it). Then we walked just a bit more and saw the third and last we see, brown Rufus lemurs. It was a large group of them – Zarra said they can be in groups of 20 or more and they are polyamorous. The largest one is the female and the leader and several females were carrying babies. Here we crossed paths with a guide and a National Geographic guy that were leaving, already. Zarra said he has been coming to get footage of the lemurs at sunrise.
Now from here we hike amongst the rock formations. They are 2 million years old and are limestone. He pointed out fossils of shells. Tsingy means walking on tiptoes. The formations are very sharp and quite pointy at times, hard to believe but the Malagasy still do walk barefoot in here. Zarra said he has often (but today he has on tennies). There is a definitive white layer of rock and a black layer, which he said is because of oxidization and they have naturally occurring acid rain. And now is when the harness comes in play. It has two carabineer attachments that we attach to a cable and walk along the crags and fissures. We also attach along some metal step ladders. If I had known all of this, well, I probably would have opted to not do it. But I'm glad that I did it. It took me back FORTY years and rock climbing at our church camp! I was in much better shape then through. 🙂 We had two great overlooks. Amazing!! Zarra said our hike is only 3km long but the park is much bigger. (He gave dimensions but I can't recall them.)

We stopped at the Cathedral formation area. The Cathedral formation was quite something, and here we had our lunch break – we had ordered cheese sandwiches – it was hard to choke it down – so dry. The saving grace – we had entertainment… a ring-tailed mongoose!! He is definitely an opportunist guy. Zarra said he eats up the crumbs we leave behind. I actually wondered if there was more than one of these guys, but we never saw two at a time.
Hiking on we saw another gray chameleon. A few birds: greater parrots – they are brown; a Madagascar bulbul – that is black with a red bill; and a pair of Madagascar flycatchers – the male is a brilliant red with long white tail, the female is a muted red-orange. These flycatchers we watched for quite a bit. They were building a nest, Zarra said. He also pointed out the Ficus or strangler tree and the Tamarind tree.

From here we pretty much head out or back, completing a loop. It was way hotter!! The sun was scorching. We had pretty much depleted our 4.5 liters of water (probably had 4l of it). I still felt zapped. Arriving back at our vehicle, we took a 10-15 minute rest the loaded up and drove back the one hour to the village.  Zarra got out and we arrived back at our hotel around 130 ish. I was exhausted. first order of business was to order our supper and some much needed liquid – besides water. I had a coke and most of an orange fanta type drink. Jeff had a beer and rest of the fanta. We did also get a big water and drank most of it also. Then we got in the pool… AHHH!  Relaxed and went to supper at 7pm. Again as we stepped out – big and brighter full orange-red moon, so must be full tonight, not last night. We went to the dining area and sat. I had a Mexican salad; then had stewed goat in a nicely seasoned sauce with veggies; and a fruit cup. Jeff had same salad (only other option was the hot soup – not doing that again, too hot!); main of tuna on a bed of spaghetti with fresh grated parmesan; and the fruit cup. We had a nice South African wine.