Manakara is a drowsy postcolonial town on the south-eastern coast of Madagascar, sleeping a ruinous sleep after once having been an important port and trading centre since it had been connected to the central highland city of Fianarantsoa by railway tracks in 1936. Nowadays Manakara is suffering from Toamasina (Tamatave) being the major port on […]
Schlagwort: Kultur
“The Times They Are A-Changin´”
“…The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast The slow one now will later be fast As the present now will later be past The order is rapidly fadin‘ And the first one now will later be last For the times they are a-changin‘” (Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin´”, 1964) One […]
Brickmaking – Die Ziegelherstellung
As one travels the island of Madagascar, it gets quite clear that wood is somehow out of reach as construction material, because it is needed as combustible and there is not much left of it – in general. Where people at the south tend to live in huts made of palm leaves, bamboo, and some […]
Ambohimanga
Around Tana and especially in the north of the Malagasy capital, there are several sacred hills tracing back to King Andrianjaka in the 17th century. He declared twelve hills as sacred for historical and political reasons. Nearly 200 years later, his successor Andrianampoinimerina did the same – but with different hills. So nowadays, there are […]
Transport Malagasy
Transport facilities in Madagascar are quite quixotic, because there ain´t that many roads worthy of that name. Travelling Madagascar is a fascinating thing to do, but it´s also tough and time-consuming. Infrastructure would be too strong a word for the possibilities on the island. It´s mainly three so-called National Roads linking Antsiranana (Diego-Suarez) in the […]
Ambositra
Even if Ambositra (pronounced ambooshtre) might be no more than a halt in between for most Madagascar travellers, it´s definitely worth giving it a second glance. Ambositra is a small town halfway between Antsirabe and Fianarantsoa on the RN7 from Tana down south, and it got charms set in the middle of central Madagascan highland […]
Antsirabe
It happens quite often that one has to stopover at Antsirabe – the town “with a lot of salt” – if travelling southern, south-eastern or western Madagascar. Just 150 kilometres south of Antananarivo in the central highland, Antsirabe is not only statistically the coldest place on the island, but also an industrial and agricultural centre […]
The stars above Lac Itasy – Die Sterne über dem Itasy-See
If you are heading west from Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, the landscape becomes even more barren than it is around Tana. The Route National 1 is going up as far as 1.700m in altitude, and about 130km west of Tana, you are reaching the rough but beautiful volcanic area around Lake Itasy at approximately 1.300m. The […]
My heart is in the highland
The central highlands are Madagascar’s backbone, stretching along the eastern part of the island from the Massif du Tsaratanana – south of Ambilobe – all the way down south to the Andringitra Massif west of Manakara. In the southeast it is linked to the Massiv d´Antaivondro, a mountain range almost reaching Taolagnaro (Fort Dauphin) at […]
Antananarivo – Tana par plaisir
Antananarivo, Madagascar´s capital with two to three million citizens who just call it Tana, has been marked as the world´s third most polluted city just behind leading Baku/Azerbaijan and Dhaka/Bangladesh in a Forbes-ranking in 2008. But there must have been some improvements ever since then. When it comes to air pollution I´ve seen worse in […]
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