Madagascar August 2023

Full report with photos available here.

“After traveling for 2 full days, taking 3 flights, a bus and a couple of jeeps we had finally made it to our camp in Sainte Luce in the south east corner of Madagascar. We dropped our rucksacks carrying everything we would need for the next 16 days outside the long house and made our way inside……… We quickly got to learning everything we needed to know for our time around camp such as health and safety, what research and surveys we would be assisting with and the general dos and don’ts of the culture which are known as Fady. The things we were told not to do were no pointing, feeding animals, talking about money or politics, talking about food from the UK, asking a lot of questions we were also told to be very respectful around burial sites……………..

Day 5 brought our first morning survey for my group so we were all up at 5.30 so we were ready for breakfast at 6. Our breakfast consisted of bananas, banana bread, Mofos (fried donuts) and rice pudding which was nearly everyone’s favourite meal of the day. That morning my group were doing a Herpetofauna long term monitoring survey which involved walking along a transect and counting and recording different reptiles and amphibians we saw. We would record information such as species, age, location, hight of ground, distance from transact, weather and canopy cover for each animal we found so it’s quite time consuming………………………….      On Day 14 we drove through the mountains and rice fields which had glorious views and apart from one mishap with one of the cars briefly setting on fire we made it to fort dauphin safely. We had checked into a hotel for the night which had a swimming pool and real showers which we were all very glad to see. We went for a lovely meal in the hotel’s restaurant where we all talked about our favourite things that we did wile on camp and how excited we were for the tour of the capital the next day…………..”