Awesome African Adventure. Day 39 – May 16, 2025

Ringtails and Flower Paper

Leaving Ranomafana and heading south for warmer weather to Ranohira

Here’s the plan from Benj – sent via What’s app each day.

Day 10: May 16th, 2025 – Ranomafana to Ranohira Isalo

06:30 AM: Early breakfast at Manja Guest House.
07:15 AM: Depart Ranomafana, drive through the city of Fianarantsoa (actually 7:25, pretty good for us)
11:00 AM: Visit of Antemoro paper workshop in Ambalavao.
12:00 AM: Visit of Anja Reserve
01:00 PM: Lunch in a restaurant near Anjà reserve
02:15 PM: Continue to drive to Ranohira
05:45 PM: Arrive in Ranohira and check in at Isalo Ranch.
07:00 PM: Dinner at Isalo Ranch. Briefing for the following day by Benja

Accommodation: ISALO RANCH, Ranohira

Ok back to me. We stopped shortly down the road to take in a Namorona Waterfall. It’s the same one as on the 5000 Ariary note.

We passed through the crossroads town of the long name. And the Parc Nationale Ranomafana.
Benj pointed out a house and tomb combination in a village. Lova Lapa – Palace of Heritage. This is so they can house the people when there is a ceremony. The tombs are often a long way from where the family lives. So this double arrangement works for these people. (A very rare way to go about it)”
We passed through the large town of Fiantarosoa -(Hill of good Learning/education)
A couple of magnificent photo stops. One looking across ‘the new valley’ = Ambalavoa City with the granite massif Andringitra (Andrinch) also a National Park noted for trekking. This is the second highest mountain in Madagascar. (2851m)
Into Ambalavoa we pulled off into La Bouganvillees to visit the paper making workshop. Bark from the Avola tree grown near the coast is stripped and pulped into a paper mache type pulp via a 4 hour cooking process. Then it is softened using a couple of mallets. Laid out into the settling process, drained and decorated using pressed flowers from their garden before being dried in the sun. Short stop, interesting process.
We are now in the area of the Betsileo tribe.
Then we are off to walk in the twin granite hills at Anja Reserve.
Our walk guided by Lonry, Ernest and Niri resulted in:
Oustalet’s Chameleon -male.
Golden Web Spider
Ring Tailed Lemur. Live in groups of 15-30 with 4 months gestation, annual birth, independent at 4 months. Can have twins. adult after 3 years. They start rhe day on the ground to take a drink, then feed and go to the trees. Then down to drink again and at night they sleep in the rocks in caves. Their Love song sounds like a cat, and their alarm call sounds like a dog. Enemies are boa snake. Females lead the group.
Lilac tree is their favourite food – leaves, fruits, flowers and tree. They use minerals in the rocks to neutralise the toxin in the lilac tree
Golden fingers frog
Female Oustalet’s Chameleon
Flighted leaf bugs
Big Oustalet’s male.
Some sort of bugs on a branch that look like a fungi until we realised they were moving.
It was an awesome visit to Anja Reserve. The three guides/spotters were eagle eyed and helpful. The lemurs were amazing – a bit lazy on the trees and later treated us to them coming down to drink and lick the minerals in the rock.
We saw it all, with some dragon flies.
Lunch we had ordered on arrival and we returned to Jacaranda’s to eat (an hour behind time) we four all had the Zebu skewers and shared our sides of rice / sautéed visitors/fries.

Back into the car we head south for another 3.5-4 hours. Benj pointed out rocks known as the Gate to the South. Here we leave Betsileo country and enter the country of the Para Barra??? people.
The Granite Massif Mountain range has lots of different peaks and names. There is a public and private reserve, the private one is community owned and supports the community. They certainly dominated the landscape, which has changed now to more like Savannah grasslands. There is less terracing evident, though the valleys and riversides are well utilised. And there is still a lot of rice And other crops on the flats. They dry the rice in all sorts of places including the road surface.

Most of the village names are tongue twisters and certainly not pronounced phonetically.
Zazafotsy was one of the easier ones and means White Baby.

We got pulled up at a few police checks yesterday and today. They put some spikes out and direct traffic to stop. They seem to check where you are coming from and going too and then they check Nico’s papers in the glove box and his licence and then we continue on.
The road today improved out of sight. The day started out dodging and weaving around and through pool sized pothole puddles, and slowly improved from there to the point we hit a new top speed of 80/85kmph. We still needed to dodge and weave between all the local traffic-lots of Zebu carts, zebu herds being driven along the road, a few pushcarts, push bikes, tuk tuks, trucks, the overloaded local buses and soooo many people walking along the road.
Plateau of Horumbe – we had the sun setting in front of us and colouring over the valley behind.
Past a newly built High Security Prison. The road had started to deteriorate again with lots of potholes to dodge and weave between.
Not sure if I’ve mentioned it previously but we feel quite at home amongst the many gum trees here in Madagascar and in Africa too. They are used as wood for everything. The essential oils we stopped to smell yesterday has a eucalyptus one – which was lemon scented. The lemurs will evidently eat the gum blossom/flowers – not the leaves though. Parts of the plateau reminded me of driving through dry county at home. Very few trees dotted amongst the grass plains.
We arrived into Ranohiro Village at 6:45 (Rano water, hira- Lemur, water of lemur)
Benj had to take 5 minutes to arrange a guide before we headed for the lodge. Naira ( is our guide for tomorrow. He was at the village to meet us. Benj arranged times etc.
tonight we arrived at Isalo Ranch at 7pm.
A quick set up of some charging before heading across to the restaurant for our briefing with Benj for tomorrow and dinner
Feeling the stiffness from yesterday’s Ranomafana walk, which isn’t helped by sitting in the car for almost 11 hours.