Toamasina (Tamatave), Madagascar
August 24, 2015
After a breakfast of fruit, toast and cheese, we set off for a tour of the gardens and reserve around the resort. Lots of local plants were pointed out e.g. vanilla, cinnamon, cycads, orchids and palms. Our Guide called the lemurs and they came leaping from the surrounding garden and forest to enjoy the fruit he offered them. We spent a lot of time photographing Lemurs – Common Brown, Crowned, Red-fronted and Black Lemurs and hybrids between them (including male red Lemurs – Black x Crowned), Black and White Ruffed Lemur, Indri and male Coquerel Sifaka. The Sifaka is from Western Madagascar but is kept here without a mate. We had already met some of these Lemurs, while scavenging food (them, not us) from the restaurant tables or visiting us on the balconies of our cabins. The Black and White Ruffed Lemurs performed some amusing acrobatic tricks for us to reach the bananas our Guide held out for them – leaping over each other, hanging upside down by their back legs or hanging by one fore leg and one hind leg or lying on their backs on a branch to munch their food.
The Indri is a single species but varies across Madagascar in the amount of white is has to its fur. Those in the Pangalanes are almost completely black with only some white between its back legs.
Finally as part of our tour, we walked through the forest and along the beach to a bog with Pitcher Plants. Amazing to see these natural fly traps, sitting innocently among the reeds or scrambling over small bushes and shrubs, where their victims are attracted by the odorous and fatal fluid in their base of their ‘pitchers’.
We decided not to go on the local village tour that afternoon. We both had a sleep and took a walk along the beach.
In the evening before dinner, we caught a boat across the lake to an island with half a dozen resident Aye-Aye. Thinking we would have to keep scouring the trees to find them, we were surprised to find that the guides had put out coconuts at stations to attract them down to the lower trunks. Aye-Aye’s are much bigger than we imagined, with their large fluffy tails, funny pinched faces, wiry fur on the back and long slender and nailed fingers (including their extremely elongated and bony forefinger, used for extracting grubs from cavities in branches. We were only 3-5 meters away from them and watched fascinated as they used their claws and teeth to break into the coconuts with a scratching, sawing motion and ripping action. Joy was able to get some good photos and videos of them at work. A real highlight of our trip.
