Maronjejy!

So I finally got to visit the national park near my site, Maronjejy. It was awesome! The trip got off to an interesting start. As I have said before, there is no cell phone service at my site. A volunteer who lives nearby told me that she would be coming to visit the park for a day so I was expecting her to arrive at my site in the morning. She hadn’t arrived by mid-morning so I decided to go over to my neighbor for a lesson in cooking Malagasy food (this resulted in a delicious lunch which I will have to inform you about in another post some other time). What I didn’t account for was the fact that nothing here ever occurs as you expect it to. I was cleaning up lunch when I heard American English at my doorway—not something that really happens at my site. My friends had arrived and informed me that we were going to spend the night in Maronjejy. I packed in about 10 minutes and we set out for the park.

We went up to stay at the second camp because the first one was full. It was quite the climb! Looking at the distances on paper it didn’t seem like it would be too bad—about 4.6 km to the first camp and another 2 km to the second. But that doesn’t include the 5 km from the road to the park entrance or the fact that we climbed up to 775 m above sea level. It was a bit of a difficult hike with a lot of travel over mud and slippery rocks. The second day we hiked around in search of the Silky Sifaka (more on that later) and then descended almost as quickly as we had come. We also got rained on (it is the rainforest after all) which made the trip a little more tricky. I was exhausted when I got home but it was definitely a great experience overall.

Things I got to see in Maronjejy: the most exciting would have to be the Silky Sifaka. It is an all-white lemur that is one of the 3 rarest species in Madagascar. Maronjejy is one of the few places the Silky Sifaka can be found and we saw one in the morning as it was still drowsily hanging out in the trees. We also saw bamboo lemurs by the first camp. There were also lots of exciting plants, including an endemic palm that is only found at a certain elevation on the mountain, a latex tree, and rosewood. There were also frogs, snakes, a few birds, and a rat (I still need to look up what it might be).

I have heard a couple stories about where the name Maronjejy comes from, but I was told by villagers that it is from “maro jejia.” Maro means many in Malagasy, and jejia is a type of tree similar to a coconut. I look forward to learning more about the park and the surrounding areas in the months to come. Some other time I want to return and go all the way to the summit of Maronjejy.