Days 3–6: Trekking the Rain Forest with Beasties and Lemurs

Paul S Bryers: July 22, 2026

Leaving Tana behind us

On Day 3 we headed out from Tana in our jeeps, via Moramanga and Mandraka Park, bound for Andasibe-Mantadia National Park. Four to five hours on mostly sealed roads with slightly more potholes than a typical Glasgow road. Do not attempt in a car, or in a pretend, trendy SUV. Speaking of Glasgow – it’s clear the Tartan Army were here overnight. Couple of traffic cones about the place.

The outskirts of Tana were simple clay brick houses with the occasional larger one among them, and paddy fields of young rice coming up yellow-green, watercress, taro.

Along the way, folk were doing their washing in wee rivers and laying the clothes out on the rocks to dry –  a colourful sight. Some looked especially pleased with their fresh gear.

Terracing became more evident as we left the city behind. And then, finally, the first glimpse of the rain forest.

Mandraka Park

We stopped for a wee hike. Chameleons – a couple of them, doing that slow deliberate rocking walk they do, as though checking the branch is still there before committing to it.

Wasp.

Butterfly.

Some flowers, including, surprisingly, hydrangeas.

Cool ferns.

Giant bamboo.

After the stroll, a bit of swinging was in order. Lynne and I were quite happy together. Her husband smiled. At least I think that’s what he was doing.

Planting trees with GERP

Then tree planting with GERP, in beautiful hilly surroundings.

Team Mejdi got roughly 150 trees in the ground in about an hour, and we were very pleased with ourselves. The new trees seemed pleased too. Mibbies they’ll write to us with their progress.

Andasibe-Mantadia National Park

Then on to the National Park and our accommodation. The road turned to earth and mud, tortuous twists and turns, some serious holes. Great fun.

Eventually, Vakona Forest Lodge — home for the next three nights.

Not luxurious, but more than adequate: an airy common area and individual basic cottages with bathrooms. Lovely sounds all night of croaking frogs (probably deadly) and buzzing insects (definitely deadly).

Into the rain forest and lemurs!

Over the next two days we set off to find lemurs in the rain forest. We were very successful, thanks to our excellent guides.

Leaving the lodge on the first morning, a small bird was working the flowers beside the path – hovering, wings a blur, drinking, sometimes, on the wing. Moved so fast it was difficult to see, never mind capture. I did my best.

Hah, you clever folks are thinking hummingbird! It looked exactly like a hummingbird. It is not a hummingbird. There are no hummingbirds in Madagascar, nor anywhere in the Old World. That was a souimanga sunbird, separated from the hummingbirds of the Americas by tens of millions of years and related to them not at all. Same problem – how do you drink from a flower without landing on it – and the same answer arrived at twice, independently, on opposite sides of the planet.

Madagascar does this constantly. It’s one of the things I’ve come for.

We met our guides Thierry and his sons at the trailhead and set off.

Conditions were dry – it is the dry season, after all – and the “paths” ranged from easy to quite steep and slippy, the flora getting very dense at times.

As we neared the lemurs, the paths were left behind altogether and we pushed through plants that seemed determined to trip us up, decapitate us, or draw blood.

We were brave.

Then the calls went up. Indri lemurs! They had spotted us long before we spotted them. Quite a spooky sound.

Note: I think I have the species right. If not, who cares — they are all fabulous.

> Indri lemur

Indri indri

The largest lemur alive, and it looks it. The size of a small child, black and white in a pattern no two wear quite the same, round fab fuzzy ears, and almost no tail at all – a stub, where every other lemur has a length of it. Eats leaves, mostly, which is a low-energy way to live and explains the sitting about.

Then it sings. A wailing, sliding, air-raid siren of a call that a family group builds together and holds, and which carries two miles through the forest. It is the loudest thing in Madagascar and one of the strangest sounds any animal makes.

The Malagasy call it babakoto. No indri has ever survived long in a zoo, anywhere, ever. They will not be kept. You want to hear one, you come here.

> Black-and-white ruffed lemur

Varecia variegata

The show-off. Panda-marked, with a great ruff of white fur round the face like a Tudor collar, and a scream that goes through the forest like a car alarm. A screaming queen really…

Mostly fruit, and it is one of the great pollinators –  it shoves its snout into the flower bracts of the traveller’s palm, which nothing else is strong enough to prise open, and walks off dusted in pollen to do it again. The palm relies on it entirely.

Also this: it builds a nest, has twins or triplets, then parks them in it and goes off foraging. Almost no other primate on earth does that. Everyone else carries the baby. This one leaves it in a basket. Seems very sensible to me. 

Delightful and very cute, as I said at the time. Also loud enough to be heard from the next valley.

> Red-bellied lemur

Eulemur rubriventer

Chestnut-brown and dense-furred, with a bare patch of white skin under each eye that looks exactly like a permanent teardrop. Fruit, flowers, leaves, the occasional insect.

Males and females look different, which is unusual enough – but the interesting part is the arrangement. They pair up and stay paired, and the male does a serious share of carrying the infant about. Monogamous, involved, and weeping slightly. A model of modern fatherhood. This would have been me had things been different, although I do do the weeping. 

> Common brown lemur

Eulemur fulvus

The one you’d draw if asked to draw a lemur. Grey-brown, dark face, pale eyebrow patches, sexes almost identical, which is rare in this family.

Fruit and leaves and whatever’s going. And a genuinely odd trick: it’s cathemeral, meaning active in the day and the night, drifting between the two as the season and the moonlight suit. Not diurnal, not nocturnal. Very few primates on earth do this.

No fixed hours. Just gets up when it fancies it. Aye, fine, that suits me. 

> Eastern grey bamboo lemur

Hapalemur griseus

Small, compact, grey, short-faced, with a serious expression – usually found clamped to a bamboo stem looking mildly put upon.

Bamboo. That’s it, essentially. Shoots, pith, leaves. A food almost nothing else can be bothered with, because it’s tough, low in nutrition and laced with cyanide. This family has specialised so hard into it that one relative eats a daily dose that would flatten a man several times over.

How they survive it is, remarkably, still not settled. There’s a liver enzyme that converts cyanide into something less lethal, and possibly a gut microbiome helping out, and they do supplement by eating soil – though that seems to be for minerals rather than any antidote. Beyond that, the honest scientific position is a shrug.

They have been eating poison every day for millions of years and have not yet explained themselves. It’s about time to come clean my furry friends! 

> Diademed sifaka

Propithecus diadema

The acrobat, and one of the largest and most spectacular of all the lemurs – silver-grey, with orange-gold limbs and a dark face ringed by a pale crown, which is where the diadem comes in. Long-limbed, silky, built entirely for the vertical: it clings to a trunk, launches, and crosses thirty feet of air between trees without appearing to hurry.

Leaves, seeds, flowers. Named for the alarm call – shi-fak – which is exactly what it sounds like.

And on the ground it cannot walk. The legs are wrong for it. So it stands up and bounds sideways on two feet, arms out for balance, in a series of hops that looks like nothing else in nature and has been described, generously, as dancing. I include a photo from the net. 

> Other flora and critters

We also encountered a lovely Parsons chameleon (young male) ……

……and a mossy leaf tailed gheko. How the guide found the chameleon-like gheko is beyond me – I can’t even see it in the photo. 

During the trek we came across a lot of interestingly shaped trees and vines…..

….some fungi….

…..fig fruits……

…..and a wee pill millipede…

As the sun lowered we headed back to the Lodge for our third night. What a fantastic couple of days.

The night trek

That evening there was a night walk. I could not attend due to – well, let’s say I had to stay near a loo. I have included some team and internet photos of lemurs observed.

> Goodman’s mouse lemur

Microcebus lehilahytsara

Fits in your palm. Fifty grams of russet fur and two enormous eyes, out only at night, moving through the branches like something spilled. Fruit, insects, nectar, gum. Fattens its tail as a larder for the lean months.

Only described as its own species in 2005, and named for the biologist Steve Goodman — lehilahytsara is Malagasy for “good man.” Somebody got a species named after them and a pun in the same stroke.

> Eastern woolly lemur

Avahi laniger

Nocturnal, woolly, and shaped like a soft toy that’s been left out in the rain. Big amber eyes, small ears buried in fur, permanently startled expression. Leaves – a hard living at night, when it’s cold and leaves are all there is.

Pairs for life, and sleeps through the day out in the open, the two of them clinging to the same branch pressed together, entirely visible to anything that looks up. Its whole survival strategy is to be extremely still and hope.

It works more often than it should.

> Night time Party Chameleon

> Night frog

Summary

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

The indri will not live in a zoo – not anywhere, not ever, no matter who has tried. The bird at the flower was never a hummingbird. The bamboo lemur eats a poison nobody has fully explained. Every one of these animals has arrived at its own answer, alone, on an island that broke away from everywhere else 88 million years ago and was left to work things out for itself.

Which means there is no borrowing them. No lending them out, no seeing them somewhere more convenient. If you want to hear an indri sing, you come to this forest, in this country, and you stand still under these particular trees and wait.

We stood still. It sang. We listened.

Definitely worth the potholes.

Photo credits: My DSLR camera zoom broke, so all my videos and photos are from my iPhone 16 Pro Max. Four of the photos are from team members with proper cameras and 3 are off the internet. A big thank you to them.