On the way to the rain forest

We've got as far as the long journey to Ranomafana It took all day to drive there and nearly as long to post these photos in this journal! We left at 7.30am and arrived about 7pm. We drove through the highlands and down the plateau, stopping for a picnic lunch in a small rain forest where we saw some of the damage caused by the cyclone earlier this year. The scenery on the journey was quite spectacular. It's amazing how an island has such diverse scenery ranging from desert to highlands, waterfalls, and rain forests and all along the coast there's white sand beaches fringed with palm trees. Madagascar has the second largest barrier reef after The Great Barrier Reef of Australia.
Today I'll just show you some of the scenery we passed on our way to see the lemurs in the forest. Here's a photo of some of our tour group. l-r.... Rita, Stuart, Kathy,me. Mohamed, Teodor, Yvonne, Carol and Barry. Note my leech socks! Lol!

A waterfall

Selling craftwear

I wish I knew how to balance a bag on my head like this!

This is the local cinema!

A vegetable market

Where ever we stopped there were kids coming to see us

View over the terraced hillsides

This tree trunk had turned to stone

There were a lot of gemstones in Madagascar

A river in the Highlands

I think this is a kind of bee eater

A fisherman patiently waiting for a bite

This bridge was blown up by Madagascans, they burnt the Queens' Palace down too, seems they do these things when they get angry with the government!

Looking up the other way on the same river

More beautiful scenery

This particular tribe wore very colourful robes thrown across their shoulders

Sunday morning, these familes were waiting to go into church

A Madagascan version of a skateboard

The whole congregation were here to see us!

These are fungi in a rain forest where we had a picnic

This tree was blown down in the cyclone earlier this year

How does she balance it?!

I loved the scenery!

Mohamed loved talking to the children, they all seemed to love him too

Madagascar is the fourth poorest nation in the world. Although the people survive by growing their own food they have little else

It puzzled me why so many wore wooly hats, it was so hot there!

This lady is giving out the pens, pencils and sweets we took for the children

I asked the lady if I could take a photo of her and her baby

I love the colour of this lake which is near to the rain forest we were heading for

You can see by all the trees that we had just about reached our destination of Ranomafana National Park. It'd been a long drive but the ever changing scenery made the time go fast for us.

I'll leave it here and the next entry will be of the animal encounters we had.

I've been talking to Andy about holidays next year. We're hoping to be able to book up to go to Perth, Western Australia; a Caribbean cruise to Tobago, Virgin Islands, Barbados, St Lucia and The Dominican Republic. I'm also booking up to do a tour of Tunisia. I've been meaning to do it for a few years but what really convinced me to go was the fact that Mohamed, my tour manager in Madagascar is Tunisian and does the tours in Tunisia for Saga. During this last tour he convinced me that I'd like to go after promising there weren't many steps there! I'm holding you to that Mohamed! In Madagascar there are hundreds of steps ~ big ones almost 18" high with no hand rails! With the pneumonia it was hard work getting up them! I've told him I'll go over in May but I may change that to June as we're hoping to go on the cruise in March or April.... I don't want all my holidays squashed up too near to each other! Lol! We won't go to Perth till November '09.

Have a good week!