Day 4 - Sunday 06/09/2015: Ankarafantsika
In the morning we walked through a different part of the Ankarafantsika forest and just added Common Jery and Golden Mouse Lemur to the list. This lemur is rare and local to the Lake Ravelobe area (its surname is ravelobensis), it is nocturnal and apparently very unusual to see it in daylight. Then we drove a short distance to the village of Andranofansika, to see a pair of Madagascar Jacana on some marshy pools. These have become much less common because of the proliferation of introduced water hyacinth, which we saw in abundance on Lake Ravelobe and at Tsaratsaotra. Jacanas cannot walk on this plant and so cannot feed on pools where it is present to any extent. A clean-up programme is planned for Lake Ravelobe, but it will be a very difficult job.
After lunch drove back to Mahajanga in time for the flight back to Tana. On the drive we passed through extensive areas of rice paddies, bare earth and grassland. The area around Mahajanga is heavily populated with people and stick and mud huts all along the way. The roads pretty much everywhere in Madagascar are just wide enough for two vehicles to pass and the drivers give little clearance to the many pedestrians, cyclists and rickshaws that frequent the towns, villages and their outskirts – but managed to avoid hitting them. In the whole trip we only saw one posted speed limit and one traffic light. Air Madagascar had rearranged the time of our flight four times between last night and today, eventually restoring the original departure time – but we had to fly back via Nosy Be, a 1 hour flight away from Tana. Eventually arrived back at the Relais des Plateaux late in the evening to a buffet meal that the hotel had left in our room.