Soa ny fiarahansika

Next morning, we were up and out early again. We explored Diego a bit more, seeing additional examples of its potential and its beauty.

We also learned about its history (from World War II to tales of contemporary pirates), and got to see more of its color and vibrancy.

We spent a fair amount of time admiring the various seaside views it offers. Diego is an active port, surrounded on three sides by water.

We then drove around its markets and one or two neighborhoods...

... before setting off across country again. This time, we were headed south.

The housing we saw was simple and seemed to me a bit insecure, but it was apparently built specifically to deal with local conditions. Almost every home we saw was built up off the ground to protect residents from the rains. And unlike in the U.S., where it is possible to drive through a neighborhood without seeing a single human soul, here it seemed almost everyone was outside. I cannot help but think this leads to a more social, and less isolated, existence.

Though we were largely headed south along the western coast of Madagascar, we stopped along the way at a vantage point where we could gaze cross-country at the Indian Ocean:

Indeed, the view all around was quite spectacular:

Our next stop was another uniquely Madagascar experience. We went to see the red Tsingy (tsing-GHEE). Formed by laterite, sand and rain, it creates a landscape that seems truly otherworldly. Here, Zeze leads us toward it:

And here, we got our first really good look at it, and the water that runs by beneath it:

The closer we got, the more fantastic and almost dreamlike it appeared:

Then we drove a little further on, where we saw an entire canyon (with a rather distinctive color palette) lined with red tsingy:

How cool is that, really?

We then continued onward, through one captivating village and neighborhood after another...

In fact, one of the parts of our trip that I enjoyed most occurred along this section of our route. In part due to the holidays, I gather from what our guides told us, it was market time in the towns and villages. This meant even more activity, color and energy in the communities we passed through.

And, thirsty from the heat and humidity (it was, after all, summer in Madagascar), we stopped in one of those villages. While Marshall stayed with the car, Zeze, Kathy and I got out and wandered around. It was brilliant. The street was packed with people and activity and color and life. Kathy thinks it is funny, but markets like this remind me of nothing so much as the street and parking lot scene outside a Dead show back in the day...

We eventually found a small roadside stall where cool beverages were being sold. We got some that were in those old, thick soda bottles. We had to drink them there and return the bottles. This is where we began to learn the few Malagasay phrases that we know. I find that perhaps the most important phrase to learn wherever I go, or at least on a par with a basic greeting, is the expression of gratitude. In Malagasay, "thank you" is misoatra (mee-SOH-truh). We also learned what the phrase we had seen on Three Horses Beer advertisements, "soa ny fiarahansika" (SOO-uh NEE FEE-ah-rehn-sih-kuh), meant. Literally, it is "good to drink together", but it means more than that, implying a sense of congeniality that makes the phrase an appropriate toast. Indeed, Kathy and I began to use it as such for the remainder of our trip. Besides, it is just so much fun to say!

We did also learn the basic greeting, balatsara (bah-LAHT-sahr-uh), though this turns out to be more of a northern Madagascar phrase, where salama (suh-LAHM-uh) is used elsehwhere. And, naturally, we learned the parting expression, or goodbye, which is veloma (vay-LOOH-muh).

Alas, we had to leave market day and continue on...

Our next destination was Ankarana National Park. There, we found this friendly creature:

And, of course, these crowned lemurs - who had apparently been spooked by some cousin of the above snake:

They were immensely entertaining to watch as they inspected the ground beneath them for signs of the boa...

Or carried their babies about on their backs...

Or simply leaped about...

As we settled in for a picnic lunch, their attention shifted from snake to snacks, including one with a seemingly strong interest in videography...

Or maybe just chewing on my camera bag...

Until discovering that there was a tad more salt on my hand than the bag (and Kathy's leg, as you can hear in the background).

Regardless, they really are as cute close up as you might imagine!

Kathy did discover, though, that crowned lemurs are somewhat lacking in fashion sense:

Nonetheless, they are irresistible...

... and so, so soft!

They did make this picnic lunch more challenging than it would have been otherwise, but they were worth every pesky moment. The same cannot be said of the mosquitoes that mercilessly assaulted us all through the meal. (My apologies at this point for not having any good pictures of Marshall, who took this shot. He does appear in one of the videos, but I wish I had gotten at least one good still picture of him. At the risk of repetition, he - along with our other guides like Zeze pictured here with us - was just great.)

Now this little furry friend of ours had apparently heard that we were the holiday couple when it came to targeted theft...

But I leave you with these, an image and a video of lemurs doing what they do best: being absolutely captivating.

Eventually, lunch with the lemurs having concluded, we headed off for some more exploration, including this river bed lined with lava:

Zeze then led us up an alleged "trail" to this little pass, which I jokingly called at the time the entrance to the Lost World:

Here is what traversing the pass actually looked like:

When we got up near the top, the view very well could have been from - or of - the Lost World:

Kathy and I were both fascinated by this plant, which we encountered here and there, seemingly just growing out of the rocks:

Oh, and those rocks, well, they could rock, as it were... Or at least, they could be made to produce music:

Perhaps we were in the Lost World, or at least a Lost World. Certainly, finding this colorful character, up in the rocks and far, far from the sea, led me to believe that we were!

And this view! Fantastic! I just wish the picture could better convey the scope of it...

Again, though, the sensory experience was not just about what we saw, but what we heard. In this case, that sound you hear behind our guide is a parrot:

This is the entrance to a cave complex we would soon see much more closely...

As we hiked down to the cave entrance, we encountered what appear in the following image (apologies for the quality) to be little pink flowers. Nope. Bugs...

Here is a stalactite at the cave entrance that looked to me to be a guardian gargoyle...

And this is what we saw when we looked back out from the cave entrance:

At this point, I should note that Zeze had been warning us for quite some time that it would be hot in the cave. Really hot. Given that it was already in the nineties (Fahrenheit), and so humid I was dripping, this disconcerted both Kathy and me. Later, she told me she had been quite afraid I would pass out at some point during our cave exploration, as she knows how poorly I take heat and humidity. This concern, as you shall learn, while well-intentioned, was also ironic.

I have never been in a real cave before. We needed torches to see (flashlights for those of you in the colonies), and were regularly ducking or jumping small pools of water. In fact, there was a river running through the caves and there were some bodies of water which were too big to cross. There were also some stunning limestone formations:

This one looks like a mummy to me:

Then, there were the bats. Lots and lots of bats...

Yes, those are their eyes twinkling. And that shot does not even begin to give a good sense of how many there were...

We eventually turned around and headed back, with Kathy exclaiming at one point that we could literally see the light at the end of the tunnel. After which, we spent a minute explaining to our guide why we found that humorous...

Hiking out, we found these little white flowers. Oh wait, they are bugs, too! In fact, they are the early stage of the pink bugs we saw earlier. Lost World, indeed...

By the time we returned to the vehicle, I thought I might just pass out. The actual heat in the cave had not been as bad as we had feared, but I swear the humidity, through some trick of being under ground, was well above 100%. It was so steamy my glasses actually fogged up while we were in there!

But some time rolling along the road with the windows down helped me to recover and enjoy the continuing stream of wonderful landscapes and enchanting sites:

In time, we reached our next resting place, Relais de l’Ankarana Lodge. Where I promptly got out my travel guitar:

And Kathy (here comes the irony) rested as she recuperated from what we suspect was a mild case of heat stroke. Poor thing. She missed a wonderful dinner, which I had to share in company with a new friend:

We spent the night in this little lodging (Kathy felt better by morning), which was quaint but could have used air conditioning, or at least a ceiling fan. But then, since the electricity was only on from 6-10 pm, its utility would have been somewhat limited...

Still, what a day!