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AUTHOR’S JOURNEYS
Earth track
Leaving the capital and taking the RN7 road south is
like travelling back in time. It is almost six hundred
and twenty miles of dust and shifting landscapes: rice
fields, eroded hills, adobe villages and women carr-
ying water jars on their heads. The earth is red, the air
warm, and the days are measured by the distance to
the next village.
In Antsirabe, a city of thermal waters founded by
Norwegian missionaries, the colourful rickshaws paint
the scene with joy. Further on, the savannah replaces
the mountains, and the first baobabs begin to appear:
enormous trees that seem to grow upside down, with
their roots pointing to the sky.
For the Malagasy, the baobab is a sacred tree. It
represents resilience, the passing of time and the
memory of the ancestors. Some reach more than ni-
nety-eight feet in height and live for over a thousand
years. Before them, the noise of the world falls silent.
Travelling along this road requires patience. The jour-
neys are slow, the tracks uneven, the dust constant.
But in return, each stop offers something different: a
greeting, a smile, an everyday scene.
The forest that sings
In Ranomafana National Park, the humidity covers
everything. It is a cloud forest where the air smells
of wet earth and the trees seem to breathe. Among
ferns and orchids, the golden bamboo lemur leaps
— a small lemur discovered only a few decades
ago. Its curious gaze and agility among the bran-
ches sum up well the spirit of this island: fragile,
vital, unpredictable.
Here the fady rule, the ancestral taboos that shape
the relationship between humans and nature. Each
community has its own: not pointing at a grave, not
fishing in a certain river, not eating a particular animal.
They are unwritten rules that maintain an invisible ba-
lance, an ethics born from observation and respect.
To understand Madagascar is to understand that
discreet spirituality, that way of living alongside the
environment without trying to dominate it. In this fo-
rest that seems to sing under the rain, life has its own
rhythm, and the visitor can only listen
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