Madagascar: The long journey south Part 2: Still in Fianarantsoa

August 2007

Day trip to another National Park didn’t happen. Arrived to find out that
the park was too far away for a day trip to start at our arrival time. The
Zebu market day had shifted to a day later. We rented bikes as the scenery
was fantastic and arrived at a small park where there are many ring-tailed
Lemurs to find that the guides were asking far too much money for a 1 hour
trot, and fed-up with being ripped off everywhere, we hopped back on the
bikes and heading back to the village (only 15km away!), back onto the
Taxi-Brousse to try again another day.

Day trip on the train heading East. 6am start. On the train, stopping
frequently to pick up passengers and goods and to make sure that everyone
on the train is fed an array of different local delicacies at each stop.
Bananas,peanut brittle, crayfish, fresh water prawns, boc boc, banana
fritters etc.
The scenery was supposed to be amazing and what we could see was nice, but
there was a rather thick covering of cloud for much of the time. The main
attraction was a large waterfall, which I missed completely as there was no
indication when we might happen across it.
Half way through the journey we passed the train coming from the other
direction,so after deliberating for a while we decided to hop off the train and return to Fianar for the scenery and having had sufficient train time, we
discovered that the return train had left. Depression set in, especially
as we found that the tourists who had had a guide with them had done exactly that.

We were now stuck on the train for a further 4 hours, and would then have a rather less than nice 10hours taxi-brousse ride overnight to return to Fianarantsoa. We were mistaken though, because apparently we were amidst the primary banana zone in Madagascar, so we stopped for at least an hour every stop (about 20 mins apart)to pick up a carriage load of bananas and drop off rice.
So instead of the full journey being the 7hours it ended up being a very long 11hours,with no great scenery and the disappearance of joyful faces of the
villagers because they were all on their way home to food and bed! At 6pm we
arrived in Manakara on the coast, although we didn’t see the coast at all and we hopped in one of the 40 aggressive pousse pousse carts on stand-by, rushed to the
taxi-brousse stand, thankfully got the last 2 seats on the bus (though they
were the split seats, half high - half low, very uncomfortable) and were on
the return.

3am Fianarantsoa, desolate and still had to pay full rate for a room, for 2.5 hours sleep before back to the taxi-brousse stand to try for Andringitra NP again!