Week 1 Tana - Fianar - Tsaranoro - Tana

"Dave goes down South"

The original idea for a trip to Madagascar must really be atttributed to Jelte's travels there in 1999. I was really keen to travel somewhere I didn't know anthing about. ADVENTURE TRAVEL! Also, Jelte said that it was cheap and worm-ridden, amongst other things. However, like most statements Jelte makes, this was a distorted image of the truth...

Fund raising for the trip was a nerve-wracking experience. Fortunately, the UCTMSC helped us out and in tandem my debts to my parents increased. On the eve of my departure I realised I was still short of cash. I spent a whileI looking around my room for things to sell. Eventually, I sold my prize Gore-tex jacket. I was very bleak, as the jacket had taken me a long time to earn. However, the tragic loss strengthened my resolve.

So anyway, I boarded a flight in July from Johannesburg to Antananarivo, the Capital of Madagascar. I planned to meet Mattieu in Diego Suarez, a city in the far north, after 1 week. It was quite scary, arriving alone in a francophone country, with extremely limited knowledge of French( and Malagasy). The taxi drivers fought for my luggage, and the airport secuirty looked menacing. It seemed as if the entire population of Tana had turned out to meet the plane, in order to squeeze some cash out of the tourists. I felt quite threatened, and I was glad to get out of the Airport and into the relative safety of a taxi. When I say relative, I mean that instead of being mugged, I thought was going to die in a Citroen 2CV , in a horrible accident involving a Zebu (local cow-varient) and a rice paddy.

The road from the airport to the Capital is good. Realise that by "Good", I mean tarred and just wide enough for cars to pass each other, as opposed to "Bad", meaning a long line of interlinked potholes rimmed by an occasional 2cm strip of tar. Tana itself is built on several groups of hillocks, surrounded by rice paddy's built on flood plains. In summer, the paddy's are all flooded and the hillocks have the pictureseque appearance of being small islands in a big, sewerage pond.

In truth, however, Tana is beautiful. The architecture is beautiful, and is a mixture of the French Colonial influence and the home-grown double story building stye typical of the local tribal group. The houses have pretty woodwork , and are bulit out of fired, red bricks, plasterd with mud. The roofs are often tiled with had made tiles, and the result is an effective, attractive building.

Whilst driving, I slowly relaxed and took in the images of life in Tana. The mixture of modern and medieval is astounding. Zebu carts and renaults vie for space in the traffic. An internet cafe is situated next door to a hotely, a traditional restaurant-like operation. It's an astounding sight, the modern and the medieval side by side.

I found a hotel for R65, the most I paid for a bed on my trip. It was clean and the staff were used to backpackers. I relaxed on a bed and tried to allow my mind to catch up. That evening I phoned "Les Lezard des Tana", the tour company I had been in contact with when planning my trip, and I planned the next days taxi-brouse(literally meaning "bush taxi") journey to Fianar. I went to have supper at small local restaurant. I pointed at some noodles at another table, indicating what I wanted. Naturally, the waiter misunderstood and I ended up with a large bowl of a suspicious broth, with a fried egg floating in it. In the end, it was actually rather tasty and I decided not to be a wimpy tourist.

Transport in Madagascar can be easily simulated in Cape Town. Hire " the Cobra", our local rollercoaster for a day. Squash 5 people into every seat. Feed some of them dodgy meat and greasy snacks. Now run the rollercoaster for 8 hours, occasionlly stopping for a toilet break, executed next to a roadside shack. A fellow passenger puking, children weeing or road disappearance are not valid reasons for a stop. A smoke break for the driver, on the other (soiled) hand, is. The transport for this journey was an ancient Peugot 405. 13 passengers in a station wagon! Fortunately, some fellow passengers cut me some slack, and gave me a window seat, after teaching me how to say "Thank You" in Malagasy - Misaotra.

Fianar, (I use the abbrieviation - I can't spell the full name!), is a town in the Malagasy mid-south which lies en route to the Andringsitra mountains. The town is very pretty. More about it later... I was instructed by Lezards to stay in a specific (expensive) hotel. I arrived late and left in the morning for the Andringsitra mountains in a old renault army lorry, owned by Les Lezards. We stopped briefly to pick some people up in Ambalavao, and bought some charcoal on the roadside. I tried to entertain the little un's in the Photo with some juggling, but like in my friends in SA, they weren't really impressed! The road was good, and almost empty of traffic.

After a couple of hours, we turned off the national route and onto a 20km dirt track, eventually arriving at Camp Catta, near the Tsaranoro massif, in the early evening. I immediately went bouldering for a bit, to relieve the travel stress. I also met a group of Spanish climbers, who were friendly and a lot of fun. Camp Catta was luxury accomodation. Excelllent food and great facilities - at a price.

Over the next few days, I walked around in the drizzly rain, to see all the walls. They are quite amazing. I made plans with the french camp manager Mattieu, to climb a shorter rouse called "le Croix du sud", 300m 6b. This didn't work out, and I ended up leaving the massif disappointed and a lot poorer, not having climbed more than a few boulders.

From the Andringsitra area, I began the long journey to Diego Suarez in the far North. The epic nature of this journey need not be recounted in detail, suffice to say I'll never do it again, and it took 4 full days. At one stage, we only covered 100km in 10 hours of non-stop driving. Fortunately, I had chickened out of Taxi-brousse transport and had opted for a ride with one of the Lezard lorries. THe Spanish climbers were also travelling in the same direction, so I was kept well entertained. It was quite amazing crossing huge rivers at in the moonlight on single track bridges, and seeing the vegetation change from grassland to tropical as we dropped from the central plateau to the coast. The temperature and humidity increased as well. At one overnight stop, I hadn't slept for a while, and I remember lying in a hotel room feeling really shit, sweating, watching the roof spin, and listening to the incessent beat of the disco below my window.

We eventually arrived in Diego, and booked into a hotel. We were a few hours behind schedule, so I immediately went to find Mattieu. We had arranged a few meeting places, and he had left messages all around town. I went to his hotel, which happened to be above THE most notorious nightclub in Diego. I eventually found him in his room, eating a coconut. When he saw me, he said "I thought you weren't going to come". Sheeesh.