Another day, more lemurs; like the elephants in Africa, I don’t think it will be possible to tire of these furry little creatures. Today’s stop was the Mitsinjo Private Reserve, which borders the national park and is a joint effort between someone and someone else (both of whom are probably very important, but I was distracted by singing lemurs) to, among other goals, plant three million native trees and create connections between currently-isolated stands of forest, thus allowing the animals more freedom to move around. In 2013 they replanted something like 500,000 trees on 7500 acres, so the effort seems to be making real progress.
Our hike today started with the indri lemurs singing in the forest nearby, and we stumbled upon the talented lemurs munching leaves in the trees above us. The guides went to great lengths to tempt them with some local plants – wildlife etiquette is a work-in-progress here – and finally found one willing lemur who climbed down and put on a brief show of close-up leaf eating for the assembled group before disappearing into the trees with a few powerful leaps. While the guides were trying to lure them lower, Audrey and I very much enjoyed craning our necks up to watch the panda-like lemurs feeding in the tree tops, and occasionally launching themselves from tree-to-tree-to-tree in massive leaps. As noted previously, it’s not a sight (or sound, since their songs are so haunting) that I would soon get bored of seeing.
After a morning of lemurs we asked the driver to take us back to the capital, partly to get ready for our early flight on a tiny private plane tomorrow, and also because driving on the highways at night in Madagascar is an activity that is almost universally described as a terrifying ordeal that will lead to death in the worst case, and brown shorts in the best case. Since we were interested in neither of those things, we made sure our departure from the park got us back into Antananarivo well before sunset.
