Manja Hotel Ranomafana

... Having seen the conditions they thrive in I am not surprised most of them die in my house The indris are the biggest of all the lemurs and live in small family groups dominated by the females. They are the only prosimians with only vestigial tails - the rest have tails to ...

... on a rickety old wooden bridge and headed back uphill into the forest. It was a beautiful day with a nice blue sky but quickly got hot (and humid) when the sun got higher in the sky. There was lots of up and downhill hiking over rocks and tree stumps which got pretty tiring after a while. Our guide found a couple of golden lemurs in a tree and being the first we've seen we took ...

... i did manage to get a rather nasty middle ear barotrauma injury which had me out of the water and deaf for a couple of weeks but i am all healed now) So what now ? well i have grouped up with 7 others and we hqve endured the journey back to the rest of the world. we have come to a national park called ranoafana (hot water in malagasy) to spend xmas trekking in ...

... all her buddies, the common brown lemur and the bamboo lemur and black and white Sifaka. Then we took off in the canoes this time all 4 of us had one guide so while our guide paddled our canoe, Ferdi had to paddle there's. Well now that was just hilarious to watch. He was very enthusiastic with his paddle strokes to the point that he kept attempting to moor the canoe where he didn't want to moor it! We were in fits of laughter and tears ...

... Indris, Madagascar's largest lemur. The wondrous indris has been described as looking like 'a four year old dressed in a panda suit' and is famous for its eerie wailing cry, which sounds (to us) like a beginner trumpet player, playing one note at a time for as long as their breath holds out. We opted to take a 3-4 hour trek. It was about 40 minutes into our trek when we got to see our first sighting of this fantastic creature. We have been so used to seeing the ...

Ranomafana 29th April 2008 Hey it's my (Caroline) birthday today. Yippee. What an eventful day it turned out to be. We started off by being picked up by a taxi driver who we had met and agreed a price on the night before to take us about one and a half hours away to Ranomafana National Park. Remember this term 'agreed a price' ok? So the guy picks us up and we tell him we need to go to the bank machine first to get money. This he does and as we return ...

... good to be true maybe? I think I like this guy though and give him an advance to get the "petrol" and we agree to meet at my hotel at noon to give me time to walk around the one neighborhood I missed yesterday. I stop by my favorite little market and find my favorite two guys trying to sell me some books from 1960 (it seems as though everything here is from 1960). I graciously decline but tell them that I will be back on Wednesday or ...

... The room was small but comfortable and it made a good base to plan the rest of our itinery while having a couple of relaxing days in the town. Yesterday we hired a car and local driver to drive us to the world heritage Ranomafana national park, it was a lot more relaxing a ride than the Madabus. On arrival we found a great place to stay in Ranomafana village near the park, it is an ensuite bungalow, one of 8, run by ...

We drove along poor roads to Mantady National Park today. we stopped several times on the way to look at huge spider webs, birds and even some lemurs that were in trees close to the road. Maurice again led the way, this time into the damp rainforest. 10 minutes in, I found a leech on my trousers. It was very small and quite insignificant, but I went a girly and flicked it away before it could get to my skin ...

GPS Coordinates: S 21°15'04.9" E 047°26'28.8" Temperature: 20.1°C Humidity: 72.3 % Pressure: 93.8 kPa Altitude: 706 m Salama! (Hello!) Second stop: Ranomafana which means Rano=eau Mafana=chaude or hot water! Again the scenic drive down to Ranomafana was very nice. I didn't think that Madagascar was this mountainous / hilly. This is due to the the tectonic forces that started to compress and push upwards the sediments present ...