The Avenue of the Baobabs is a stretch of dirt road in the Menabe region of western Madagascar where some twenty-five baobabs up to thirty metres tall line both sides of the track, left standing when the forest around them was cleared for rice and sugar, and at sundown their pale grey trunks turn deep red against the sky. The trees are Grandidier's baobabs, found only in Madagascar, some more than 800 years old, with smooth trunks swelling to three metres thick and a crown of bare branches on top like roots in the air, which is why they are called upside-down trees; Malagasy legend says the gods planted them that way. The row runs about 260 metres along Road No. 8 between Morondava and Belon'i Tsiribihina, and it is a working road: at dawn and dusk families pass along it on foot and by zebu cart between the villages and the paddies, and the baobabs stand over them like columns.
The hour everyone comes for is sunset. As the sun sinks the trunks flare red, the western sky runs from orange to violet, and the silhouettes of the trees stand black against it; in the rainy months, sharpest around March, the paddies beside the track brim with still water and the trunks stand doubled on the surface. Walking a slow ring around a single trunk shows the scale, and beyond the famous row single baobabs stand scattered across the farmland for kilometres, and a few kilometres on two trunks twist around each other, the baobabs in love. The trees flower in the dry winter, from May to August, large white blooms opening at dusk on leafless branches and pollinated overnight by lemurs and hawkmoths; the animals that once spread their seed, giant lemurs and elephant birds, have been extinct for centuries, so the grove has no children, and the avenue is protected while the forest it came from is gone. The Avenue of the Baobabs is a row of survivors on a farm road, and the sun turns them red every evening.