On the edge in Madagascar

PHILIPPA JONES watches with awe as climbers tackle the extreme landscapes of the highlands of Madagascar.

Granite giants with their smooth soaring pillars and bulges - streaked with yellow lichen - hunch over a valley dotted with tiny villages.

While the locals go about their work, peacefully herding their zebu cattle and tending their rice fields, a different kind of toil occupies two climbers high on the vertical walls of these crags in the highlands of Madagascar.

They've been up there for 10 days, making gradual progress on a new route on the 800m face of Tsaranoro, sleeping in a portaledge, suspended from the rock and moved up the face as they go. The short winter days are spent searching for the means to move up. I follow their painstaking progress through the binoculars - two tiny specks on a sea of rock.

A rock climber myself, but a fainthearted one, I muster enough courage to climb with my partner the lower-angled first sections of one of these massive walls.

With the distorted perspective exaggerating the steepness, I can appreciate the feat of climbing them for the first time. The sheer scale combined with the remote location overwhelms me. We abseil down and return to camp.

The two Spanish climbers high on the wall are finding conditions unpleasant. The cold wind that has sprung up overnight means moving through a difficult section with delicate footwork and numb fingers is too tenuous. The climbers sit it out for two days.

The wind buffets the portaledge against the rock and the nylon rain shield flaps wildly. The next day the wind worsens and the climbers are running low on water. They decide to take a break.

They abseil down pitch after pitch of the ropes they'd fixed there and thrill us back in camp with video playback of footage they've taken of each other climbing. On the tiny screen the valley sprawls hundreds of metres beneath them. From their perspective Camp Catta is a tiny speck.

My climbing partner, Martin, and I arrived for a three-week stay at Camp Catta after a bonecrunching day's journey in the camp's dilapidated 4WD.

It's early in the season for Camp Catta. Soon it will be host to hikers, mountainbikers and parapenters as well as climbers, and most of them will be French-speaking. The locals reckon we are the first New Zealanders to venture there.

Named after the catta lemurs that live in the sacred forest at the base of these walls, the camp operates on strict environmentally sound principles.

It has brought benefits to the villagers in the area without negatively interfering with their way of life.

Camp Catta was set up in 1998 to provide a base for rock climbers who trickle in from Europe and the US with their haulbags, ropes and hardware, drawn to the virgin rock.

From the moment the first photographs of these huge rock faces of central Madagascar appeared in the European climbing magazines five years ago climbers have been arriving in this remote part of Madagascar's highlands to put up new routes.

They eagerly set to work up the sheer lines of the elegant 800m Tsaranoro and its neighbour Karambony, giving their routes grand names like Fantasia, Out of Africa, Gondwanaland and Alien.

Described by fellow climbers as not for the fainthearted, most of the routes are steep, long and committing. As one German climber put it, some of the climbs required severe psychological effort and top physical capacity and warned that falling, even with a rope for safety, would just be too dangerous.

The rock is old and solid and its roughness provides great friction for climbing shoes. But it's not just climbers who feel the power of these huge rocks looming over the grassy plateau.

The Malagasy people build tombs among the rock features for their ancestors whom they revere. A natural cave or a gap between boulders walled up with small carefully laid rocks is a tomb that contains these bones.

Along the trails that link the rice fields and the pastures where the placid zebu graze with the scattered villages can be seen rock markers standing in prominent positions to warn passers-by there is a tomb nearby, for it is forbidden to go near these sacred places, or to refer to them without the greatest respect. One guide told us not to even point in the direction of a tomb.

In such a poor country where slash-and-burn agriculture only barely provides a subsistence living, malnutrition is a reality and life expectancy is short. Twice we encountered solemn groups carrying a small, dead body in a grass mat bundle to a tomb high up among the crags, and felt overcome with emotion for the sweetnatured and gentle Malagasy people.

But it's not only the people who are impoverished. As one of the highest conservation priorities in the world, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), conservationists are battling to preserve what's left of Madagascar's unique flora and fauna.

Nearly all the mammals, reptiles and amphibians and about 80 per cent of the plant life exist only in Madagascar but with only 15 per cent of the original rainforest remaining, many species are on the brink of extinction.

This region of granite domes which lies next to the heavily protected Andringitra National Reserve is relatively safe because the villagers are becoming educated about conservation and low impact ecotourism is seen as a way of bringing needed resources into the area.

Keen to reach the summit, I take an easier ridge route and find a granite landscape, with strange and delicate vegetation. Setting up a bivvy to sleep out under the stars I reflect on the variety of Madagascar's terrain.

The fourth largest island in the world, it stretches out in the Indian Ocean alongside the east coast of Africa. Down the centre is a backbone of mountain ridges, backed by a high plateau which descends into a tropical rainforest in the east and north, and into the semi-arid spiny forest in the west and south.

When the sun rises from behind the peaks across the valley to spill gold light on the Tsaranoro massif and the calls of the lemurs drift up from the valley, I can see the Spanish climbers are again making progress on their route. Perhaps the day after tomorrow they'll reach the top.

They'll dismantle their portaledge, pack everything into the huge haulbags, abseil down, pulling their ropes and coiling them up as they go. And then they'll be back in camp, celebrating another grand new route.

Looking out forever across the endless plateau, I can see other whaleback domes and outcrops, some so remote it's unlikely they'll be climbed. I decide that, for me, the essence of Madagascar is right here in the highlands.

CASENOTES

Pack

The most important thing to take to Madagascar is a taste for adventure because things may not work out exactly as planned.

Getting there

Fly via Singapore and Mauritius or alternately Perth and South Africa. The best time to go is the dry season which is winter, April to October. Madagascar has two official languages, Malagasy and French, but some English is spoken in major towns and places where tourists go. A visa is required and can be issued from the embassy in Sydney. Your travel agent can arrange this.

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