The third part of our Madagascar trip started with an entire day spent in a bus from Morondava to Antasirabe – unfortunately the bus air conditioner broke within the first hour and after some time of animated conversations between the driver and the tour leader, they established that a spare part was needed and it might be some time before we found it, so we travelled with the bus windows open. Not surprisingly, we arrived in Antasirabe quite late in the evening at about 20:30 and in the dark.

The following morning we visited some local workshops where items were fashioned from Zebu horns.

What exactly are Zebu?

Well, there should be a whole category to describe this one. Zebu is the local species of Madagascar ‘beef’ cattle.

Best to explain as follows: if it looks like a duck, clucks like a duck, walks like a duck – it ain’t beef.

Enough said.

It ain’t beef as you know it but at least worth a try to understand why I say this.

However, the horns make remarkable works of art and its quite fascinating to watch local craftsmen in action. To support the community initiative, we bought some Zebu teaspoons.

Back on the road after this for another long day in the bus. Today’s entertainment (in addition to the lack of air con due to the still unlocated spare part) involved a flat tyre about an hour outside of Antasirabe, in a picturesque rural location.

We continued on our journey, taking up most of the day and arrived at Ranomafana National Park in the early evening, going out for a nature walk of about 5 hours in the national park the following day.

This National Park is beautiful and well worth the long trip to get there. Lots of forest and fabulous waterfalls and, of course, lemurs….

Numerous creatures noted here including: the Red bellied lemur, red fronted brown lemur, the greater bamboo lemur and the elusive Golden Bamboo lemur as well as frogs, birds and chameleons.

At this point I lost track of the names of the lemurs – there were just so many different ones, so hard to keep a mental note of them all! I believe we saw about 40 different species in total across the entire trip.

Moving on from Ranomafana the next morning to the Anja National Park where we saw the famed ring tailed or King Julian lemurs.

Such characters.

Onwards to the next stop (Isalo National Park) after lunch.

En route we came across some locals transporting a pig in a rather curious way as well as random hat sellers….

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