Justins World

It has been a wonderful first week in Madagascar, but I’ll be honest, I came for the Lemurs and I’ve yet to see one. Today i’ve been promised I’ll see ring tail lemurs, although promises around wildlife always come with caveats!

The lemurs we went looking for today are the infamous ring tailed lemurs or for those who’ce seen the movie Madagascar, King Julian and friends. We stopped at Anja private reserve and it didn’t take long to find a family of ring tailed lemurs sleeping in the trees. The baby lemurs seemed to be quite active. The initial sighting was amazing but also somewhat underwhelming, static animals in trees doesn’t get the adrenaline flowing, but soon enough some came down to see what we were doing with our cameras.

I found a quiet little spot with quite. few baby lemurs running around, I didn’t realise the rest of my group have moved away looking at some other Lemurs so i had just myself and about 10 lemurs grooming, eating anplaying around me. I almost cried, it just was so magical, they didn’t seem to care I was there, they’d stay about an arms distance awy, which for wildife is often way too close, but in this case, it just felt more intimate.

We drove on to the Isalo national park where we were staying the night. It had a striking landscape with rocky outcrops towering about the ground with canyons winding there way through the rocky outcrops. The next day we walked into one of the canyons looking for more lemurs. We found not one but three species of lemur! The first species were Verreaux’s Sifaka, famed for their dancing on two back legs to get between trees. Sadly there were a few too many tourists here, many crowding the lemurs to get selfies with a lemur. We got a little bit of time with them, before we found a family of Ring Tailed lemurs, which amusingly had an adopted red-fronted brown lemur as part of its family. It was a lot more shy than the ring tailed lemurs though.

Our guide was quite amazing in this park as well, managing to spot incredibly hard to see well camoflaged stick insects and spiders. He’d point directly at the spider he had seen from 10 metres away and I still couldn’t see it. A little twig in the right spot got the spider to move and become visible. Good luck to the insects this spider hunts, I couldn’t see it. We also saw an Oustalet’s Chameleon, the second largest species of chameleon. It was very grey in colour and not that camoflaged at all! Two days and three species of lemurs have been spotted. This is what I think most people come to Madagascar for, the wildlife, but the hospitality and friendliness of the people has also been outstanding.