Day 14: the Anjozorobe reserve

The end of our trip is close, but we still have nevertheless to spend two days in the  Anjozorobe Reserve, which is in hundred kilometers in the North East from the capital. This reserve, about 10 000 hectares, represents the last vestiges of the natural forests of the Malagasy highlands between the savanna and the east wet dense forest.
Since 1998, the NGO FANAMBY manages, with a ministerial approval, the remaining 40 % of the initial surface of this forest.

After a lot of nights spent under the tent, it is this time a magnificent lodge that waits for us, the Mananara lodge.

 

 

We live in individual bungalow, formed by a part hard containing the toilets on which is connected a tent canvas to form the bedroom.

The owner of this lodge, worried about questions touching the environment, set up some measures in this sense.
 

The hot water is supplied every evening at a set time, for every bungalow, thanks to individual boilers placed outside and fed by wood fires, when in the electricity supplied by a generator and is available only a few hours a day in ranges defined in advance.

In the afternoon we decide to go and look for orchids in a forest very close to the lodge, but we find some...
 

 

Disa buchenaviana et Cynorkis madagascarica

The lodge is situated in side of a hill, at the foot of which is a swampy zone where abounds a very nice-smelling plant of the family of the ginger

 

From this past wet zone, we penetrate quickly in the primary forest and we do not delay finding the first orchids in flowers there.

Angraecum sp.

 

Angraecum vesiculiferum et Bulbophyllum alexandrae

And typicals animals too...
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The night is close and we end our loop which will return us to the lodge, but before it we fall on a magnificent natural pond around which abound the bundles of papyri.

 

 

After a good meal, we go each in our bungalow for night deserved well before our big rideof the next day which will make us penetrate a little more profoundly into the reserve.