Madagascar is busy! City streets are teeming with people, everyone knows everyone, and everyone has time to talk. Roads are packed with transportation devices uniquely configured for this country: ox carts, tuk-tuks, push-pushes, ancient Citroen cars from France, bikes, scooters, and the occasional BMW. There is nothing like the energy and sense of community in a Madagascar city.
But there is no mistaking that Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world. About three-quarters of its 30 million people live in the countryside, surviving as subsistence farmers. Most of the rest live in Antananarivo, the capital city, where unemployment is high and infrastructure is lacking.
Our first stop brought us to the newly restored Queen’s palace (gutted by fire in 2019 and an aging relic before that). The restoration is magnificent! The palace now houses a museum dedicated to Madagascar’s colorful history. Surrounding buildings reveal the lives of Madagascar royalty prior to French colonization. Sprawling below the palace, Antananarivo wanders over and between several large hills.
From Antananarivo we visited the beaches of Morondava, a busy center for fishing. A short boat ride transported us along canals frequented by Madagascar-endemic water birds and ended at a small fishing village, where the entire population is busy sorting fish, organizing nets and fixing boats. A local was proud to tell me that the town of 4000 people has three churches, one school and hundreds of iconic handmade outrigger-style fishing boats.
Our usual highlight at Morondava is photographing Baobab Alley, and this year was special as we photograph these curious upside-down trees at sunrise, sunset, and also as the Milky Way set amongst their branches. Spectacular! And then an unusual highlight: we have just parked at Kirindy Private Reserve (part of Kirindy Mitea National Park) when our local guide rushed up.
“Fossa!” he says, “A pair is mating, just here!” Then he rushed off along a trail. Seeing a fossa is like finding the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Seeing a pair of fossa mating is, well, incredibly unlikely. Fossa are unique to Madagascar and are the island’s only predatory mammal. They are cat-like animals, about lynx-sized, and they hunt lemurs. In all my trips to Madagascar, I have seen just one fossa, mostly asleep in the deep shade of a tree. This year we spent an hour photographing two fossa cavorting 20 feet up a tree.
Our photo tour focusses on wildlife, especially lemurs, but we explored much more. This year we visited a sapphire mine, where dozens of pits have been dug, entirely by hand. A team of men toss shovelfuls of dirt up a thirty-foot slope. Women strain the dirt through a small screen and pick out handfuls of rock. It’s tough work but pays relatively well.
About the lemurs: this year Berenty is plush with new life. Dozens of brown lemurs, ringtails and Verraux’s sifakas were carrying tiny babies on their bellies and backs. We followed the lemurs closely as they hopped from tree to tree. Sometimes it was simplest to just sit and wait for the lemurs to come to us.
We met several other species of lemurs at Andasibe. Each morning we heard the call of the Indri. Indri are the largest lemurs in Madagascar—in fact, the world. Curious animals, they descended from the treetops to check us out and strike a few poses. Gorgeous golden diademed sifakas danced across meadows in easy reach of our cameras.
Palmarium shows off its own unique lemur population. Our local guide found us several species of diurnal lemurs: brown, black, black and white ruffed, and crowned, plus nocturnal species like the aye-aye, mouse and dwarf lemurs. There was no end of opportunities to create unique lemur portraits. A bigger challenge was to capture these unusual animals in action: jumping, playing, or quickly ping-ponging their way through the forest.
Madagascar is a fun and challenging tour. We captured such a wide variety of subjects that we were certain to go home with exciting new images that we had never taken before.
