Madagascar!

On our journey to this island nation off the SE coast of Africa, we spent a night in Johannesburg, South Africa. I mention this because we had a very interesting and delicious dinner there. We sought out the restaurant - Tribes African Grill - because the menu featured all manner of grilled meats. We greatly enjoyed the Mixed Grill that included ostrich, warthog, impala and kudu. Rather than posting a stock photo of a kudu, I urge you to search online and check out this beautiful animal. Of the four meats, we enjoyed ostrich and kudu the most - they were moist, tender and had very pleasing flavors. We don’t know for a fact that these animals are farmed, rather than hunted in the wild, but we strongly suspect that.

Now on to Madagascar…

As we approached the airport, you could see lots of red dirt, agricultural patches and mostly dirt roads. On the ground, we found that the capital of Antananarivo was well into the spring season of planting rice:

Anywhere there was flat land and a way to get a lot of water to it, rice is grown. It is the staple crop of the country -

Our flight to Morondava was cancelled at the last minute due to equipment problems, so we spent an unscheduled extra night in “Tana”. [That’s a much easier way to refer to the capital than its full name.] The next day we arrived safely on the west coast and the home of the “famous” Avenue of the Baobabs -

There are 7 species of baobab in the world and 5 are endemic to Madagascar. A sixth occurs in both Madagascar and Africa, while the seventh is in Australia. When they are young…

… they have a lot of branches. As they grow older and bigger, the branches become so heavy that they break off, giving the trees their distinctive shape -

A baobab is essentially an enormous sponge surrounded by bark. The local people cut into them to reach the stored water, but they are not cut down, as they are protected by law. They also harvest the bark for use as roofing materials. The trees have remarkable regenerative properties, so the bark grows back, somewhat like cork trees.

I repeatedly put Steve up against trees that I was photographing, to show just how massive they are -

Those were the common species, while this next one is frequently referred to as the “Rasta” one (with so many branches hanging down) -

Other famous residents of the island include chameleons…

… and lemurs -

Red-fronted Brown Lemur

I plan to be sharing with you all the different species of lemurs especially that we saw on our travels here. I think my favorite family is the Sifaka, because of their striking coloration. These are Verreaux’s sifakas…

… and the baby was really cute to watch. As usual, to see the video, you’ll need to open this post in your browser by clicking on the link at the end of the post -

I think I’ll wrap up this post, a little on the short side, because I just wanted to give you a quick overview of this very diverse country (and internet is very spotty). As I have before, I try to get a picture of a country’s flag, so here’s Madagascar’s -