Ranohira

The Isalo massif has been part of Bara life far longer than the town below it. The Bara, cattle-herding people of the southern plains, used the sandstone plateau as pasture, refuge and burial ground, placing their dead in niches in the cliffs of its canyons, where they remain sacred sites today. Ranohira itself — the name is explained locally as the water of the makis, the ring-tailed lemurs said to have been found drinking at a spring here — was a settlement on the tracks across the plains, and grew when the colonial road that became the RN7 was pushed through from the highlands to Toliara.

Its modern role dates from 1962, when Isalo National Park was created over the massif, one of the earliest protected areas declared after independence. For decades that meant only a trickle of visitors, but as overland travel on the RN7 became the standard Madagascar itinerary, the park became the mainstay of the local economy, and the town acquired a park office, a guides' association, guesthouses and a line of lodges out along the road.

The other transformation came from the ground. In 1998 sapphires were found near Ilakaka, some 25 kilometres south-west on the RN7, and a rush followed: a hamlet became a sprawling town of diggings, buying offices and traders from across the Indian Ocean, with the wealth, lawlessness and environmental damage that accompany such booms. Ranohira absorbed some of that traffic and money, and industrial-scale mining now works in its commune as well, but the town remains what it has been since the road arrived — a stop on the way, living off what passes.

Ranohira is a Bara town at heart, and Bara custom governs much of what happens around it. Zebu are the measure of a family's standing, brought out for funerals and weddings and counted with care; cattle raiding, once a proof of a young man's courage before marriage, has long since hardened into the organised dahalo banditry that troubles the rural south. Funerals are the largest ceremonies, with cattle sacrificed and the dead eventually placed in the cliff tombs of the massif.

Those tombs make the park as much a cultural landscape as a natural one. Certain pools, caves and rock faces are fady — forbidden, or forbidden on particular days — and the guides, who are local, treat them as such and expect visitors to do the same. The park's rules and the community's taboos overlap, and both are explained before a walk starts.

The town's other culture is that of the road. The RN7 brings drivers, traders, overland travellers and the restless population of the sapphire fields, and Ranohira has the mixed, transient feel of a stop where nobody stays long — bars, stalls, repair shops and a stream of vehicles. Guiding has become a respected trade passed down within families, and the association that organises it is one of the more significant local institutions.

About sixteen thousand people live in the commune of Ranohira, in low houses of brick and thatch along and behind the national road. Cattle herding and small-scale farming of maize, cassava and rice in the wetter hollows are the traditional livelihoods, and the park is now the largest employer of young people, as guides, porters, cooks and lodge staff.

Water is the constant preoccupation, as it is across the south: the grassland dries hard between April and November, the streams that run in the canyons are the reliable supply, and drought years are hard on herds and harvests. Electricity is limited, the town has a hospital and schooling to junior secondary level, banks are in Ihosy or Toliara, and the sapphire diggings pull labour away in good seasons.

The rhythm is set by the road and the park. Guides leave at first light with walkers, bush taxis arrive unannounced, lorries stop for fuel and food, and in the evening the town gathers at stalls and bars along the tarmac. Out of the dry season the visitor traffic thins and the town returns to cattle, fields and the long empty view towards the massif.

Southern Malagasy eating is drier and less rice-centred than that of the highlands. Maize, cassava and sweet potato carry weight here alongside vary, rice, and are boiled, pounded or grilled; the standard hotely plate is rice or cassava with a laoka of zebu, beans or dried fish, with sakay, chilli paste, to sharpen it. Zebu meat is everywhere in a cattle district, grilled over charcoal or stewed slowly with tomato and onion.

Milk and curds are traditional foods of the herding peoples, and sour milk is still drunk in the countryside around the town. Dried and salted fish comes up from the coast by lorry, tamarind flavours drinks and sweets, and roadside stalls sell grilled maize cobs, fried cassava, peanuts and mangoes in season to people waiting for a bush taxi.

Drinks are simple: sweet coffee, ranovola — the smoky water boiled off the toasted rice crust — bottled beer and toaka gasy, home-distilled rum. Lodge kitchens along the road cook a French-influenced menu of zebu fillets, fish brought up from Toliara and vegetables from the highlands, and pour the wines made in the hills around Fianarantsoa.