The Call of the Indri, volume 1

By Fred Triep

In 2004, Fred Triep visited Madagascar for seven weeks. He found that to be an inspiring trip. He decided to go to Madagascar again in 2012, but this time for three months to study the plants and animals and create a simple flora of Madagascar. On Madagascar, he spent some time at the Zazamalala estate of his friends Simon and Jocelyne. In addition, he travels together with Simon, but also alone. In this book, he writes about his encounters with the Malagasy and this fascinating island's unique plants and animals. What was supposed to be a quiet nature vacation resulted in several adventures.

Fred Triep (1949) is a biologist. He lives in Amsterdam, and until April 2012, he worked as a teacher of biology and ICT subjects at Horizon College in Alkmaar.
His passions are travel, hiking, plants, animals and photography. For years, he has been writing non-fiction: travel stories for magazines on mountaineering and outdoor sports and articles for the Hortus newspaper. He also maintains a website about hiking (wandelwebsite.nl) and botany (botaniewebsite.nl).
In May 2011, he published the novel The Catalyst.

• Language: English
• Publisher: F. Triep Multimedia
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005648930

Fred Triep

I ben een gepensioneerde bioloog. Ik schrijf boeken (romans en reisboeken)

Book preview

FOREWORD

In July and August 2004, I travelled through Madagascar for seven weeks. That trip left a deep impression on me. I wanted to return to this fascinating island. Therefore, in the spring of 2012, I travelled through Madagascar for three months. I made a weblog of this trip, which I reworked into a travelogue at home. I am happy that this travelogue has now been published. However, the publication of this book was only possible with the help of my friends.

I am grateful to Margriet van Kampen and Gerda Tjerkstra for their enthusiastic reactions to my weblog about Madagascar. They have stimulated me to transform the weblog into a travelogue.

I would like to thank Aukje van Beek for her corrections, critical remarks and questions. They made it possible for me to complete and finish the manuscript. Without her help, I would not have been able to complete this book.

I thank Simon Rietveld for his critical comments on the manuscript regarding his estate Zazamalala and Madagascar. I have appreciated his corrections of the scientific names of the plants and animals.

I would also like to thank him and his wife Jocelyne for their hospitality on Zazamalala, which enabled me to experience more of the ‘life’ of ordinary Madagascans than would have been possible as a tourist.

I am grateful to Marianne van Roy for the spell-check at the end of the writing process.

Introduction

The Indri

It is a quarter to seven in the morning. We have been waiting for half an hour at the reception of the Andasibe-Mantadia National Park. The manager has not yet come, while we were told yesterday afternoon that we had to be there between six and seven o’clock if we wanted to make a trip through Andasibe-Mantadia National Park. So, we got up early and arrived at a quarter past six. We would like to see the indri (Indri indri), a lemur the size of a big teddy bear. Simon and I have met the indri before, but we would like to see it again and above all: hear it! In July 2004, I photographed this animal (see photograph 1); this time, I want to film him. Jocelyne and Simon and Jocelyne’s three-year-old son Zeno do not know him yet. Zeno loves animals and will certainly enjoy them.

The indri is called baba koto by the Malagasy. According to a myth, it was originally a human. Therefore, it is fady (taboo) for them to hunt it. The indri is unique; in the morning after breakfast, he sings. My Bradt travel guide describes the sound as a cross between a whale song and a fire engine siren. I hope he will sing for us too this morning.

A seven-week trip through Madagascar in the summer of 2004 inspired me greatly. After that trip, I knew that I would like to go back to this fascinating island. The visit to the indri must be one of the highlights of this Madagascar trip. I will be on this island for three months to see, identify and photograph the unique plants and animals. I have just received my pre-retirement as a biology teacher and now have time to myself. Simon, Jocelyne, Zeno and I left the Netherlands in mid-March 2012 and we will stay until mid-June. My particular interest is in plants, especially those of the dry regions. I will spend part of the trip on the Zazamalala estate of my friends Simon (interested in forestry and plants) and his wife Jocelyne (born and raised in Madagascar) east of the city Morondava on the west coast of Madagascar. Another part of the trip, I travel around with Simon in search of plants. He is looking for one to three plants of certain species for his beautiful garden in Zazamalala. I don’t have to collect anything; I try to photograph as many plants as possible. I aim to make a small Flora of Madagascar. How big it will be, I do not know yet at the beginning of my trip. However, an overview of the two hundred to three hundred most common plants will already make me very happy. The total flora of the island consists of 14,000 higher plant species. I will never manage to include them all in one flora.

Simon grumbles: ‘Why are people here never on time? I nod; we could certainly have stayed in bed half an hour longer. By my watch, it is seven o’clock. Then the caretaker comes. He opens the little office, and finally, we can make an appointment with a guide for a trip and leave. Our guide is called George.

Fifteen minutes later, Jocelyne, Zeno and I follow our guide. Simon has decided not to go with us. He is blind and can hardly do such a walk: the paths in Andasibe-Mantadia National Park’s Forest are sloping and slippery because it often rains here.

It is still quiet in the forest, and we were the only visitors at the reception. We walk behind George. While filming him, I ask him about the number of Indris. Thirty-four families are living in the forest, counting about one hundred and twenty individuals.

We walk past a large fern growing on a tree trunk. George calls it an Asplenium; I recognise it because it is a houseplant. A little later, we walk past a large screw palm (Pandanus spec). The large dark-green leaves stick up and almost seem to form a rosette. I am reminded of Hans from the VU Hortus. We would have liked him to come along because he has a lot of experience with this type of plant. But that did not work out. He wanted to have a male of a certain Pandanus species. The screw palm has separate male and female plants. He does have a female of that species in the greenhouse, but he is missing a male. I had already explained that I would not be taking any plants with me, and he was pretty understanding: he also thought that it was not possible.

We meet another guide. The guides talk to each other for a while; sifakas have been spotted. We have to wait a while, while our guide goes out to look for them. Five minutes later, he comes back and gestures us to follow him. We crawled through the trees under low-hanging branches, and then I saw something brown above me; these were the feet of the sifaka. For a moment, I doubted whether this was a sifaka lemur or an indri, but then I knew. It has a clear tail, so it is a sifaka, in this case, a diademed sifaka (Propithecus diadema). He hangs quietly in a tree and eats the leaves. I hear rustling. A few meters further, another sifaka is hanging around, also busy with his breakfast. I grab my video camera and record the activities of these lemurs. But after five minutes, they are done, in no time, they jump from tree to tree and have disappeared from my sight.

George indicates that we have to move on. In the distance, I can already hear indris screaming. Would we get to see them? According to our guide, this is not a problem. He saw them yesterday at a specific spot, and they cannot be far away: they only travel small distances every day.

Half an hour later, we see the first indri. Zeno likes it and wants to scream out his joy. We urge him to be quiet; we are afraid that the prosimians will disappear with so much noise. I enjoy it too, but it is hard work to get the indri’s good on photo and video. The indris we are watching now are also having breakfast. They are not making any sounds yet. I see two indris hanging in the trees, and they look different from the sifakas: they don’t have light brown shades on their legs and arms. The colours of the indri are black and white. They also have a tiny tail and a plump head. They really look like teddy bears.

A few tens of meters further on, I heard screaming; an indri from a neighboring piece of woodland was letting people know where his territory was. Then the indri’s start to shout above our heads. Fantastic, it seems like two fire engines are passing by. I also hear the neighbors’ responses again. Every individual produces his own sound, and together it looks like an orchestra. You cannot call it singing, but it is fascinating.

Meanwhile, it has become busy in the forest. We meet several groups of tourists with a guide. It is a good thing that we were there so early.

After we have photographed and filmed the indris, we decide to return. We want to drive to Toamasina (in French: Tamatave) this afternoon. We follow our guide back to the reception. There we thank George and give him a tip. We are back at the pick-up around eleven o’clock in the morning, where Simon is waiting with his dog Tsonga. I am satisfied, and I am looking forward to all the other destinations that we will visit this trip.

Photo 1. An indri (Indri indri) sings after his breakfast in the Andasibe- Mantadia National Park

In Part 1, you can follow my entire journey in 2012 like a diary. I have separated the travelogue as much as possible from my discoveries of plants and animals (which I have put in italics) so that you can read it if you are less interested in the biological facts. In Part 2, you can also read three more travel stories about parts of my journey in 2004. But before I introduce you to my travels, let me first give you some information about the extraordinary island of Madagascar.

Geography and climate

Madagascar is situated in the Southern Hemisphere, east of the mainland of South Africa and Mozambique. It lies mainly in the Tropics, with the Tropic of Capricorn passing over the island’s south.

The island, which is about 1600 km long and has a surface area as large as the Benelux and France combined, has a mountain ridge that runs from north to south. As a result, there is a division in the climate between the eastern and western parts of the island. For the climates, see also figure 2.

For the most part, the eastern side of the island is under the influence of the south-eastern trade wind, which means that it often rains there. In some weeks, it can rain five out of seven days.

The western part of the island lies in the rain shadow of the mountains. The air, coming from the east over the mountains, has already given up its precipitation. However, in the southern hemisphere’s summer, the land becomes so warm that moist air is brought in from other sides. This leads to a wet period and a dry period. In the west, it can be dry for six to eight months. In the most south-westerly part, the coastal area south of Toliara, it can even be dry for a whole year.

What is the best time to travel around? In July and August, the temperatures are not so high. Travelling in overcrowded buses is then quite doable. At night, it can be cold in the mountains (Andringitra massif, see Travelogue 3 of summer 2004). On the plateau in the central mountainous region, it can be chilly at night between May and September, and because most houses do not have heating, people wash less. In this period, most roads are passable, but some areas are only unobstructed from the middle of August onwards (for example, the road from Morondava to Belo sur Mer). In these months, one does not see so many reptiles and amphibians.

Figure 2. The different climates types (with the length of the dry period) of Madagascar. Source base map: Comet (1974)

If you want to see these animals, it is better to travel in March and April or September, October and November. If you’re going to see the frogs in the south or west of the island, it is best to look around at the beginning of the rainy season: some species have disappeared within a month after the first rain.

Some lemurs have babies in September, making it even more interesting to spot them then. But keep in mind that in these months, the daytime temperatures start to rise.

Travel in December, January and February through Madagascar is not advisable for the average tourist/traveller. It is hot and humid then; in January and February, there is also a big chance that you will have to deal with a cyclone. The east coast receives rainfall almost all year round, but the best opportunity for a dry period of a few weeks is there from November to December, before the