Sunday, January 12, 2014

Madagascar, Phase 1: Jungle

Billy Connolly said, on a storm-battered boat to Antarctica, "If you must vomit, do it somewhere spectacular." 

I have never forgotten that and it came back to me many times as I spent three weeks vomiting in increasingly exotic places.

The trip to Madagascar got off to a bad start. After 24 gruelling hours of travelling, we arrived at Antananarivo airport only to find that Absa, efficient little techno-geniuses that they are, had not taken note of my instruction that I would be travelling and had blocked all my cards so I was stuck without money at one in the morning on a weekend night in a foreign country with no access to a phone or email. 

As I write this, it is now almost a week since I arrived and they have still not sorted it out despite my repeated irate emails to them - and let me tell you, it is not easy to find access to communications in Madagascar. Even in the really larney places the access to electricity is touch and go. If you find a place that actually has electricity it most likely operates off a generator which they only switch on for a few hours at a time to do the essentials, from after sunset, and then they promptly switch everything off at around ten pm and bugger you if you haven't got ready for bed (or heard back from your bank) yet. 


Electricity was an interesting change. We're spoilt in South Africa. We're accustomed to having electricity and hot showers all the live long day, with the odd two-hour blackout by Eskom being greeted with horror in almost all Capetonian households except that of my eccentric parents, who like to look on the bright side and turn load shedding into an adventure by pretending they're camping, going to bed extra early or playing Marco Polo. In Madagascar, however, people are rather unbothered about electricity and mostly cook over fire - wood or charcoal - with workers at national parks having pots of rice boiling over lunchtime for their midday meal. Rice is the staple food here and although there are rice paddies everywhere you look, the country still has to import a great deal of rice to meet the demand. The amount of time it must take to build said fire for rice, cook it, and eat it must also mean they take more than an hour for lunch; in Madagascar the motto is "mora mora" which means "slowly slowly" - it underlines the lifestyle and belief system and seems, also, to be a philosophy of living and experiencing life at a good, solid pace. It is considered extremely offensive to become impatient here.


The Malagasy say they eat rice three times a day: at breakfast, lunch and supper, and if they have not had any rice for the day, they cannot sleep that night. Having suffered through a high-protein diet at various points we can say we are enjoying haplessly giving in to the customary rice accompaniment. It's sticky, fragrant, plentiful...what's not to like?



The locals here use electricity only for television, radio and computers (if they're well-to-do) and they say it costs approximately 5000 ariary per month - that's R25/$12. They were quite shocked when we told them what we pay for 5kg of charcoal (to make a braai, naturally). Here, households make charcoal in order to provide extra income. They sell huge bags on the side of the road for 7000 ariary in the village (up to 20 000 ariary in the big city). But 20 000 is still only R100, and the bag is at least 50kg. To make the charcoal they build a sort of oven in the ground and slowly burn pieces of eucalyptus for up to a week. The constant smoke from these eucalyptus/charcoal ovens follows you as you travel through small villages and it makes one want to light up a Marlboro. Both Janine and I had a peculiarly strong yearning to smoke throughout the holiday, and it did not let up until we stepped onto the plane home.
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The first day in general was rather a nightmare. Air Madagascar apparently changes its flights like it chages its underpants so we ended up waiting for six hours for our flight. We had been on the go from 3am on about an hour's sleep and were like zombies by that time. Then we got onto the flight and were promptly sprayed with large amounts of choking insecticide, and it was pretty much downhill from there. 





Luckily for us, we got the bad stuff over with on the first day and it got better very rapidly after that. We were met in Antananarivo by our guide, Eunice, a very nice man who was very knowledgable but also very friendly and full of good humour and became a good friend to us in the three days he showed us around. We stayed in a tiny village in the north called Andasibe, meaning 'big campsite' - a rather descriptive name since that is pretty much exactly what it is. The houses are mostly wooden huts and the closest thing to shops are little wooden kiosks that sell random collections of things like sim cards, raw meat (hundreds of flies, not refrigerated), torches and bananas. The nearest ATM, however, is over 100km away (not that I could use it, thank you ABSA.) 


Andasibe has the odd hotel in it - but it is hard to describe what the hotels are like since they, too, are little more than wooden kiosks and one feels that if you had to make like the wolf and huff and puff they, too, might fall down. The resort where we stayed was up in the hills and it was beautiful - it was a little outside Andasibe and right up in the jungle - a huge cultivated area in the middle of a mass of banana, mango and vanilla trees. The staff were incredibly friendly but between their two words of English and our two words of Malagasy I suppose it would be hard to be anything but good-natured since all we could say was Hello! Thank you! Very good! We did somehow manage to glean (I'm not sure how) that one of the waiters, who had the word JODY tattooed on his arm, had once intended to become a rapping superstar and that was going to be his stage name - which is proof of the power of mime plus time when there is the intention to communicate.

Andasibe, despite its remoteness, is a relatively popular starting point for people who want to explore the rainforests from the north. There is a long stretch of rainforest all along the eastern side, but since we were going to be visiting the Nosy Be (Big Island) archipelago along the north-west coast, it made sense for us to stay as close to the north-west as possible, so Andasibe was a good base from which to explore the rainforests. There are numerous national parks nearby that are best accessed with a guide, which we did, led by a lovely guy named Roger who - like Eunice - has never signed into facebook and laughed at us when we suggested he look us up. Roger is extremely knowledgable - he has worked with David Attenborough in the past - and I was constantly amazed by his ability to spot camoflagued animals. We would be walking along bold as brass and suddenly he would dart off into some bush a million miles down the bank and show us some animal that was barely visible and smaller than a mouse. I am completely mystified by how he did it and kept asking him, but he never did explain it to me. (Perhaps it was witchcraft?) Some of the frogs and chameleons here are so well hidden that even when they are pointed out to you, you cannot see them. I have some photographs that, when I open them, I'm not sure what on earth I photographed, because all I can see is a pile of dead leaves - even though I KNOW there's a frog in there and I know roughly where it is supposed to be. 

On the first day we visited a park where the amphibians and reptiles were in a terrarium, and our guide there took us through the cages and we went a bit overboard with pictures, photographing about 100 chameleons each, never mind the snakes, frogs etc. We had lunch at said park and were feeling pretty doubtful judging by the looks of the place but let me tell you, even the most rustic places around Andasibe have INCREDIBLE food. For starters, the animals are pretty much all free range and organic and not fat, because they all wander around eating what they should be eating, so they don't taste of fishmeal and cardboard. Secondly, the food is simple and wonderful. The national dessert is banana flambe, which is basically a banana doused in rum and set on fire, and brought to you still burning. It is absolutely delicious. I plan to set many more bananas on fire at home. Another wonderful dish is Ravitoto (pronounced Ruvvitoot - Malagasy has a completely unpredictable system of dropping random letters out of its pronounciation which makes it impossibly confusing to try to learn), a stew flavoured with coconut milk and ground up cassava leaves which was so delicious I nearly ate the plate. 


People eat an insane amount of rice here. One side portion of rice here is enough to feed me and Janine together for about three meals, and each person eats that amount about three times a day. The whole country is full of rice paddies and yet they still have to import more rice. When you drive through the rural areas the rice paddies are something to be seen. Not everybody has access to running water so they sommer wash their clothes in the rice paddies and spread them over rocks to dry. At one point I even saw two little toddler boys standing in their wellington boots in a rice paddy, fishing. I'm not sure there actually are fish in there, but those two little boys seemed pretty hopeful.


On the second day we had a big day of hiking. We took three hikes that day into different regions of rainforest, led by Roger, hoping to find different species of lemur. Lemurs are a bit like monkeys but they are furry all over, and they have the intelligence of (apparently) a five or six year old child. They are very curious, so although they usually are found high up in the trees, if you stay very still and are patient, they will usually come down and give you the opportunity to get a good photo. Some of the tourists really make you wonder whether brains and money are inversely proportional, though. At one point we were trying to see Indri lemur and a Frenchman behind me was trying to get a photo. This man honestly started shouting, "Indri! Indri!" to try to get the lemur to face him for a photo. Naturally the poor thing scurried back up the tree. Some mothers' children...!


We were extremely lucky on our hikes, despite the occasional presence of idiotic Frenchmen. The bad news was that despite the copious amounts of insect repellent I wore and the layers of clothing I added, the mosquitoes here are mutant little devil beasts and I got eaten to pieces. Within five minutes of entering the forest I pulled the first leech off my chest and from there I was recognised as a superior food source for all creatures great and small. I am covered in calamine lotion and still itch, and itch, and itch. Janine has hardly been touched but I think it's because all bugs realise that there is preferable gourmet meal right next to her. However, the walks were worth every bite because we were told that one is lucky to see three species of lemur; on our first walk, we saw five. And that was only the first walk! 


The second walk got us really close to a family of Indri, the largest species of lemur, and heard them making territorial calls; then we went on a night hike and got to see little dwarf lemurs and the tiniest of all lemurs, the mouse lemur - which really is the size of a mouse and is THE CUTEST THING IN THE WORLD. I managed to sneak up on it and get a picture (in the dark!) although it blinked its eyes at me rather irritably; not that I blame it. 



The third day, we went to lemur island, where there are four species of lemur - bamboo lemur, common brown lemur, another kind of brown lemur (the red something something brown lemur I can't remember), and black and white ruffed lemur, which is the most aggressive. 



It has a long tail, too, and there is a legend here that the Indri got its wailing call because the ruffed lemur stole its tail in a fight. The lemurs were battling over who would be king and the Indri said it should rule because it was the largest but the ruffed lemur said it should rule because it was the strongest; they fought, and ever since then, the Indri has been wailing over its lost tail and the ruffed lemur has been barking triumphantly over its win. 

It's nice to see the bamboo lemurs in the park, especially, because they are extremely shy so you can't usually get pictures in the wild, but on lemur island, the lemurs are tame because most of them are rescue lemurs that used to be illegal pets etc. They are friendly to the point of being overwhelming. Janine especially had a rather marvellous time on lemur island. For some reason they loved her as much as the mosquitoes loved me. From the minute we stepped off the boat I was just the stepping stone for them to jump onto her. They leaped onto my head and shoulders etc., but they made sweet, sweet love to Janine. They licked her, they petted her, they loved her. They groomed her. Two of them leaped onto her head and started licking her hair clean. Since leaving the island we have affectionately crowned her queen of the lemurs; when she misbehaves we threaten to sell her as bride to King Julian, the mischievous lemur king made famous by Disney. 



We also got to see baby lemurs - their breeding season is November - and if you think lemurs are sweet, wait till you see little baby lemurs strapped onto their mothers' backs by their tails. Their mothers can leap several metres with the babies securely strapped and serenely riding along and their big eyes blinking.


Something cool about Madagascar: there is no racism here. Kids are born and raised pretty much unaware of, and happy with, their skin colour. It is beautiful to see and so refreshing. It took me a few days to figure out what subtle tension it was that I was missing when I got here, but when I did, it suddenly seemed so clear. 



People also seem rather confused when we ask about HIV/Aids - their infection rate is less than 1% and there is not really drug abuse besides a little marijuana either. There is a fairly strong drinking culture - although Eunice told us there is also a tradition where people put a mirror on their beer glass so that they know by the bleariness of their face when to stop drinking - but again, not like in South Africa. Of the 18 tribes, there is little tension; they get along well, people say - inter-ethnic tension is not a problem. Corruption, however, is a huge issue - Roger told us that if you so much as want a job interview, you have to pay a bribe of usually about R4000, which is astronomical considering that 90% of the population lives on less than R20 a day, so the poor tend to stay poor and the rich tend to get richer. Subsistence farming tends to get passed down the generations. 

Everyone we have spoken to about politics mentions corruption first and foremost; they are massively distressed with the large gap between rich and poor, which is more noticeable even than South Africa. It's interesting, though, that even the poorest of the poor here don't seem to go hungry; certainly not to the same extent as in South Africa. The big problems they face are a lack of infrastructure and a real lack of access to medical care. 

Before we arrived there was an outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague in some of the villages and I am starting to understand, travelling around, why so many people are dying of diseases that are so easily treatable. The roads are too poor to get to a doctor, the pharmacies simply do not have stock of essential medicines (and often have not heard of quite basic items) and corruption is so rife that unless you have the money to grease the palms of at least ten people on your way in, I cannot imagine that you would get the care that you need if you were ill. Where we stayed in Nosy Be, the infrastructure is somewhat better because it is aimed at tourists (the roads are fairly good and there is a clinic) but in the rest of the country I would imagine there is cause for deep concern. 


One of the guides we befriended in Nosy Be also told us that there is a serious lack of long-term thinking among both the politicians and the people, and that his dream is to enter politics one day. (His idol is Nelson Mandela.) For him, the biggest concern behind corruption is that everyone is so fixated on their own day-to-day survival that there is no room for focusing on building long-term infrastructure or developing the country beyond the next ten years. Interestingly, as much as South Africans tend to moan about our own development, he looked to South Africa as a model of longer-term development planning. 

People in general seem rather fascinated with Janine's looks, and children seem to find my looks a bit strange and worthy of examination. There was a wonderful moment in Antananarivo when a small boy saw me and yanked on his mother's arm with his jaw hanging, calling to her to look at me with a look on his face that said plainly, "What the #&^%$ is that?! Someone got bleached!" 



But people here have adjusted wonderfully to independence from the French and there is a marvellous sense of mischief towards French arrogance. Eunice expressed it to us in his description of French tourists: "They think we are still their colony. They are not interested in the country; they do not want to know about the wildlife or the nature; they only want to know why we have a television or a cellphone." Apparently they look down on the food and wine as well, which is ironic since the only mediocre-and-expensive food we have had here so far was in a French-run establishment; the Malagasy food was all cheap as chips and absolutely fabulous. Eunice was very tickled when we told him that the French have no reason to be arrogant about the food or the wines; since all the wines we have tasted here so far are pretty crap and besides, the South African wines we export are crap as well in comparison to what we keep for ourselves.


Interestingly, Malagasy do not seem to see themselves as part of Africa although the interest in South Africa is substantial; the people we met are big fans of FreshlyGround, Johnny Clegg, Lucky Dube etc, and asked us questions about our local artists (although not many people seemed very interested in the death of Nelson Mandela). People talk about 'Africa' as though it is some distant place, and they talk about 'the Africans' as though they are some faraway people that have nothing to do with them. I asked Eunice about this and he agreed; he said when people come here from other parts of Africa the reaction is usually some curiosity: 'Oh look, a real African!' and that the identity here is quite separate. 


Death is a big deal here. As you drive through the countryside you will see elaborate tombs all over the place - many of the tombs will be more elaborate than the houses, since some of the tribes believe life is temporary and death is forever, so it's better to invest in your death than your life. One of the tribes has a ceremony known as the turning of the bones, where the ancestors will send a message saying they want their tomb spruced up, and their whole family has to then let them know the date of the proposed ceremony and then they have to exhume the body, clean up the bones, put them in a fresh shroud, and have a huge feast for the ancestor. It's a big celebration usually, but it's important that they let the ancestor know in advance when it's going to be happening so that the ancestor makes sure they are home in the tomb when it happens (because they might be floating around somewhere else at the time and miss the party).
 
Something else interesting: we were warned that the people here are desperate for money and will try to pull a fast one every chance they get. I must say this has really not been the case for us. Honestly the people have been lovely and have engaged with us in a really nice manner and even though we speak very little of either French or Malagasy and our attempts can only be hilarious to them they are terribly patient and mime with us with wonderful patience and good humour. 



The people seem to be really polite with each other as well. When we first got here and Eunice was driving us around I thought the people here were terrible drivers because they all hoot at each other constantly. Eunice himself hooted at every single other car and truck we passed and at every single bicycle and pedestrian. I eventually asked him why he was doing that and he looked puzzled and said he was *greeting* them, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. I had to explain to him that in South Africa it was generally accepted that you only hooted at people when you were cross with them or telling them to hurry up. He seemed genuinely perplexed by this. 


In the meantime it seems customary to hoot a greeting at every single other vehicle, bicycle or pedestrian you pass on the road here, which makes for rather a chaotic trip since the largest national road is about the width of the average road in Observatory and typically has a number of trucks, carts, oxen and pedestrians on it (bearing in mind this is the national road - the equivalent of the N1 or N2). It is reasonably well paved but incredibly narrow and winding, and you can't really go faster than 60km/hour on it (although Eunice tried). I'm not generally a vomitty kind of person, but carsickness has aquired a new meaning for me here. 


Now that we are in Nosy Be (phase 2) I am trying my utmost to avoid any kind of road trips at all because the road is even narrower and more winding and the nearest available taxi driver has a horrific wet cough and periodically stops the car in the middle of the road to spit phlegm in all available directions, sometimes into a clear bottle he keeps in the car for this purpose. Even with my normally iron stomach it is all I can do not to add my own projectile body fluids into the mix when we are driving plus minus an hour to the nearest town in 40+ heat, humidity, along a winding road full of potholes with the phlegm wars being fought in the front of the car. Today was particularly bad because I forgot my sunscreen and I think I had a touch of sunstroke and it was all I could do not to projectile puke all over the poor coughing taxi man's neck. 

Which brings us to...[to be continued: Phase 2, Island]

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