Thanks to the rain and the woman in the next straw bungalow with a cough (woman, not bungalow), waking at 4am was a breeze. Pity the alarm was set for 6am. However, we did, (few thanks to our guide and lots to others) see a family of 3 indri; cute teddybear faces 70 feet up in a tree that divide into two because one turns out to be a baby on its ma’s back are a bit disconcerting. Then a tribe/pack constellation of brown lemurs (a ‘longing’ of lemurs?) charging round the middle height and a leaf-tailed gecko (that I thought was a leaf. Oops). The drive to Antsirabe passes back through Tana, so we bought waterproofs, mozzycoils and lunch, and failed to get our flight tickets. But did get our boots polished by the most charming urchin in Tana.

The road south is spectacular; the scenery changes gradually but markedly and the people’s style of dress, housing and skin colour changes. We saw several exhumation parties as this week is a very auspicious time for these three day events. Day 1 – party. Day 2 – dig up ancestor’s bones from tomb and process to village with band, relatives, dogs and standard-bearer in the van. Day 3 – more parties and re-burial. There’s no peace for the wicked/righteous/anyone. Who needs friends when the family won’t let you kip? Several groups of guys with fiddles, drums, trumpets, flutes, harmonicas, squeeze-boxes etc. congregate, about fifteen at a time and are in great demand and everyone puts on their best, most colourful clothes and brings food. Great idea. Another custom at its height around now is circumcision. The astrologers have said so. Apparently, this accounts for the relatively limited range of the detailed painted carvings of Land Rovers and petrol tankers they sell at the roadside in this region. They are, of course, given as presents to the young victims. I told Souluf I thought it was a pretty unfair swap and he nearly drove into the ditch laughing.

Actually, ditch driving is much less common than one might suppose. There is relatively little traffic on the seven roads on the island and what there is is so out of tune that it never gets above 50kph. In fact Souluf often travels at 8kph because he seems incapable of choosing an appropriate gear. Pierrot called him ‘good’. I will kindly describe it as ‘steady’. Today, we had to be push-started by street kids. I could barely handle the G-force. There is an unspoken ‘tarmac sharing’ arrangement at work: you can use any side of the road, provided no-one else is using it and you pass to port….(left-hookers, of course). It works surprisingly well. The worst bit of the travelling is getting stuck behind a geriatric truck (usually a Peugeot) farting noisome clouds for 15k. Souluf slams it into 4th uphill and takes 6 minutes to overtake. Fortunately, it makes taking photos and video terribly easy. And everything is so vividly photogenic. Every 6 year old I see with a baby strapped to her back, as she plays hopscotch in the mud, every boy bowling a hub-cap with a stick, every stretch of road with stalls of neatly piled, glowing carrots, cauliflowers and mandarins, every hillside of postage stamp terraces interlaced and emerald and glistening, every thundering water-tumble where groups of laughing women pound their laundry on foamy rocks, every zebu cart piled high with mattresses, saucepans, charcoal, plastic chairs, homecoming workers – they all demand to be photographed. Fortunately, we arrived in Antsirabe too late to use more celluloid.

Here, we walked to (and overshot) a restaurant on streets that are beginning to lose the Napoleonic definition of straight, perfectly-kerbed thoroughfares as the natural forces of street-stalls, crumbling pavements, 5,000 pousse-pousse drivers and MUD change their shape, just as surely as the jungle invades the abandoned city. What a culture! It absorbs and flourishes. Fady and faith. Famadihana and foreigners. We ‘vazaha’ are curiosities to be accepted and grafted on.