Reflections on Madagascar

I slept in that bed.

Middle of nowhere.

7-11

Pirogue trip to Nosy Ve.

Vendor stand in Ranomafana.

Favorites...
food: homemade zebu yogurt
destination: Faux Cap
town: Morondava
park: Kirindy
beach: Lavanono
landscape: mountains leaving Ranomafana
plant: chubby baobab
animal: Verreaux's sifaka
word: tsara = good
saying: tsi mila = I don't need any
snapshot memory: girl running across hot sand sloshing water out of the bucket on her head TIES WITH naked young man on the side of the (busy) highway helping clothed young man with his broken 10 speed bike (think Hwy 1 at Davenport)
experience: getting bogged the first time and being helped by everyone within sight without hesitation and without request - they all just started digging and pushing until we were free... and them all cheering for my photograph
*Sandrine making animal noises*

Verreaux's sifaka

Chubby Baobabs

Least Favorites:
burning land
people using beach as toilet
broken 4WD
Ambovombe


Looking back, I realize how much of my Madagascar experience isn't recorded in photographs.  I have a hard time pointing my camera at the faces of people I don’t know, no matter how beautiful I think the image will be.  When I muster the nerve to ask permission, the moment has usually passed and the dynamic has changed.  I want the photo of the woman in a brightly colored and patterned sarong wrapped over her very unmatching brightly colored and other patterned blouse (that somehow works) gracefully walking barefoot down the street with a basket of who knows what effortlessly balanced on her head. I don’t want the photo of the posed woman looking stiff and uncomfortable and staring blankly into my camera.
Also, I spent a lot of time in the back seat of a moving vehicle and it wasn't realistic to stop at every scene that caught my eye. We drove 3800km in 25 days, passing through vastly different landscapes. The mountainous highlands with red dirt, bright green rice fields, lots of water and cooler temperatures.  The warm dense jungle teeming with wildlife and its calls.  The dry rolling grass hills of the southeast dotted with out-of-place-looking traveler’s palm and continually leading you to yet another valley river crossing.  The hot and dry spiny forest in the south that is a tangle of dead-looking trees, vines, bushes and cacti all sporting their own variety of painful daggers.  The remote southern Indian Ocean coastline with its end of the earth feeling, sand tracks and revitalizing breezes. The west coast fishing villages built right up to the waters of the Mozambique Channel.  The dry deciduous forest bursting with birdlife, lemurs and joyful chubby baobab trees.

We saw people existing in every environment with villages sharing a common layout but defined by the natural materials surrounding them.  Brick houses where the soil is clay, wood homes when there are trees around, stick and thatch houses where trees are scarce. There is always a source of fresh water, whether it be a well or a natural body of water and there are always people crowded around it, filling buckets, barrels or jerry cans for use elsewhere.  We drove past (and sometimes through) oceans, lakes, rivers, creeks, puddles and irrigation troughs where people were washing themselves or any other imaginable thing.  I saw trucks, motorcycles, zebu (ox-like animals) and clothing being washed and naked men, women and children bathing.  The smaller and more stagnant the water source (and the more trucks driving through it), the more I questioned whether a person was cleaner or dirtier after their bath.  How those clothes got clean, being washed in a muddy puddle and dried laying on a hot patch of red dirt, I'll never know... I'll just never take my washing machine (or tap water, for that matter) for granted again!
Small villages would appear "in the middle of nowhere" with 5 to 20 huts generally clustered together on a flat piece of dirt bordering the road. Any visible adults were mostly clustered together in a shady spot and children were scattered about, engaged in some form of play, until they heard the truck and came running to wave and smile and holler cheerfully after us.

Towns showed up on our map and usually had a couple of dirt streets besides the main one, a church, a school, some gargottes (local eating establishment), a few basic accommodation options and a small market. The main road, whether paved, dirt or sand is typically lined by crooked wooden stands and stalls with men selling all varieties of fresh (fly covered) slabs of meat or greasy, rusty metal parts from mechanical things long dead. Chicken meat is sold feather-covered and still clucking, just hang it upside down by its feet until you get it home. The women are vendors of grains, dry fish, fruits, vegetables and prepared items. Rice, yam and sweet potato were available everywhere. Mango, banana, papaya, coeur de boeuf, carrot and tomato were regularly available except in the far south. Fresh? salads of carrot or pasta would be displayed on tables or in cases, usually uncovered, so that the dust and bugs kicked up by the passing cars, trucks, taxi-brousse, pousse-pousse, people, bikes, zebu, goats, ducks, dogs, cats and chicken would inevitably add their flavor as well. My favorite item (and frequent purchase at 5 cents each) was the deep fried ball of rice bread batter offered fresh or stale, depending on your luck. The word for bread is pronounced moof... so these delightful treats are called moof balls. 4 donuts a day keep the hunger at bay.

Was that an overwhelming paragraph?  It was meant to be.

Making fresh moof balls.

 The big cities Fort Dauphin and Antananarivo are loud and dirty and hectic and contain all the people and their offerings of a small town amplified exponentially. Both wealth and poverty are visibly magnified, as is outside influence. I'm sure these cities have many positive attributes (culture, history, style, supermarkets and bakeries) but I'm not one to stick around long enough to flesh them out. Toliara was an exception to my dislike of big cities. Maybe it was because I arrived by boat and was transferred to shore in an ox-cart where the zebu were up to their armpits in water. Or maybe it was because I arrived on a quiet Sunday when everything was closed and locked myself up in my $56, 5 star splurge hotel room with WiFi to talk to my hubby for the first time in 2 weeks.  Either way, the city felt like a crumbling ghost town in the process of being reinhabited and for that reason, was charming to me.
Madagascar was friendly and safe beyond my expectations. Hiring a "4WD" and a driver allowed us to access parts of the country off the tourist track and for me to experience the most remote travel of my life. I loved the accessibility and variety of wildlife and could imagine returning to visit parks in the northern region of the country.

Goodbye Mada!