So a funny thing about the rain forest I didn’t actually know: it rains here…a lot.  Now, before you get all smirky, I have been to many rain forests around the globe in many different seasons, AND I have been to 2 rainforests in Africa already on this trip; never a drop of rain.   So our surprise was legitimate was we drove into Ranomafana with intermittent rain fall and heavy cloud cover.  [Ed. note: not going to lie, we’ve gotten super lucky when it comes to rainforests. Muddy? Sure. Raining? Nope.]

No big deal, there was a late afternoon mist which would of course clear by morning, so we bundled up under 5 blankets in our slightly rustic lodge room [Ed. note: “slightly rustic”], turned on the sketchy portable space heater, and took a nap…only to wake up to the not-so-soothing sounds of a monsoon.   Have you ever heard a monsoon?  To be fair, I’ve never been in a monsoon because I at least put enough research into the Boy’s bad ideas to veto traveling anywhere during monsoon season, but I imagine it is something like the absolute deluge of rain pour we awoke to…The fog made the visibility about 4 steep, wet steps outside of our door and the prospect of getting down all 30 steps to the lobby/restaurant for some very stringy zebu meat unappealing.  [Ed. note: it was a downpour that wasn’t stopping that night.] This was the first of 3 days we started sustaining on our emergency stash of granola bars and cashew 100 calorie packs…

Fortunately, the rain took pause for a few hours the next morning so we could go on our first Ranomafana hike.  Unfortunately, this hike was guided by the worst guide in Madagascar, Stefan.  Stefan was the anti-Morris…he ignored us, he took 30 minute cell phone calls, he pushed us out of the way while taking a photo to put a random French tourist he just encountered on the trail in between us and the extremely rare cool bird.   And all this happened before we found our first lemur.  [Ed. note: we get along with most everyone, and are pretty good about rolling with the punches. Stefan literally stood in front of my camera, pushed me aside, and called this random person up to see the cool bird. And then got on his phone and walked away.]

Finding this lemur only occurred because Stefan worked with a young tracker who ran ahead in the forest and texted Stefan where to take us once he found something.   The tracker would wait on the side of the trail until we arrived, then point down the side of the cliff and Stefan would “lead” us to where to find the furry friend…and the tracker would run off again to find another group. [Ed. note: tracker dude was excellent at his job, and nice too. I still don’t know how he found some of them.]

The day was becoming frustrating, as the forest was becoming very crowded, the first time we’d actually encountered any other tourists on our hikes since flying south, and Stefan seemed more interested in chatting with other guides and groups rather than talking to us, helping us, or even leading us on actual trails (in fact at one point 3 other groups took a very straight forward path up and down to some lemurs and we had to literally climb a small tree while chasing after Stefan to get out of the middle of the muddy rain forest…

We gave up.  I hate to be a quitter, but at that point we literally turned to our main guide and said “we’re done, this is not any fun, take us out of here” and left the forest.   Stefan seemed genuinely shocked by this turn of events…and the lack of tip as we loaded into the car as the rain started to pour once more, just the icing on the cake of our terrible day…

[Ed. note: After the round-about way we took for an hour to catch up with the tracker, trying to keep up with a cell-phone-chatting guide out of view, I literally stopped and said I’m not hiking for a bit. And we stood there, in silence, in the rainforest, for about 10 minutes.  He tried to say the lemurs might move – I told him we’d find them.  And we did, but man oh man, he made us miss Morris.  And then the rain started again. Yay for lemurs, but boo on the guide.]