Toliara Things to Do

Other than the main road from Isalo, it appears that the roads around Tulear are pretty awful. As a result, it is often easier to get to the neighbouring coastal towns by boat rather than road.

We caught a boat to Anakao from Tulear harbour. From a distance there appeared to be nothing unusual about it, as there were one or two large vessels in dock. However, once we moved through to board, we were confronted by the sight of several ox carts milling around in the shallows - our 'chariots' for the morning!

Such shallow water would seem to be a pretty fatal flaw for a harbour, and I'm not sure why the harbour is so shallow - poor construction, poor maintenance or just that the other potential harbour sites were even worse? - but the water depth is so limited that even small motor launches cannot make it into the harbour. We were duly helped into the back of the ox wagon (it was hard to think of them as chariots, but that's the direct translation from French and it certainly sounds better that way) along with our luggage and the oxen waded out to wait depth to our boat!

A surreal experience - and here we were as South African tourists thinking that the Afrikaaners had cornered the market on ox wagons!

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To be frank, we found Tulear (Toliara) to be a little short on major tourist attractions (except the utterly brilliant Arboretum outside town, which we think is worth visiting the town for all by itself), but the other major highlight was visiting the coelacanths at the small Museum of Ichthyology.

I am sad to report that said coelocanth is long since deceased - this large and armour plated prehistoric fish that has remained unchanged for about 200 million years and was thought to be extinct for the last 70 million years until it unexpectedly turned up in fisherman's net off the East Cape coast of South Africa in 1938, has never successfully been kept in captivity. The specimen in this small museum is pickled, but what is remarkable about the exhibit (other than the fact that very few museums in the world have a genuine one) is that she was pregnant at the time she was caught, and so you can also see the foetuses of the coelacanth pups, still with their yolk sacs attached. Quite wonderful.

The museum is otherwise what you might expect for an institute that is clearly starved of funds and kept going by the sheer grit and commitment of the staff. Mindbogglingly, the coelacanth is kept in a tank of formaldehyde that is partly open to the atmosphere - akin to storing the Rosetta Stone in a cardboard box! By first world standards, it may be an unspectacular museum, but considering how much they have achieved with virtually no resources, it is a sterling achievement and provides an interesting perspective on the rich marine environment of Madagascar's coastal waters.

You cannot take photos inside the museum, and so have no option but to buy the museum's postcards. They may seem overpriced for what they are, but considering what this plucky little institute manages to achieve with precious little support and even less money, hell, they more than deserve it!

If coelacanths fire your imagination (as, you may have gathered, they certainly do mine), you can see the original specimen preserved in the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Grahamstown, South Africa. Even better, read "A Fish Caught in Time" by Samantha Weinberg, which is an immensely readable account of the whole bizarre tale surrounding the rediscovery of the coelacanth (which has since been shown to be moderately well distributed in parts of the Indian Ocean extending as far as Indonesia, if still extremely rare) - this is the popular science book that I wish I had written, and I can't recommend it highly enough!