A ring tailed lemur

Reunion to Durban – Part 1

Tuesday 30th October 2018

The Indian Ocean continues to challenge us. The exit from Reunion, last Wednesday, was even more lively than expected, with high winds and horribly rough sea. In our rather rushed departure I had forgotten to take a seasick pill and I rapidly became unwell. Even my trusty tablets that I put under my top lip couldn’t stop the waves of dreadful nausea.

Having been told we couldn’t stay in the marina we had decided to leave quickly so that we could sail with the Oyster Rally boats who had very kindly invited us, and Atem the Blue Swan, to join their SSB radio net. With such a tricky crossing in front of us there is comfort in numbers and the pooling of knowledge means we would be very well informed.

Thankfully during the first night things calmed down and my queasiness gradually wore off. The wind dropped right back and on came our engine. Unfortunately, looking forward a week, with the help of our weather router, conditions for our arrival in Durban, still looked difficult. As the forecasts firmed up, it became clear to us that a stop in Madagascar to wait for things to improve might be the solution. So it was therefore that just 3 days into our journey we found ourselves anchored, with four other Oysters that made the same call, in Fort Dauphin on the SE corner of Madagascar.

Madagascar had never even been on our radar, we knew very little about it. Whales breaching and fin slapping greeted us at the entrance to the bay, which we were surprised to find, with its backdrop of mountains and several European influenced villas above the beach, looked from a distance, a bit like an Alpine lake resort.

Fort Dauphin

The view from the deck proved to be deceptive, ashore, the smells, the slightly beaten up buildings, the rutted roads, the lovely wooden canoes and the smiling faces of the people, were all very African. We were met at the beach by an excited gang of youngsters and a few adults, all keen to help bring the dingy up the beach and look after it for us. The women and children persistently offered cheap jewellery for sale, the men waved taxi keys or offered to be our guide. The throng was a bit intense but all very friendly.

Local wooden canoes

We were shown the way to the immigration office where much filling of forms and enthusiastic stamping took place before a fee of over £100 was demanded. There was slight suspicion amongst the crews that this amount was fairly arbitrary and set to fit how much they thought we would pay. Barring Galapagos, with its National Park fees, I think it must be the highest amount we have paid to enter any country, but we were stuck here, we had to pay up.

A few trips to the ATM were in order and after a data sim was purchased we returned to Raya to rest, and, what else, to study the weather forecasts. We assured ourselves we had made the best decision, we would be here a couple of days. Heck, we were in Madagascar, time to find the lemurs.

Our taxi drivers car, a bright blue, tiny ancient Renault, was only just big enough for us and our guide, who, reassuringly, wore a sign saying ‘Official Guide’ in big letters around his neck. They told us they would take us to a private reserve where we could get close to the lemurs, but to be honest they could have been taking us anywhere, our normal careful research not done, we were in their hands. We wound our way through the crowded, narrow streets and through the bustling market area, stopping at yet another ATM to get more tens of thousands of Madagascan Rand, even after our time in Indonesia, we were struggling to get our head around all those zeros.

Leaving the town behind we turned onto a smooth wide dual carriage way, rice paddies and other crops filling the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the coast. Our comfort and speed was, however, short lived, as within minutes we took an unmade road towards the mountains. It had rained heavily all night and our driver was quickly confronted by deep puddles that filled the bumpy track.

Overnight rain made the roads almost impassable.

He’d obviously tackled this before as he torturously wound his way between them, his little car manfully battling on. Villages lay every few miles, consisting of collections of huts constructed totally from the bamboo that grows everywhere here, the walls from the stiff stems, the roofs from the fronds. We passed a gash in the mountain, shockingly rock was being hewn from its sides by hand, carried to the nearest village and made into square bricks.

Yes that’s a duck wandering past stone bricks, hand made straight from the mountain

A continuous stream of people walked between the villages, mostly carrying goods either strung from bamboo sticks, or in the case of the women in baskets miraculously balanced on their heads. A man driving four head of cattle squeezed to the side of the road to let us pass, we stared out of the window wide eyed, this truly was, another place, a world away from our comfortable European lives.

Everyone uses the one road through the villages

Eventually we reached the reserve and found our lemurs. They are really lovely creatures with expressive human like faces, their bodies covered in lush soft hair and their long bushy tails used skilfully, almost like an extra limb. We saw tiny Bamboo lemurs sat high amongst the shade of the dense foliage at the top of 30ft bamboo clumps, brown lemurs athletically leaping from impossibly spindly branches in the very tops of the trees and ring tailed lemurs that peered at us from crooks in the tree trunks.

Ring tailed lemurs

But the friendliest were the white lemurs, nick named dancing lemurs they nimbly swang from branch to branch, ran up and down the tree trunks and came right up to us looking for food.

White lemur

What an amazing morning. Praying for no more rain we followed the rough road back to the bay, ran the gauntlet of locals on the beach and returned to the boat. The days weather report had arrived, it was time to move on, our unscheduled stop had turned out to be so much more than a safe place to wait for the weather systems to get in line. Despite our fears this little corner of Madagascar, at least, is delightful.