22nd June, 1990
The capital, Antananarivo, “City of Thousands”, known locally as Tana, lies at 4,200 feet above sea level. From the airport at Ivato, the road to town leads through a medieval film set where street vendors spread their vegetables on the pavements in front of their two-storey red adobe houses with sharply-sloping tin roofs. The facial features of the Merina people of the hauts plateaux are indubitably Asian and the clumps of houses part periodically to reveal Asiatic scenery of flooded rice paddies where ducks swim and bullocks wallow. Tana is dominated by the Palais de la Reine, where a mixture of architectural styles share the hilltop rova (royal residence). Sheer cliffs offer stunning views of the countryside beyond and the numerous white parasols of the famous Zoma market below. In a bout of anti-European sentiment after invasions by the British and the French, Queen Ranavalona I persecuted Christian converts in the mid-1800s, throwing them off these very cliffs.
From Freedom of the Skies
Glimpses of the journey:
- Around the world
- Crossing the Atlantic
- Saint Louis, Senegal
- Bubaque, Guiné-Bissau
- Timbuktu, Mali
- Cottars’ Camp, Kenya
- Virungas National Park, Zaire
- Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe
- Sossusvlei, Namíbia
- Lumbo, Mozambique
- Antananarivo Madagascar
- Adis Ababa, Ethiopia
- Misfat, Omã
- Jaipur, India
- Himalaia, Nepal
- Mae Hong Son, Thailand
- Bario, Sarawak, Malaysia
- Borobodur, Java, Indonesia
- Baliem Valley, Irian Jaya
- Gimbat, Australia
- Munda, New Georgia, Solomon Islands
- Hurricane in Apia, Western Samoa
- Anaa, Tuamotu, Polynesia
- Easter Island, Chile
- Crossing the Andes, Chile-Argentina
- Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
