Ranomafana

The village grew around its hot springs. Thermal water rising beside the Namorona gave the place its Malagasy name — ranomafana, hot water — and a bathing place was built to take advantage of it, on the road that linked the plateau at Fianarantsoa with the eastern lowlands. For most of the 20th century Ranomafana was little more than that: a staging post on the RN25, a market for the Tanala and Betsileo farmers of the escarpment, and a spa of local reputation.

The forest on the slopes above was being cut and hunted through those decades. In 1986 researchers working in it identified a lemur new to science, the golden bamboo lemur, and confirmed that the greater bamboo lemur, thought to be gone from the area, still survived there. The find, and the campaign that followed it — led by the American primatologist Patricia Wright with Malagasy colleagues — turned the forest into a conservation priority, and the national park was established in 1991.

The park changed the village. A research station, Centre ValBio, was built beside the forest in 2003 by Stony Brook University; lodges appeared along the road; and guiding, portering and park work became a significant local livelihood, alongside a continuing tension over access to land and forest products for the communities that lived from them. In 2007 the park was inscribed, with five others, as part of the Rainforests of the Atsinanana World Heritage Site.

Ranomafana sits on the boundary between two peoples. Above and west are the Betsileo of the plateau, rice terracers with elaborate ancestral tombs; below and east are the Tanala, the "people of the forest", who have long farmed the escarpment with hill rice, coffee and honey and know the forest as a source of medicine, building material and food. The village market mixes both, and its dialect and customs sit between them.

Ancestral observance is strong. Fady govern which days may be worked, which forest places may be entered and which animals may be harmed, and vary from one hamlet to the next; guides raised locally treat them as seriously as the park rules. Christianity is widespread alongside these practices, and a small church crowd fills the village on Sundays.

Conservation is now part of local identity in a complicated way. Two generations have grown up with researchers, park rangers and visitors in the village, and guiding has become a respected career passed between families, while the restrictions on clearing forest for hill rice are a real cost to households that have few alternatives. Village associations, tree nurseries and health and school projects linked to the research station are part of the bargain that keeps the park and its neighbours in balance.

Around ten thousand people live in the commune of Ranomafana and the hamlets around it, and life runs along the single road. Farming comes first — hill rice, cassava, bananas, coffee and vegetables on the steep slopes — followed by the tourism economy of guides, porters, drivers, cooks and guesthouse staff, and by small trade in the stalls near the bridge.

The day starts before dawn, because guides and visitors go into the forest at first light and farmers walk out to plots that may be an hour away. Water comes from the river and from standpipes, electricity is limited and unreliable, and the village has a hospital and schooling to junior secondary level, while the nearest bank and senior secondary schools are in Ifanadiana or Fianarantsoa. School attendance and health care in the district have been improved by programmes tied to the research station.

The seasons order everything: the rice calendar, the cyclone months when the RN25 can be blocked by landslips, and the visitor season from about April to November, when the village is busy and the lodges full. Out of season it returns to being a quiet farming village with a hot spring.

Meals here are highland Malagasy with a lowland accent. Rice — vary — is the base of every plate, served with a laoka of zebu, pork, chicken, beans or leaves in broth; ravitoto, pounded cassava leaves cooked with pork, is common, and freshwater fish, crayfish and eels from the Namorona and its tributaries appear when the catch allows. Sakay, the fiery chilli paste, is on every table.

The escarpment grows what the plateau cannot. Bananas, litchis, jackfruit, sugarcane, pineapple and mangoes come up from the warmer land to the east, coffee is grown on smallholdings in the hills, and honey from forest-edge hives is sold by the jar at the roadside. Breakfast is vary sosoa, soft rice porridge, or mofo gasy, little rice-flour cakes fried in the early morning, with sweet coffee or ranovola, the smoky water boiled off the toasted rice crust.

Lodge kitchens along the park road cook a French-influenced version of the same ingredients — zebu in green peppercorn sauce, river fish, vegetable gratins — and serve highland wine from the hills near Fianarantsoa and tea grown at Sahambavy. Beer and toaka gasy, home-distilled rum, are the village drinks.