Days 6 (cont) – 11: In which we bonded with villagers, were visited by spirits, overwhelmed by baobabs, charmed by lemurs and made chocolate

Paul S Bryers, July 28 2026

Day 6 (cont) – A village that had never met a tourist

We continued Day 6 with a visit to Ankadiefajoro, a village of around 400 in the commune of Nandihizana in Manjakandriana district, twenty kilometres east of the capital. It sits immediately north of the RN2, the trunk road from Antananarivo to the port of Toamasina, which carries most of the country’s freight on its back.

The village had never received tourists before. We were the first.

I am not sure I have the words for what happened next, but I’ll try. The whole village turned out – including something like 170 children – and greeted us with singing and dancing and a wall of smiling faces.

There were formal welcomes from the chief/mayor…..

………from an elder woman who looked magnificent in red…….

….and from an elder man who was so delighted that I too was called Paul that he shouted my name at me at intervals for the rest of the afternoon.

Then a tour of a house. Simple, though I suspect one of the grander ones – it still slept ten people and had no toilet. The animals occupied the lower floor. The upper, living area, consisted of a basic kitchen with blackened ceilings from burning charcoal for cooking and heat, a living area with bed, a hallway bedroom and a main bedroom. Toilets are communal. The owners were very proud to show us around, as they should be.

Lunch was a proper occasion, with the mayor and select elders and youth.

We fell into a wonderful exchange with the young people about Céline Dion, Michael Jackson, and what they wanted for themselves and for the village. The food was excellent – especially a rice dessert that takes four days to make and was worth every one of them. Then rum tasting. This village, which has next to nothing, had pushed the boat right out for us.

And then more dancing, until it was no longer clear who was entertaining whom.

Something passed between us and them that afternoon. A bond, for want of a less sentimental word. And it has left me thinking hard about the children. There is no primary school in the village, and the nearest schools are a two-to-three-kilometre walk away, across that busy highway and, they tell us, a river that floods dangerously in the wet season.

And there was this. Two young women from the village had recently passed their university entrance exams. Their families could not find the few hundred dollars a year it would cost to send them. So they will most likely stay in the village, they told us, and marry. Passed the exam. Can’t afford the door.

It seems to me there may be a way for us to help – with the primary, the secondary, and those university places. More on that in due course. It has rather got under my skin.

That evening, a complete change of register: a meeting with Aurelie Kouman, journalist at France 24 Afrique, on Madagascar’s relationship with France, the long shadow of the colonial period, and the growing weight of Russia and China.

From a village that had never seen a tourist to a conversation about great-power competition, in a single day. This country does that to you.

A morning flight, MD703, carried us back from Morondava to Antananarivo, and the west coast gave way once more to the highlands.

Day 7 – Visited by spirits

After breakfast, a visit to a local place of worship for a demonstration of traditional spiritual practice, and a meeting with the community leader.

I found it unsettling, and I could not talk myself out of the feeling that I was watching theatre.

The spirits, we were told, were those of naughty young men and prostitutes, come to possess the villagers in front of us. There was contorting of bodies. There was the simulated stabbing of oneself with knives. There was the drinking of beer. It was vivid and committed and, to my Presbyterian-adjacent Scottish eye, deeply peculiar.

Now – I want to be careful here. These are people’s genuine beliefs, held sincerely, in a tradition far older than my discomfort with it, and it is not my place to sit in a Malagasy village and rule on the authenticity of someone else’s spirits. Ancestor reverence runs deep in Madagascar and deserves more respect than a visitor’s raised eyebrow.

But, I couldn’t shake the sense of performance. Whether that says more about the ceremony or about the sceptical Scot watching it, I genuinely can’t tell you. Possibly the spirits took one look at me and decided I wasn’t worth the effort.

We then flew from Tana to Morondava.

Later, something entirely more terrestrial: a meeting with FANAMBY, a conservation association working on the sustainable management of Madagascar’s natural resources and the protection of its extraordinary biodiversity. They showed us how conservation and local livelihoods have to be made to work together here, because neither survives without the other.

Then a sunset cocktail on the beach. The fishing boats were out, lateen sails leaning into the light -not fishing at this hour, but working as water taxis across the bay. Lovely. And a shark passed by, slung over a shoulder, on its final journey.

Then on to the Palissandre Côte Ouest at Morondava – a genuinely beautiful hotel, and after that day, a welcome one.

Day 8 – Overwhelmed by baobabs

I have been waiting twelve days to write this sentence: In a greenhouse at Kew, barely two weeks ago, I stood beside a baby baobab that had hit the glass ceiling. Today I stood beneath ones that never will.

Giants. Up to a thousand years old and twenty-five metres tall. These are Grandidier’s baobabs, the grandest of them all, and the Avenue is a straight red-sand road running perhaps a kilometre between two rows of them Kings and Queens, with dead-straight, branchless trunks rising into a cobalt sky.

In the dry season they are crowned not with leaves or fruit but with egrets, and the odd pied crow keeping an eye on things.

Three kinds of baobab grow hereabouts, near enough identical but for a darker bark – or bibibibs, as I have decided to call them, because a tree this magnificent can afford a silly name.

Life went on beneath them. Locals cycling, pousse-pousses running, people walking with their whole shop balanced on their heads. And as we left the Avenue for a wee village, we were chased – briefly and without malice – by a zebu-powered cart. Don’t know what horse-power that equates to….

Next up was lemurs. But first, two owls.

They were roosting up in the daylight, unbothered, doing that thing owls do where they pretend not to see you while very much seeing you – most likely white-browed owls, one of Madagascar’s endemic hunters, which spends the day sitting very still being judged by smaller birds and the night doing the judging itself. Beside them, a chameleon, fast asleep, or doing an excellent impression of a leaf that had given up. And then the lemurs.

Red-fronted brown lemur Eulemur rufifrons

Grey-bodied, with a warm rufous cap and pale eyebrow-spots that give it a look of permanent mild surprise. Fruit, leaves, flowers, the odd insect -an easygoing generalist that lives in loose, sociable troops and takes the dry western forest as it comes.

Verreaux’s sifaka Propithecus verreauxi

The famous “dancing sifaka” of the west, and the one you’ll have seen on the television: white as a bar of soap, with a chocolate-brown cap and a black face. It leaps upright between trunks, and on open ground it cannot walk, so it bounds sideways on two legs with its arms thrown up for balance – half ballet, half toddler, entirely wonderful.

One of ours carried a tiny baby clamped to her fur, hitching a ride through the canopy. Delightful is not too strong a word.

Grey mouse lemur Microcebus murinus

One of the smallest primates alive, a palmful of soft grey fur and two enormous eyes. This one peered in and out of its tree-hole and, now and then, came right out to see what the fuss was about – took one look at a crowd of North Americans and a Scotsman, and, I like to think, concluded we were harmless.

On the way back, We caught sone baobabs in the failing light.

Some folks some stayed to catch the baobabs at sunset – I’ve included one of their photos here….

The rest of us made for the hotel pool and its own sunset, which was glorious. We discovered the Golden Parachute, and old acquaintances were strengthened.

Day 9 – Ring-tailed lemur, plants and fishermen

Day 9 began at the Zazamalala Botanical Garden, where ring-tailed lemurs were spotted, before we took to canoes to visit fishing villages along the coast.

The canoe launching was an event in itself: sliding down through the mud to meet the river, dignity optional.

Kingfishers and herons watched us go.

The waterway was busy – boats everywhere, ferrying people across the channels, a whole commuter network with not a road in sight.

At the fishing village the children were all out, hands held up, walking us to the spot where they’d perform their dance. I suspect there was some hope of a dollar or two; when none came, they didn’t seem to mind in the slightest.

The dancing was a joy, with at least one guest and both our guides joining in -Anatolin, it turns out, is quite the mover.

Then a coconut-climbing demonstration, which I attempted, and did not replicate.

Back down at the river, the fishermen had come in laden with sardines. I helped untangle one small fish from a net and had fish-hands for the remainder of the day.

On dry land we took pousse-pousses, and Aziz and Marie made the decision to challenge Anatolin and me to a race. We lost. We also very nearly came a cropper, which felt like losing twice.

Then the market – hats, spices, salted fish, fresh meat, and chillies hot enough to be classed as a weapon.

Day 10 – Home to the Malagasy highlands, and a farewell

We were welcomed with a Hiragasy performance.

Hira gasy -literally “Malagasy song” -is the great folk spectacle of the highlands, and much more than a concert. A troupe in matching, vaguely nineteenth-century dress performs a whole day’s worth of formal oratory, singing, dancing and gentle moral instruction, the speech-making (kabary) as prized as the music. It grew up under the old Merina monarchy, when a good speaker could hold a crowd for hours, and it survives as a living art form – competitive, communal and full of wit.

And the day – and the main tour of the big island – closed with a farewell dinner at La Varangue in the capital. This is a beautiful French- Malagasy restaurant in the world’s foodie maps.

Day 11 – Chocolate, and onwards to Sainte Marie Island and Whales

We started with a chocolate-making workshop with a local cacao cooperative. Madagascar grows some of the finest cocoa on earth, and it turns out I am no chocolatier — but I gave it everything.

It was great fun.

Then to the airport, and onward: to the island of Sainte Marie, where, after a zebu cart ride, we checked into the Princess Bora Lodge for the next 3 nights. The resort is very beautiful, set over several acres and on the West Coast of the Island.