At 5am we were up, all six volunteers ready, and soon we were on the road for the 12 hours journey through Madagascar that would take us to the Kianjavato commune and the field station.

We tried to catch some sleep, but the Malagasy way of driving doesn’t really allow it, with road going up and down with continous twists and turns and drivers honking at every living thing they see. The main road is a bordered by a sequence of villages, with houses and market stalls facing the street. You find children and adults, dogs, cattle and chickens, as well as taxi brousse, zebu carts and rickshaws, all sharing the same road. Drivers keep honking to let their presence be known, to show they want to overtake or simply to say “hi!” to a friend.

After a couple of hours on the road, a dense fog settled over everything, making it hard to see much more than the road right in front of us and the outline of the trees on the side.

It looks like some villages specialise in making particular handcrafts: we passed a village with several stands of colorful bags; one that sold religious statues; one with musical instruments, mainly drums and small guitars; one where many toy trucks were displayed; one sold wooden plates and spoons.

Around 9 the fog suddenly lifted letting the sun shine through and allowing us to see some more of the beautiful Malagasy landscapes.

The houses we saw on the sides of the road from the beginning of the trip were made of bricks and concrete. Only once we reached the tropical forest houses started to be built in wood, and the more the forest became dense, the more houses were built in wood instead of bricks.

Going trough Madagascar you can see a lot of Asian influence, from the facial traits to the food to the man-pulled rickshaws often seen in the larger villages.

I managed to get an hour sleep, and when I opened my eyes it was not the rice fields and small forest patches that greeted me, but the dense tropical forest, with a lot of palms, fruit trees and giant bamboos.

We reached the field station less than an hour before sunset, just in time to meet everyone and get our tents set up before it became pitch black.