It’s nearly pitch black out, but only 6 pm.  Two steps behind me is the wet, curvy mountain road still quite busy with swift driving semi-trucks and local traffic.  Two feet in front of me is the vaguely blurry forest entrance (although the blurry is likely because I forgot my glasses…again…)  There are 7 of us standing there in the pouring rain staring at the branch which has been primed with banana pieces…for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, a full 15 minutes later we all stand, mostly silent waiting the imminent arrival of the tiny mouse lemur…who never actually appeared. [Ed. note: it was pouring down rain, and the lemurs didn’t want any banana apparently.]

We’re on another night walk, and unlike the gentle stroll with Morris in his flip flops, finding a lemur every 3 minutes, this one did not appear likely to return similar results. For one, we weren’t actually in the forest and then there was the lashing rain. [Ed. note: they closed the national park at night a few years ago…] But our new guide was persistent, so we started to actually walk…up the busy, wet, dark mountain road pointing flashlights at the trees hoping to see something move.   Or perhaps just hoping something would reflect the light?

Apparently that worked because our guide started spotting chameleons.  The first one was about a foot long, but the second was only about 3 inches and the third didn’t even clear an inch!  How he spotted that last creature will remain a mystery to me because almost as soon as we turned back around to the car, the Boy exhibited his night walk expertise once more and found a mouse lemur (clear on the opposite side from where we left the yummy banana…[Ed. note: I am an excellent night lemur spotter. This one was tiny with a long lemur tail though!]) and I deemed that “mission accomplished” and booked it back to the warm, dry car as fast as I could dodge then on coming motorcycle careening towards us at top speed…