[Ed note: this will be it for a while, and there was a lot happening in Madagascar…so be prepared for a lot of photos]

Some quick thoughts before I do a bunch of lemur and other Madagascar pictures – some will be awesome shots, some will be “is that a wet blurry lemur in a tree, or just a smudge?”.  They can’t all be winners, but we saw a bunch of lemurs!

• Lemur species total count: 16
• Total lemur types (ordered by appearance):
  • Red-Bellied Lemur
  • Black and White Ruffed Lemur
  • Diademed Sifaka
  • Indri
  • Goodman’s Mouse Lemur
  • Eastern Wooly Lemur
  • Common Brown Lemur
  • Eastern Grey Bamboo Lemur
  • Red Fronted Brown Lemur
  • Coquerel’s Giant Mouse Lemur
  • Hubbard’s Sportive Lemur
  • Verreaux’s Sifaka
  • Ring-Tailed Lemur
  • Golden Bamboo Lemur
  • Milne-Edward’s Sifaka
  • Red Mouse Lemur
• The best way to describe lemurs is they are a mix of cat, monkey, raccoon, sloth, teddy bear, and large mouse.  That’s a lot to mix, but there were so many different types of lemurs, they mainly fell into a a couple of categories…
  • Small and fuzzy
  • Mouse faces
  • Slothy and big
  • Tree cats
• They took over in Madagascar when it broke from Africa and filled every available niche they could.  There used to be GIANT lemurs wayyyy back in the day, now the largest is the loud-mouthed Indri
• Trekking through the rainforest is really fun, even if you don’t see lemurs (but we did every time we went out!). We’ve been to a bunch of rainforests, and each one reminds me why I love them so much – they are incredibly….alive. Green, lush, with so many different plants and flowers and ferns and trees and crazy vines and giant leaves and yeah.  Every direction you look it’s awesome, and spending hours and hours hiking up and downhill really is fun.  But then you get to see lemurs too? Totally worth it.
• We got incredibly lucky in that in all of the rainforests and all of the hikes we’ve been on over the years, only the final day’s hike was it actually raining. It more than made up for every other dry day with the buckets and buckets of water the sky unleashed.
• The spiny forest desert and dry lowlands were awesome too! I didn’t even know a spiny forest was a thing until I started learning about Madagascar, and they’re awesome.  Octopus trees with their many many branches-things, that all point south.  Giant spikes on every plant. And they’re very much alive, even without the rainfall!
• And Isalo…what a crazy-awesome place that is. Giant mesas and canyons – we only did a small portion of the massive national park.
• All that being said, Madagascar was absolutely the “most third world country” we’ve ever spent a long amount of time in. Infrastructure, villages, everything. Zebu meat and dark stringy chicken is a luxury there, and it really stood out to me.
• It was great to learn about each region’s different tribes and peoples and their various histories and traditions though – all in one Madagascar.
• Visit! Despite the leaches and the roads and drives and traffic and rain and hike and whatever else, it was an awesome place to go. It truly is like an 8th continent (or like a 7.5th) in terms of 90% of the flora and fauna is endemic to only there.  You’ll never see and experience anything like it.

 

And then I have NO photos of a Red Mouse Lemur – it was pouring down rain, in the dark, I spotted him, then by the time I got to enjoy his company for a bit, he scampered off.  Sometimes you just need to say hello to the lemurs and not photograph them – this was one of those times.

 

So that’s the 16 lemur species.  Now for some Madagascar photos – rainforest craziness, BAOBAB TREES!!!, chameleons, etc.  We spent 11 days exploring a crazy world.

Finally, where we explored (and Tana, the capital):

 

Until next time…

I think in any long trip you are bound to hit a breaking point.  A moment when all you want is to be home in your familiar surrounding with identifiable food and the ability to brush your teeth safely with tap water.  For me, that moment arrived as I was none too patiently waiting for our guide to detach a leech from my forehead in the backseat of our jeep, lest I morph into a deranged version of a unicorn…[Ed. note: I saw it, and had him remove it.]

So we’ve established that it rains in the rainforest.  At this point it had been raining almost continuously for 3 days and 2 nights.  The drizzle was not relenting, but it was our very last day to find lemurs so we had to (obviously that argument was placed by the Boy…) go forward with the planned hike.  We decked out in every piece of waterproof gear we packed, tucked our pant legs into our boot socks in the ever styles backwoods Payne Stewart look, and began our 3 hour tour…

And then for 3 hours we trekked up and down the muddy slopes of the secondary rainforest seeking lemurs.  How do you spot lemurs in the forest?  You watch the trees for movement as the lemurs leap about and eat fruits and leaves.  But when it is pouring rain in the winter, the lemurs are cold and they stay put, so basically you walk through the flooding forest trying not to fall down the muddy slope while also looking upwards into the trees to determine if that small, wet lump is an ant’s nest, a ball of leaves, or in fact a huddled lemur. [Ed. note: I thought it was fun, albeit quite wet. Lots of neat rainforest plants to see! Like tree ferns!] May the odds be ever in your favor…

Miraculously, we found 3 lemurs on this hike and as soon as we saw the sad, cold sifaka, I told our local guide that my waterproof clothing could not possibly absorb any more water and we needed to head back to the car.  The problem was, when you are on a 3 hour circuit loop in the wet rainforest, there isn’t really a shortcut you can take to escape the wet any faster.  The local guide tried to ease our minds by saying we were about 1.5 kilometers from the car.   I know my metric conversion skills could use some work, but I thought he also said something about an hour, then 15 minutes, and since I was pretty sure 1.5 kilometers was around 1 mile 15 minutes made more sense to me and I trudged on, sloshing with my waterproof hiking boots now full of a half a cup of water each…about an hour later I realized something was clearly lost in translation as now he was saying the car was about 30 minutes away.   We were never getting out of this forest and the rain just kept coming down harder.  [Ed. note: this isn’t embellishment. As a side conversation with our guide, we both agreed we thought it’d stay at a steady drizzle. Instead, it kept raining harder. And harder. And harder. I felt bad for the wet lemurs, hugging the trees.] Nothing like a dose of pneumonia to end a vacation before a 12 hour car ride and 17 hours of flights…

The real reward of our final hike came once we were safely back to the car: leeches.   The first one was on my sock.  Innocent enough, the guide plucked and killed it and tossed it out the window.   Then one fell on the Boy’s hand from his raincoat, but again: pluck, kill, toss. [Ed. note: right on my thumb, it started eating.]  Okay, we’re safe, right?  Nope, the Boy is yelling, and swatting at my face, the guide is pulling, and I am panicking as something is in the middle of my forehead, sucking my blood…

If only that was the end, crisis over, pack up, head back to summer in Atlanta…nope, back in our room we had the bonding moment no married couple needs.  We got to shed all our saturated “waterproof” (apparently there is a limit to that word,…) gear and check each other for leeches,..and then unceremoniously kill the bastards we found for the next hour.  [Ed note: I had three new bleeding holes on my ankles – somehow they managed to get in my socks. Killing them caused a bloody wet explosion. While drying our boots, I killed another six or so….]   

On that note, I remembered once again why I do most of the vacation planning instead of the Boy.  See you next time on a very peaceful beach with someone serving me endless cocktails and no need for hiking boots…