LEMURS!!

Kati and Me at Camp Amoureux

October 3 - Today was the first "real" day of our trip.  We caught an 8:30 flight from Tana to Morondava, on the west coast.  Our guide Marc and our driver Faly met us at the airport.  Faly's 4x4 is his pride and joy and he's responsible for getting us all the way to Bekopaka while Marc is leading us through all of our adventures.  The two of them actually left Tana Friday night and drove to Morondava along perhaps the most notoriously bad road in a country of horrible roads.  They didn't get into Morondava until Saturday afternoon!

Our first stop in Morondava was an ATM.  They are not easy to find over here.  There wasn't one in the airport, and I knew that we'd need money for the coming days, so we had to drive 15 minutes into downtown Morondava just to find one.  As it turns out, that's the only ATM in this western area of the country!  Morondava is ecclectic.  There were two guys that had set up a tail-gating tent outside of the palace of justice and were blasting Malagasy music.  There was a lady selling live chickens, just walking around with them hanging upside down from her hands.  And, most noticeably, there were dozens of rickshaws.  Faly hates rickshaws because you don't need a license to trive one so everyone buys them and just park them haphazardly in the middle of streets.

Just outside of Morondava, we turned left onto a dirt road and Marc leaned back to say, "Now the fun driving starts."  It took us nearly two hours to make it to Camp Amoureux.  Two hours on a dirt road that's only passable during the dry season.  We drove through several small villages and the Allee des Baobabs.  The road was rarely level and I couldn't count the number of places where the road was washed out or destroyed and we had to take a "detour" around a portion of the road that had been excavated with no apparent plans for filling it back in.  At one point, Faly even had to pay an old man standing on the side of the street just to keep driving.  I honestly have no idea what that was about!

We finally got into Camp Amoureux around 1:30.  Now, when I say "camp," I mean camp.  We are legitimately staying in a canvas tent (with holes in it) set up on a wooden platform under a thatched roof.  This is definitely not the kind of "glamping" people think of when they picture safaris.  Yet everything else is fantastic.  The restaurant here is a two-story wooden pagoda right next to these two baobabs that have twisted together and become intertwined - hence the name "Camp Amoureux."  The first floor has several tables for dining, and the upstairs is a lounge area with couches, chairs, and this awesome ball game that I have no idea how to play, but want to understand so much!

Angry Red-Fronted Brown Lemur

After a nice barbecue fish lunch, we took a two-hour walk through the Marofandilia Forest.  But, even before we left the camp, we saw a troop of red-fronted brown lemurs right by our host's and a panther chameleon that was nearly two-feet long!  Unfortunately, after leaving the camp we didn't see much more for the first hour.  We ran across a small green gecko and a collared iguanid (not an iguana), but little else.  Then we hit the jackpot.  About 2/3 of the way through the hike, we stumbled into another troop of red-fronted brown lemurs.  What's more, they had two babies and one of the females was about to give birth!  The males were very protective of the pregnant female, and it wasn't long before the only thing between me and a hissing lemur was two feet and a camra lens!  Not long thereafter, we found a troop of Verreaux's sifakas in the canopy above us.  They were leaping from tree-to-tree and they had a few babies with them too (it's baby season for lemurs).  We got some phenomenal pictures!

We had a lazy afternoon, drinking Three Horses Beer, napping on the second floor of the "restaurant," and recovering from a hard day of driving and lemur watching.  Yet, 6:30 came quickly and it was time to take a night walk through the forest.  Our day walk was great, but the night walk was even better!  Before leaving our camp, we saw a fork-marked lemur (which are very rare around here), a red-tailed sportive lemur, and a Madame Berthe's mouse lemur.  As our walk continued, we found at least a dozen mouse lemurs, including some gray mouse lemurs, a few sportive lemurs, and two more fork-marked lemurs. Only two species eluded us - the dwarf lemur, and the aye aye.  I really wanted to see an aye aye (like everyone else in the world), but they are unbelievably shy and difficult to find.  They say that even tour guides that have been doing this for ten years or more often haven't seen an aye aye!

By the time 9:30 rolled around, we were both exhausted, so we called it a night and started resting up for our long drive to Bekopaka.