It is November 2018 and we are about to embark on our latest adventure in Madagascar, this time I will be travelling with Wiebe Bosma and Leo vander Hoeven my friends from Holland.
I have travelled with both of these several times before so we know each other quite well which is quite important for these expeditions. This trip is a bit unusual as for various reasons we are not able to travel to Madagascar together. Wiebe will be the first to arrive in Madagascar, then myself and Leo will follow on several days later. I have already made the arrangements for Wiebe to be collected from the airport and transported to our first base hotel and for the first few days until I arrive he is going to do a small tour over to the Eastern part of the Island. Hopefully he will be back in Antananarivo when I eventually arrive.
Sunday 4th November
Departure day for me and I am collected by a friend at 20-00 hrs. who takes me to the Premier Inn at Heathrow Airport where I will be staying the night so that I can leave early the next morning. Have to set alarm for 04-00 hrs. for the next morning flight to Paris.!!
I made it up in time to walk to the Terminal and catch Air France flight to Paris Charles de Gaul airport and arrived at about 09-00 hrs. CDG airport is large and quite confusing and had to find a little train to take me to the next terminal for the flight to Madagascar. The flight left on time at about 11-00 hrs. and landed at Tana about 23-15 hrs so in all about a 10 hour flight. Collected the luggage and bought the visa for 35 euro, through customs and out to meet my driver.
Monday 5th November
00-15 hrs met the driver outside the terminal who then took me to hotel we had booked for our first nights stay, then straight to bed.
Tuesday 6th November
Had a good nights sleep and woke early at about 07-00 hrs. Nice hot shower to chase away any jet lag, although time difference is only 2 hours so not really much of a problem, and then downstairs to have a look around our first days hotel and then for breakfast and to meet up with Wiebe.
He had a good time in the Eastern part of the country for a few days and took lots of wildlife photographs.
After breakfast we met up with our driver Christian who will stay with us for the duration of the trip and after a discussion about our itinery we set of and headed South for Antsirabe.
We eventually arrived in the small town of Ambatolampy and made a stop for an omelette and coffee and lo and behold a tourist bus full of Germans drove in behind us! Ambatolampy has a nice cafe and in the small town square there are some jacaranda trees which always look nice with their purple flowers.
On the way to Antsirabe it was very noticeable how the landscape had changed alongside the road since my last visit. There seemed to be much more land that had ben put over to cultivation which was mainly rice fields, I suppose this was inevitable as the demand for food grew, but it made me wonder about the future for the countryside.
We eventually arrived in the town of Antsirabe and took the branch road that we had travelled in our previous visit to get to the location of plants of Euphorbia primulifolia. This location comprises of three large hills each of which is full of Euphorbia primulifolia, at our previous visit we did a plant count and found that there was on average 7 plants per square metre which by our estimation equated to over 200 thousand plants. At this time there had not been much rain and the plants were generally only showing the small white flowers on the soil surface although the leaf rosettes were just starting to form. This plant is recorded as being endangered, however in my opinion this is certainly not the case. The only danger these plants face is that part of the first hillside is being excavated by the local population so that they can use the material for building purposes, but even if the whole hill was taken and that would take a very long time there will still be thousands of the plants left in habitat.
We moved from these hills and drove some distance further along the main road to another spot where we soon came across more plants of E. primulifolia where only the flowers were visible , but once again there were numerous plants, further evidence that the plant is not endangered.
After looking around for some time and discovering the extent of the Euphorbia primulifolia it was time to head back to Antsirabe and the hotel that I had stayed in on a previous trip. The hotel is called the Eco Lodge Les Chambres du Voyageurs and is an extremely comfortable and well appointed place. It is always nice to stay in a decent hotel if possible as there are always plenty of opportunities to stay in some less appealing places out of necessity!!! After a clean up and a nice dinner it is time to sink a few Three Horse Beers and to plan our next moves. Needless to say Wiebe went on the prowl around the gardens of the hotel looking for creatures to photograph, we eventually went to bed at 11 pm.
To be continued:–