Day 5 - 07/09/2015: Drive Tana to Ranomafana
After breakfast at the hotel we set off at 7am for the long drive to Ranamafana. Getting through and out of Tana was slow (about 2 hours) and gave us an opportunity to view the shops of the capital, and hope that our hotel in Tana doesn’t source its produce here! The road we took beyond the capital is the main north-south route of the country (N7). For the next 5 hours we followed the twists and turns of a river valley. The road was very pot-holed which made for continued slow progress. The landscape here was almost entirely given over to rice paddies, both in the flood-plain and terraced up the valley sides, and brick formation, apparently directly from the wet soil. There were many egrets in the rice paddies and the occasional pied crow, but the wildlife we saw was minimal, especially compared with the abundance of wildlife that is associated with Indian rice paddies for example. We saw very little in the way of trees or wild flowers along the roadsides or between the paddies and no areas of native forest in the entire journey. Probably the most widespread birds in the rice paddies were domestic chickens, which seem to have evolved very much longer legs than their European cousins, presumably as an adaptation to wading.
We stopped at 2pm for a traditional Madagascan meal at a restaurant in Ambositra. Here we were entertained by a 3-piece Madagascan band, called Marolafy, playing unusual instruments and singing rather well. They went for the Bob Marley look but the music was distinctly not reggae. We bought their CD. All our lunch and dinner meals at hotels and at this restaurant offered 3 courses - which didn’t do much to help with the diet. Here we had some unidentified warm solidified paste served wrapped in a banana leaf as a starter. For mains we had a choice of a zebu stew (zebu is the Madagascan equivalent of cattle), chicken (long-legged) in a coconut sauce, or a salad (which everybody avoided, because it was probably washed in tap water, even though it looked very appetizing). For desert we had some delicious pineapple. The restaurant was situated down a passageway behind a series standard Madagascan street shops, making the initial entrance look rather uninviting, but it was clean and pleasant enough. The shop immediately outside held large baskets of such delights as dried shrimps, dried whitebait, rice, lentils and various beans.
At 3.30pm we continued on our journey south. We left the valley behind and crossed to the eastern side of the central mountain range. As dusk fell the rain came and gradually got heavier – driving conditions were pretty atrocious, and by the time we arrived at our lodge at 8pm our driver had done nearly 12 hours at the wheel. We were greeted by hotel staff with umbrellas - and this was the only time on the trip we needed them.
After dinner I spent about an hour photographing some of the moths that were attracted to the light outside our chalet. These included 5 hawkmoth species, amongst which were Convolvulus Hawkmoth that I get as a scarce migrant in Britain and Silver-striped Hawkmoth which also occurs as an annual migrant to Britain but which has never graced my traps. Below is a gallery of some of these moths: