We get up thinking it is after 7:30am only to find its only 6:30. Change money (a protracted experience involving a lot of counting and recounting and checking and paper work) and then grab some breakfast – pain au raisin and pan au chocolate from the little Salon de The on one of the main roads. After reconfirming our airline tickets and we get a pousse pousse to the taxi brousse station. Poor guy – 10 000FMG for both of us and all our luggage.
Getting a taxi isn’t quite as easy. There are several little kiosks and each one has different services. The first one we try is not offering anything until 6pm and given that it’s a five our journey that sounds pretty dismal. But with some translation assistance from a French guy we manage to find one that will take us to Andisabe as soon as it fills up.
And so we sit and wait. There’s been a long and complicated conversation in numbers which we later realise was the seating plan – numbers written onto tickets. We sit on the edge of a shelter to wait – behind us two guys are fixing a motorbike, starting it up. Huge clouds of smoke belching out from the exhaust. The side of the ticket booth is painted light blue and a man leans out of it smoking a cigarette. It’s slight skew, not quite square.
The minute we’re all packed in we start to sweat. There is a great debate about the seats and I wonder whether we have got in the wrong ones, if that is what is upsetting everyone because no one wants to say anything to us. A girl in the front seat is the only one who pays us any attention - she turns around in her chair to stare and smile.
I decide I love these journeys – the breeze blowing through the windows, the smell of Madagascar coming in: wood fires, hot shrubs, rotten fruit, and rain on warm dusty soil, rivers, new wood where someone is building a house and the never ending lullaby of the Malagasy music. I imagine the one song is saying “The honky tonk in you is driving me”. We hear it again and again later in the cafe where we have dinner. Rob reminds that I always get the words in songs wrong.
Gradually the landscape starts to change as we rise up onto the plateau. Endless palm trees are replaced by endless banana trees and the contents of the stalls beside the road change too. Eventually we climb steep hills in second gear grinding our way to the top – the driver seems quite pleased about the decrease in speed which allows him the opportunity to fiddle with the tape deck. We get a forty minute blast of ‘Hits of 92’ including Young Guns – Blaze of Glory or whatever it is called. We roar down the other side of the hill, not heeding the other side of the road when we swing around corners. At one point a sharp on a sharp downhill corner there’s a bridge with the first six supports knocked out of it no doubt by someone taking the turn too fast.
We cross an enormous old railway bridge and as we climb higher streams sparkle in the valleys below. People along the road carry all sorts of things. Wood is piled up in stacks like a sort of hardware store – wrapped together in bundles. Flower pots for sale.
The guy in front next to the driver is a heavy sleeper whose head drops backwards periodically thumping loudly against a pole and causing much hilarity. A woman gets on with her angry baby and after this no one gets anymore sleep until after we’ve stopped for lunch when the baby falls asleep. There is a wireless microphone set on top of the dashboard which smacks of karaoke – the guy next to me sings along anyway, slightly out of tune.
We are dropped at the entrance to the park but as it is now five pm it’s closed. The night walks start at 6:30pm. We pitch our tent in the drizzle on a hill on the other side of the road. There is no shower or toilet but a large open sided wooden barn filled with table and chairs. When it cools down a bit we walk back up the road towards the RN1. There’s another campsite and a hotel there but apart from yelling children playing on swings no one seems to be around. The restaurant (closed) looks out over a lake studded with water lilies and sizzling with insects.
On the road we see a large millipede of sorts that I am almost convinced is a giant spitting cockroach & a small snake slithering across the road. We eat dinner at a small snack bar at the entrance to the park – two pizzas and a beer. Then I sit writing beneath a large electric light on the office wall surrounded by hundreds of insects – small flying ants, enormous crickets with swivelling heads, a yellow moth the size of my hand on a drain pipe and a praying mantis which hops its way up the wall and when I leave is clutching a large bug between both front feet eating it like corn on the cob.
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