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The Glossary
Andasibe Mantadia National Park Travel Guide
With its vast populations of frogs, spiders, and other cold-blooded creatures and creepy crawlers, truly, Andasibe-Mantadia National Park is not for the easily-spooked. An ecotourism destination, Andasibe-Mantadia has carved a place in Eastern Madagascar for its rainforests and biodiversity of species tagged as "rare endemic" and "endangered." A favorite hide-away of eco-warriors, Andasibe-Mantadia has hiking tracks and reserves created to strike a balance between resource extraction and environmental protection.
A three-hour drive on a paved road makes Andasibe-Mantadia one of the easiest parks to visit from Antananarivo. On the way is the eclectic market town of Moramanga and the Musée de la Gendarmerie or Police Museum, which has displays of police uniforms, cannons and a vintage taxi-brousse (shared taxis) alongside a bunch of dried marijuana.
Once in the park, adventurers hire local guides to take them to a hike that usually takes one to six hours, under the park's humid climate and over its 900 to around 1300-meter elevations. The rainforests are exceptionally rich in frogs, reptiles, and invertebrates in all imaginable and unthinkable shapes and colors. As hikers trek deeper, they may hear the calls of the Indri, Madagascar's largest, panda-looking lemur that can be found only at the park. The forest also shelters 10 other lemur species, as well as over 100 bird variants including sparrow hawks, blue pigeons and cuckoos perched on tree branches or flying overhead.
After a hard trek, a waterfall and a lake at the heart of the park offers travelers an invigorating swim amid a setting of trees festooned with birds and lemurs. The hot springs of Ranomafana National Park are also nearby.
Just opposite Andasibe-Mantadia is another rainforest, Mistinjo, which offers cheaper tours, including night walks to see rare nocturnal species. Here, animal-lovers have a better chance to glimpse at unusual types of chameleons while contributing their entrance fee for community projects to support the locals' agriculture and health. The proceeds from both Andasibe-Mantadia and Mistinjo are used to save the forests from degradation caused by logging, slash-and-burn cultivation, and replacement of a part of the jungles into commercial eucalyptus and pine plantations.
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