Madagascar by Arnie Wilson

As I strolled beneath a Jacaranda tree in glorious purple bloom, the big battered Mitsubishi bus mounted the pavement and headed straight for me. Was I about to beome one of Madacascar’s many threatened species, squashed with as little dignity as a mosquito?

I ran out of the bus’s path, more embarrassed than dead. But, it was a close thing. As everyone keeps saying here, in Madagascar, anything can happen. I simply had not had the local knowledge: to be aware that buses always drive across this section of pavement to get to the bus stop in the lay-by in Antananarivo’s Avenue de l’Independance.

But, then you could spend decades of your life here without fully grasping the complex minutiae of the Malagasy existence. Like the vast island of which it is the capital (it is nominally the world’s fourth largest, after Greenland, New Guinea and Borneo) Tana, to which it is frequently abbreviated, is a bewildering and beguiling melange of cultures. It is almost as if several artists have painted a vignette on the same canvas, one on top of the other, without really covering up the previous scene. Thus, a colourful hotch-potch is for ever threatening to break through the ever-peeling paint.

The result is a haphazard kaleidoscope - a microcosmos of Africa, India, Bahrain, and Chile, with fearful poverty: only 20 countries in the world are poorer, and an estimated 1,500 people in the capital live off rubbish tips. But there is much to cheer, too.

Apart from the 18 different “tribes” which make up this ethnic jiogsaw - from Afro-Indonesian to Polinesian and Indo/Pakistani to Chinese - the strongest influence is French. Madagascar, dubbed “Noah’s ark adrift in the Indian Ocean”, was a French colony until its independence in 1960, and just as India has its still ubiquitous Morris Oxford (thinly disguised as a Morris Ambassador) Madagascar has endless fleets of battered Citroen Deux Cheveaux and Renault 4Ls juddering uncertainly round the capital (the name means City of the Thousand). Even the Chinese-made equivalent to the post-war dinky toy, being offered in their thousands at markets and stalls on almost every street corner - particularly on market day, when the Avenue de l’Independance almost bursts at the seams with market traffic - are, almost without exception, tiny but much more pristine versions of the same makes.

Mercifully the otherwise decaying French colonial influence means that at least in general the restaurants offer high standards of cuisine - not that many of the locals can afford to eat out.

Apart from the occasional couple of ancient French railway carriages hitched onto a goods train, the only regular passenger train is the most bizarre of contraptions - reputedly the world’s only surviving operational Michelin autorail train.

This single diesel-powered carriage with 12 rubber-clad wheels made its first experimental appearance on French railway tracks in 1937. It made its debut in Madagascar in 1952. The island once had two, but recently traded one with Michelin - which wanted it as a museum exhibit - in exchange for 200 unused rubber tyres to keep their surviving specimen going

It resembles an ancient single-deck bus on rails, which is effectively what it is. Nineteen passengers, settled back in wicker-work basket chair-style seats, can watch the wonderfully varied Malagasy countryside drift by in moderate comfort as the train picks up speed to reach occasional bursts of 50 mph - more of a train a petite vitesse than a TGV.

Even with a normal train, it would take for ever to get anywhere in Madagascar: its is a thousand miles long and almost as big as Texas. We travel east towards the Périnet nature reserve, in the hope of seeing the Indri, Madagascar’s, and therefore the world’s, largest lemur (the island has 95% of the world’s lemurs, not to mention seven different kinds of baobab trees compared with mainland Africa’s single species). We have to scatter a steady stream of pedestrians lured by the infrequent train service into a false sense of security who are using the track as a footpath.

While the road takes the deep valley floor, our Viko Viko train climbs to the heights. We pass through some as yet unravaged forest and then fields laid waste by nomadic farmers who burn as they go, setting fire to the land according to ancient tradition. They clear it for agriculture only to move on two or three years later, leaving the land laid waste behind them. The process is illegal but almost impossible to police. In between are fields with trees hacked down and smouldering charcoal ovens.

At Moromanga, the Clapham Junction of Madagascar, we pause to let a “mixt” train through: mainly goods trucks with two carriages hitched on to the end.

While we wait, we stroll through the village, with its inevitable market stalls, and are confronted by the stark contours of a disturbing memorial to Malagasies who died in a heart-breakingly unsuccessful uprising in 1947, when as many as 80,000 are reputed to have been killed under the iron fist of colonial France. This particular memorial (there are others around the island) is dedicated to villagers of Moromanga who were lined up and shot close by the railway station which we had just left for our cosy little tour. It was a sobering moment.

Later, at our destination, we stroll through the forest, and before too long, our guide has located what we have come all this way to see: high in the branches above us, is an appealling woolly creature, rather reminsicent of a small and slender panda, with two offspring curled around her. It is the famed Indra.

The family perform an enthralling aerial ballet for us in the canopy of the jungle. First the female swings, Tarzan-like, through the high branches, her young clinging to her as she jumps. Then the babies put on their own show, swinging independently before leaping themselves: not to yet another branch, but back to their mother again - one coiling around her neck, the other clinging to her stomach.

On the way back to a late lunch of fish (Tilapia) and chips, our morning is made complete by the haunting siren sound of the massed choir of local Indra, a plaintive, mewing cry which is utterly bewitching. In her Guide to Madagascar, Hilary Bradt describes it as a “wailing sound somewhere between the song of a whale and a police siren.”

There was one more thrill in store: the discovery of a young Madagascar Boa asleep in a headge. He or she is coiled up, at head-height, and even when our guide pulls the branches in which the snake is nestling down a little to give us better view, the boa remains in steadfast slumber.

Back in our toy-town train and on our way home, our route was barred by a forest fire, making it unsafe for us to proceed until the flames had died down. The farmers were burning the fields again.

While the island’s newly-formed tourism ministry strives to protect the environment, and at the same time cash in, if it can, on the tourism boom in neighbouring Mauritius and the Seychelles, the Malagasi living off the land still seem set on destroying it. Visit this wonderful, hauntingly beautiful country and its eclectic band of captivating people soon if you can. It may not survive in its present form for too many decades.