'More Rain' with the Silky Sifaka: Marojejy National Park

Sambava, in the vanilla region of Madagascar, is a gate-way city to a national park that is filled with steep mountains, orchids, rain forest, 2 inch roly-poly bugs, and a lot of rain. In fact the national park's name, Marojejy, means a lot of rain in the local dialect. The local dialect and people are call Tsimihety, which literally means "do not cut". The Tsimihety are differentiated from the Betsimisarka people, in Sambava, a city less than 50 miles away, because they don't cut their babies' hair when they are first born. I wish that the name "do not cut" meant "do not cut" down the forest because the forest in here in the North East of Madagascar, like all of Madagascar, is mostly gone.

Heading up to the park from Sambava

Marojejy river and peaks

Marojejy is home to one of the most endangered primates in the world: the silky sifaka (check out the link for a few pics of this adorable animal). There are roughly 600 species of primates in the world and the silky sifaka is one of the twenty-five most endangered due to habitat destruction and poaching. Current estimates place the entire population below a thousand members, all of which live within this national park and a nearby protected area. The silky sifaka are incredibly beautiful -- as their name implies -- they have longer, silkier hair than other species of sifaka, like the one that we saw in Kirindy forest, the Verraux Sifaka. They also seem much bigger than the Verraux, even though they only weigh around 17 pounds. Maybe it's that silky fur!

Marojejy living up to its name -in the rain

We are fortunate to have seen how incredibly beautiful the silky sifaka are in person. Unfortunately, because Marojejy lived up to its name of More Rain, we didn't take any of our own pictures of the silky sifaka. We simply have mental ones of this majestic creature using its powerful legs to move from tree to tree in the canopy 75 feet above us. Wilson coined a new term that we got "Sifaka Bombed" when the tree above us would shed even more water on top of us after the sifaka landed on it, loosing a torrent of water right on our heads. Luckily, the sifaka did get closer than 75 feet. In fact, one young sifaka came within 10 feet of us, peering at us curiously before jumping off impressively, and above us.

No pics of the silky sifika, but did catch a chameleon

I think that another unexpected person accompanying us was also impressed by the sifaka. The unexpected person was our driver for the day, Rajao, a 40 something stoic Malagasy man. Because we were low on time and a little travel fatigued, we had splurged and spent an extra $25 today so that we could get a taxi to Marojejy National Park instead of riding in a taxi-brousse, a journey of 65 kms. This ended up being a very good decision because otherwise we would not have been able to hike high enough in the rainforest to see the silky sifaka. It was also a good decision because it was neat for us to share the experience with Rajao, someone who lived there, but had never seen untouched forest before, nor the sifaka.