Leaping Lemurs (Day 46)
Lemurs really do leap! They spend their days eating leaves high up in trees. When they are done, they will leap to the next tree. Their leaps are daring, skilled, funny looking, and graceful all at once!
Sometimes, a lemur will jump to one of the hotel rooms.
Here is a lemur jump in slow motion.
Lemurs rarely travel on the ground, but sometimes the next tree is far away…. So they sort of leap/dance over to it!
Here, a lemur mother jumps along the ground with her baby on her back.
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BABY / TEENY LEMURS
Young sifaka lemur.
Teeny lemur babies ride on their mother’s tummy or back.
We did a few night walks where we saw elusive nocturnal mouse lemurs. It seemed crazy to look for things the size of a mouse 30 feet up in trees in the dark, but we still found them. This one didn’t like the flashlight. (Sorry, little buddy!)
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OTHER ANIMALS
Giant turtles — Our hotel recently built an open air sanctuary for giant turtles. The hotel has more than half of the giant turtles in the whole country, and they have a multiyear plan to reintroduce these turtles into the wild. Giant turtles can live to be 200-years-old and can weigh over 300 pounds.
We saw a variety of fun, colorful animals, such as this Madagascar milkweed rainbow locust and this gecko.
One day, we found an 8-foot-long ground boa constrictor on the hotel grounds. It was less than 1 minute walk from the main lobby.
Flatid leaf bugs- They are some of the coolest bugs we have seen. They look like little white leaves on a tree — until you see them move!
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MADAGASCAR TODAY
Probably the defining feature of modern life in Madagascar is the amazingly bad road system, ranked 4th worst in the world. We never saw a paved road outside of the capital, and people say the main highways are sort of like a 4x4 off-road adventure. This hinders so many forms of progress: economic growth, education, healthcare, etc. The Malagasy people we talked to seemed incredibly sad and frustrated by this. They blamed government corruption and seemed to feel powerless.
It makes tourism hard too… Our hotel wasn’t even accessible by road at all! We could have flown or taken a boat. We chose to fly.
During our stay, we visited a Malagasy village. (We had to take a truck with tires as tall as Hugh so that we would not get stuck on the drive.). Village life centers around fishing from hand-carved wooden boats. The boats seemed very small, but they take 3-4 people, often going out for 2 nights for an 80 mile journey.
Compared to the Samburu and Maasai villages, this Malagasy village was much less focused on maintaining traditional ways. They lived very differently, but they seemed to do things as practically as they could. For example, they built their houses from wood slats or branches because it is cheaper and easier and the materials are local (remember the bad roads). Also, cyclones wipe out their houses every few years, so you should build them simply.
They were not nomadic. The village was run by a democratically elected leader, and women could vote! They used money and had 2 stores for local people. They had windmill powered water wells, and we could hear music coming from solar powered radios.
One rich family even had a satellite dish (on their house made of sticks).
What seemed to be graffiti on the walls turned out to be kids practicing writing and math! Paper, pens, and books seemed scarce in rural Africa, so Malagasy kids make due with what they can.
The Malagasy villagers are not polygamist, but men again have to pay in cows to get a wife — but only 1 cow this time. Jamie felt like this huge disparity in the wife:cow exchange ratio between countries might present an arbitrage opportunity…
Teenage male circumcision was again an important right of passage in Madagascar. The local religion includes good and evil animal spirits, and people feel they can control the spirits if they build a small enclosure where they pour the blood of a zebu (like a cow). Even our hotel has one of these spirit enclosure areas!
Again, local kids seemed pretty interested in us as strangers from a far away land.
One surprising difference was the amount of singing and music. We heard 5 small musical performances during our stay. The Malagasy songs were beautiful !
