We adore walking. True, we also enjoy the play on words suggested by our site's name, but we really do love being pedestrians. And as equal opportunity enjoyers of any walking activity, we're also big fans of hiking. There's a peaceful, almost meditative state of mind I can only achieve hiking. Well, or listening to music while staring out at the desert on a souq bus in Morocco, but the hiking is easier to get to. Usually we prefer hiking just the two of us; comfortable enough to appreciate the silence, but also able to natter on about anything and everything. (That would be me when not in the meditative state.) But in Mad most of our hiking has been done with guides.

The national parks here have very strict rules about only being able to enter a park with an official guide, though oddly these rules differ from park to park. At Ranomafana we were assigned a guide by the park officials; at Isola we were besieged by men offering to act as guides, official or faux, with the ANGAP official looking on in amused disinterest; and at Andohahela the park officials are the guides. But in any case you can't go in any park without a guide.

Since maps are either non-existent or laughably bad in this country, and the guides are all licensed, having had to pass a test about the ecology in their area, tagging along behind a guide is hugely informative. They spot lemurs, lizards, birds, stick insects, point out interesting and weirdly shaped trees and bushes and caution about the poisonous plants, leeches ad scary-looking, but harmless, spiders. So we've been quite happy to hike with a third person when out in Mad. Even if it means I miss out on my meditation.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

I don't recall much about the flight from Fort Dauphin to Nosy Sainte Marie, but I do remember it was preceded by an extended period of primitive camping or otherwise severely limited accommodations, which explains some of what I wrote in this excerpt from my notebook:

I'm flying with my face pressed to the plastic before the window, studying the mountains and rivers, wondering why some parts are green and mottled with trees and others are arid, and the steward brings the food trays. I select a cheese sandwich (in the French style with butter on a baguette.) Leah prefers the aisle seat; there is an empty seat between us. (How very strange? Maybe less than half the seats are empty. "Why didn't we trawl the runway to pick up more passengers, like the taxi-brousses?" I quip to myself.)

The sandwich has a paper napkin around it and then the whole thing is wrapped in plastic. I unfold the plastic and then unfold the the napkin, which I hold up. It has a border of square dimples and an elaborate design of schematized flowers, leaves and hearts. Something spontaneous and strange happens. I pull my shoulders up and together, and swallow a trill of personal laughter. I'm amused with the frivolousness and elaborate absurdity of my napkin. I have the urge to wipe my hands on my sleeve, rather than the napkin, and then casually urinate in the empty row ahead, rather then in the empty bathroom nearby. (Public urination is all too common in Madagascar and out of necessity I now urinate the way everyone else does.) As fast as I am entranced, it breaks and I consider the change in my sense of mores. I turn to Leah and notice she has carefully wiped her napkin of crumbs and squirreled it into the pocket of her day bag, which holds precious bits of Kleenex. What has happened to us?

Posted by David | Permalink

We've just posted a plethora of back dated posts and you're welcome to read as many, or as few, as you'd like. There are some fun stories, though, either way.

Tomorrow we leave Fort Dauphin for Isle Sainte Marie, about 900 kms northeastish of here. We plan to stay there for about two weeks, during which time our internet access will probably be nil. So plan your leisure reading at work accordingly.

Posted by Leah | Permalink | Comments (2)

In a few days we'll have been out of the States longer than any previous trip we've taken. And yet we've been in Madagascar for less than half our stay here. We'll have been here five weeks this Sunday, but we have six more weeks from this Saturday. Time seems to pass in a different way when traveling. We end up quite isolated, operating in a small space consisting of finding food, lodging and transport. And with little access to news sources, the outside world really fades away.

This all came up because we did a big money count last night, checking that we have as much as we thought we did and trying to plan how much we'll spend in each country. Our daily allowance is roughly $30 total. Not much, especially for two people, but the fact that we love camping helps enormously. And fortunately hiking is cheap no matter where you go. We will, of course, go over our daily allotment in some places. Italy, Australia and New Zealand will be burdensomely expensive, but then its cheap here and we hope to recoup in India and Argentina. Malaysia seems like it could go either way: we could blow our budget or save a lot.

But with 294 days left (don't ask: David is always and forever an engineer and he just knows these things) not only is the trip going well, but we're set, more or less, for the next forty-two weeks. Wow.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

For the trip from Andohahela National Park back to Fort Dauphin, Charles and Jean, our two fairy godmothers who work in the park, secured two seats for us on the twice-weekly taxi-brousse. We had planned to hike out, as we'd hiked in, but then I crippled myself for a few days, so that seemed less like a good idea. I resembled one of those old women you see in pictures, hunched over half-way at the waist, leaning heavily on a staff, shuffling along, but only for about two days and now I'm almost all better. But remember to do your yoga so you too don't make every muscle in your lower back seize while squatting down to get into your tent. But I digress.

Because the park is 8.5 kms up a rutted dirt track, the taxi-brousse was not a proper passenger van. The passenger van taxi-brousses only go on roads that are (mostly) paved. They have four rows of passenger benches seating three people to a row, plus two more people up front by the driver. They can be relatively comfortable, but children don't count towards the total number of 14--indeed you don't even pay for children under the age of 5--and depending on how little trafficked the route is, and/or how much the driver is willing to bribe the gendarmes and police at their separate, ubiquitous check points, more people will be crammed into the brousse. On our way to Fort Dauphin two weeks ago, I counted 24 passengers, not including infants. So much for a 'proper' taxi-brousse.

The taxi-brousses that travel off the primary paved road have to be able to maneuver through holes the size of small houses and over ruts of a similar dimension. The one in which we rode from the park was a full-size truck with the back converted into a seating area with three rows of benches facing forward and two half benches facing each other into the center of the truck bed at the tail gate end. All made out of rebar.

Naturally we started out squashed against each other in one of the half benches with our feet up on bulging bags of rice. Once we reached the paved rode we stopped at the nearest village to swap out a tire so David and I got out to watch. I think we might have felt better if we hadn't. The incoming tire was bald and held on with only three of its six lug nuts. But we welcomed the chance to readjust our vertebrae.

While we were standing about, smiling at the small children gawking at the weird foreigners, the driver came up to me and said I could sit in the front since he knew I "didn't feel well." So I rode the rest of the 50 kms in the relative comfort of the cab, growing unaccountably teary listening to the driver's tape of American songs from the 60s, sitting next to a beautiful young woman who was emphatically pregnant. I was worried all our jostling might send her into labor, but I haven't practiced my doula skills. And if we shared a mutual tongue, I'm sure she could have told me some stories about real back pain.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

Only a mad gardener could have designed the valley in which we camped for the last five nights. There was a huge diversity of flora: water plants with leaves as big as bath towels; fan palms; tall, slender rainforest trees with only leaves at the top; tall tubular cacti covered in fleshy green ovals, each hiding a thorn; pretty trees that dropped spiked balls, which when dried reveal barbed thorns (I dubbed them painful velcro); split personality botany, which grows a thick tree trunk and halfway up bows down to the ground becoming a vine; pad cacti, similar to the ones, with which I grew up; and much, much more. The fauna was just as impressive: butterflies, lemurs, ducks, sunbirds, lizards (one with a black body, white spots and a shiny copper-colored tail). Best of all, each night hundreds of egrets loudly arrived, squalking and pecking at each other, until they were all spaced equidistant to each other, pretending they hadn't just squabbled like a huge, grumpy family and then slept. The gardener's results were sublime.

The area is called Tsimelahy in Andohahela National Park (recently made a UNESCO world heritage site) and properly termed a transitional forest, the confluence of rainforest and spiny desert. Our tent was pitched in a purpose built clearing with fire pits and stone paths. One short path led to a natural swimming pool about 150 meters in diameter and was flanked by gently sloping waterfalls. The soft roar from the falls was heard from every point in camp (and some distance beyond) in a slightly different way. It was paradise and the (nearly) perfect place to repair and recover from extented travel.

Leah needed the repair more urgently, since on our first day there, without apparent cause, she suffered disabling back pain. She lay flat either in the tent or on one of the shaded picnic benches by the pool, only moving to inch her way with a makeshift cane back and forth and to the bathroom--I offered to carry her, but she absolutely refused and it probably would have hurt her more, anyway. At length, she recovered with time, yoga stretches and hot compresses made from the boiled bark of a special tree that one of the friendly park rangers, Charles, collected from the forest. (Charles carefully explained to us that he was responsible for everything in the forest, which for the moment included us.)

Charles and another ranger, Jean, led me to see lemurs one morning before they woke and left to forage for the day. The six lemurs, balled in three pairs for warmth, were adorable, mostly white fur with black or brown caps, black ear tuffs, palms and faces. Some had faint red-brown-orange patches on their chests. On the walk back, Charles picked mountain oranges and gave me four. Their scent was so good they seemed fake.

At the end of the week and with our food supplies nearly depleted, Jean carried Leah's pack back to the entrance, in case she had any lingering problems, where Charles had arranged for seats in a taxi-brousse to return us directly to Fort Dauphin for our flight on Saturday to Isle Sainte Marie.

Kudos to the mad gardener.

Posted by David | Permalink

We have a friend, Alfredo, who loves to sail. He loves everything about sailing: he waxes poetic about famous boats and races held decades ago; gives detailed lectures on sailing's technical aspects; and in fact teaches a one week course on sailing in southern Italy every summer. All of which makes me wonder what he would have thought about our 12 km pirogue trip to the coastal fishing village of Evatra, through palm lined canals and lakes.

One of the aspects of life in poorer countries that will always amaze me is peoples' ingenuity; not having ready-made goods requires that you create them yourself. The pirogue we used is a hollowed-out trunk of a Eucalyptus tree, large enough to hold five people. The left side bulges out in a greater curve, which Ernesto, the captain, counterbalances by carefully seating everyone, staggering us so I'm the only one sitting in the center of my wooden plank of a seat, in the center of the priogue. Which leaks slightly, so I periodically hear Ernesto using a cut-up plastic water bottle to scoop out the excess water, dumping it over the side. And then there's the sail.

Instead of a custom made sail, the sail hoisted on the pirogue is made of two empty 50 kg bags of Pakistan Long Grain White Rice Reap No: 2-1-91-1022. The bags are each cut lengthwise down both sides and then sewn together on one long edge to create a square. A square of untrimmed raveling edges, hoisted up by blue twine onto a two meter branch cut from a tree, curving slightly towards to top with a convenient 'Y' over which the twine runs. The twine is tied around the front plank, the first paddler's seat, to keep it secure. And it works beautifully, other than the fact that Jean, the first paddler, has to use his paddle to hammer the mast into its hole every twenty minutes or so. But when the wind picks up we plough through the water, sliding past palms, birds and at one point, a small crocodile. I wish Alfredo had been there to enjoy it with us.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

Follow this plan to go about 300km from point A (Isalo NP) to point H (Fort Dauphin) on public transportation through some of the deserts of Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world:

A - Beginning from the village of Ranohira close to the entrance to Isalo NP, take the two hour taxi-brousse ride to the town of Ihosy. Spend the night to get an early start on the long ride south. Do not be alarmed at the family of five crouched in the shadows beneath your hotel room window. The father, who grips a lethal looking spear, is the night watchman. Sleep well.

B - The next morning arrive at the bus station promptly at eight. When the bus finally leaves at noon be comforted that your wait has secured the two coveted fronts seats, which provide a sliver of additional space and a clear view of six hours of desert mountains and scrub plains. Also, enjoy your experience six hours of pot holes, wash-boarded road, and washed out four-wheel dirt tracks.

C - Spend three days in dusty, but not unpleasant, Betroka (pronouced Be-TRU-ka) telling everyone you meet who asks, mystified, why you're there, that you are trying to get to Fort Dauphin. And, listen to your neighbor, too scared to leave the hotel, tell you about cattle rustling, bandits and the guy who had his arm shot off down the road 10 days earlier.

D - Buy tickets for a bus. When the buses all show up full, get a refund and resign yourself to two more days in Betroka. While Leah is at the food market the next morning and you are reading the end of a mystery in the hotel room in your underpants, find out from each hotel employee, your neighbors and several passersby, who burst into your room one at a time, that your refunded ticket was sold to a four door mini-truck going most of the way, labeled "African Development Fund", owned by five people who dislike their own comfort. And, you have five minutes to pack and leave.

E - Suppress the memory of riding in a mini-truck for 15 bruising hours along more bad "road." Enjoy the 10 minutes of paved road in the middle of nowhere.

F - When the price of a room for a night in Amboasary is expensive enough to make the driver snort with laughter at the greedy hotel owner, accept the invitation to pitch a tent in front of a school room in which the African Development people spend the night.

G - The next morning, switch to a taxi-brousse for the last 75km and 4 hours, filled to record-setting capacity and which has live chickens hanging upside down from the roof and over the windows. (I have pictures of this, in case you don't believe me.)

H - Arrive at Fort Dauphin's dusty bus station and walk the hilly, relaxed town desperately trying to see the ocean. When you do finally see water, stop in the middle of the road and gape your mouth towards the ruggedly beautiful beaches.

Congratulations, you have reached Fort Dauphin, the launching points for a pirogue (a type of small canoe) excursion to the tiny fishing villages of Evatra and a week at Andohahela National Park!

Posted by David | Permalink

We spent a surprisingly social weekend at Ranohira, the village 3 kms from the entrance to Ihosy National Park last weekend. I worry sometimes that we seem insular as a couple and so hard to approach, especially since neither of us is great at accosting complete strangers. But accost them we did; we even stalked them.

We arrived Thursday afternoon after an extra day spent in Fianar while I recovered from a mysterious and fleeting stomach bug. Somewhat to our dismay, we were besieged by men offering to be our guides, instead of being assigned one, as happened at Ranomafana NP, the weekend before. We decided to spend a day reconnoitering and also give David a chance to recover from the cold I'd given him (completely unrelated to the stomach indisposition).

Friday morning, while dithering in front of the map at the ANGAP office, one of our would-be guides mentioned there were two Peace Corps volunteers in town for a month to teach English during their holiday break. One of them even lived in Betroka, a town we were anxious to find more information on, since we wanted to travel through there on our way to Fort Dauphin. David promptly decided we should make use of my Peace Corps ties for the information. So we set about our stalking. We weren't terribly successful. In fact, after asking all and sundry without finding the volunteers, it was Kate and Shelby who found us, with the question: are you the people looking for us? We spent a very pleasant few hours in their hotel room and made plans to meet for dinner after their hike.

Back at our tent for what we thought would be a lazy afternoon, we met Ada, who'd just taken the bungalow behind the area in which we were camped. A Canadian teaching at a business college in the Emirates, Ada proved willing to hike with us the next day, so we bought our park tickets and made arrangements with Daniel, who was to be our guide, to meet at 7 the next morning. Back at Chez Alice, where we were staying, we shared the shaded picnic area with Joon, a travel writer for a Korean paper based in Seoul. The four of us shared a pineapple and oranges while we swapped Madagascar travel stories. We did the same at dinner with Kate and Shelby, though they clearly had more, and more interesting stories. We went to bed at a shockingly late 10 (the sun rises and sets at about 6), tired, but pleased.

Saturday was lovely; hot and sunny enough to thoroughly enjoy the swim in the natural swimming pool we hiked to. It was also cool enough that after our hike across the plateau from the pool, amidst the scrubby brown desert in between boulder-strewn mountains that reminded me of central Utah, we shivered in the shade of the narrow canyon on our way to the blue and black pools. David and I swam again, using a 30 foot waterfall as a masseuse by standing underneath it and letting it pound our backs. Ada decided she'd had enough cold water at the first pool and Daniel lounged on the rocks smoking. He probably thinks all the swimming is silly, anyway.

On our way out of the canyon towards the campground 2 kms from the park entrance, we encountered a troupe of ring tail lemurs. We'd gotten close views of a troupe earlier, on our water stop at the campsite before plunging into the canyon. The lemurs have become habituated to humans at the campsite and there were brown lemurs hanging about as well. One of them was cheeky enough to try stealing some food being set out for a group staying overnight. She was shooed away, but not before she snatched a package of biscuits.

The troupe of ring tails we met on the trail struck me as especially funny. The ring tails are the lemur type most people are familiar with and they look exactly like their pictures. This troupe was walking on all fours, rather like a line of cats, with tails twice the length of their bodies. Sauntering up the middle of the path towards us, they looked for all the world as though they were on their own guided hike, there to gawk at the bizarre primate species that doesn't have enough sense to use their opposable thumbs to leap to the safety of the trees next to the path. But we do have enough sense to have taken several pictures.

Posted by Leah | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gare routiers, French for bus station, in developing countries are always the most depressing places. You get the chic travelers who travel on public transport because a car is just beyond their means for long distance travel, or because the car they do have has to stay in town with the rest of the family, but you also get the poorest people. Beggars, both old and very young; transient-looking men with little else to do but drink and hang around, which makes them slightly unstable.

There's a homeless woman here at the Fianar routier with nine children, all boys and all about the same age. The youngest is probably about three and the oldest eleven. She looks like a sort of demented incarnation of a den mother. I think only two of the boys are actually hers, but who knows, maybe as they get older she simply exhibits less maternal feeling.

There's a man too, who's either drunk or somewhat developmentally disabled, who tried really hard to pick a fight with another man hanging around. He seems to have some of the other men who actually work for the companies watching out for him because they let him get somebody's bags out of a taxi and toss them up onto a waiting bus.

There are countless vendors, some selling practical things for travel like small tea cakes, oranges, water, but there are others selling thing that seem incomprehensible given the context. Large sets of pots, mugs, cheap trinkets, flashlights that probably don't turn on more than once. The sunglasses and watches sort of makes sense: you might get people to buy the sunglasses for themselves on a long trip during the day, and possibly you'll get someone to take the watches as a gift for whomever they'll meet at the end of their journey. But it still seems odd.

The child beggars are the saddest. The sweet-looking 10 year old with a coat at least five times too large for him. It covers his fingertips by a good three inches, is a washed out peach, very tattered and flattened quilt weave, so old and worn its as thick as a new t-shirt. His pants hit him mid-calf and he has no shoes on his dirty feet, toughened by constant tramping over filthy cobblestones, cracked asphalt, all littered with urban debris.

The woman with the nine boys sends them out to beg. Or they just know that life is better with some cash, so they go out themselves. But when she finally goes out herself and gets to me, she looks older than I expect.

And then there are the kids begging with even younger kids on their backs. A young girl, probably 8 or 9, just came to the window asking for biscuits or candy. She had a toddler girl tied to her back, for all the world as though she were old enough to do so. And maybe she is.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

Each step was calculated. I moved my boot sideways and over a mossy branch, steadied by gripping a bamboo stalk as thick as a waterbottle (it sounded like a waterbottle too, although, I'm told the water inside is toxic.) I limboed under a thin thorny vine. I watched a dozen or so small worms work their way around my boot and up my pants' leg. I looked around at the overwhelming variety of green and brown colors and textures. Spiders, butterflies and other strange creatures went about their business. I moved on. A vine pulled at the camera pouch, "take more pictures." Another vine pulled at my waist, "don't go." I pushed on.

This was my third hike through the Ranomafana rainforest, rather than on a path, on the "natural way", which was really a steep groove made of a mixture of mud and dead leaves. I stopped when some things tumbled onto my neck and down the back of my shirt. I swipped at the back of my neck and hat several times and tried to balance myself on the slope. Then, my English-speaking Malagasy guide, Adrian (spoken with a French accent), turned, pointed to my leg and said, "now David, don't panic."

My first hike was on Saturday, Leah and I walked together with Adrian in the lead and a scout, Jimmy, who ran ahead to track lemurs. When found, Jimmy would call back to Adrian, which he did soon after we started, and I learned a new Malagasy word, malaki (quickly). And, we ran through the rainforest, onto a broad path and then abruptly up a slope with many vertical stalks of bamboo sparsely spaced, which allowed in more sunlight. With the warm sun, humidity and my panting, my glasses fogged. My boot hooked a low vine and I looked too closely at the forest floor momentarily. When I arranged myself and looked up there were Golden Bamboo lemurs making great leaps from stalk to stalk.

Some bamboo was waving to departing lemurs and others bowing slowly to additional weight. Jimmy's call drew other scouts, who called to their guides and other tourists. We watched for some time while Adrian whispered facts about the lives of this endangered species. Although, he didn't need to whisper; all the tourists blundered through the forest. A man with a big camera fell backwards onto his butt into a clump of trees. I guess all primates in the area enjoyed the spectacle. Later in the day, we saw Red-bellied lemurs, a groggy nocturnal lemur (Small-toothed Sportive lemur) in a tree and a troupe of Milne-Edward's sifaka (another species of lemur). And, there were spiders, stick bugs, cameleons and an overwhelming variety more.

That evening we went on our second hike and first noctural walk. We each had a flashlight and stayed on a clear path to a purpose-built picnic table in a clearing. Jimmy found Brown Mouse lemurs jumping through and licking the trees not far from the clearing. Adrian kept a spotlight on them for pictures. Leah stared at the lemurs, then straightened her back, never taking her eyes from the lemurs, said in a clear, serious voice that the lemurs were too cute and she was taking one home. They were cute.

Leah had had a cold for several days and Sunday morning it had advanced to the point that she couldn't go on our scheduled hike. Adrian had to walk 7km early in the morning to meet us at the park entrance, so I couldn't cancel without feeling badly. Leah could use a quiet morning anyway, so I went without her. And, so now, on my third hike, I found myself crouched in the rainforest with Adrian telling me not to panic. I furtively demonstrated non-panic, as best I could. I asked if the worms were the object of his concern, but not is those words. He said, "worms live in the ground; those are leeches." But that wasn't what he was woried about: apparently, I was standing next to a poisonious shrub, which I was warned not to even brush against. I shifted my concern, memorized the long, pointed leaves arrayed in a spoke pattern and passed carefully around it. I tried to brush my boots off and tried not to think about whatever fell down the back of my shirt.

A little farther on Jimmy called and I stumbled along again. When we arrived, there were guides and scouts everywhere, but oddly, few tourists. Jimmy directed me into a steep area of dense trees and pointed. At eye-level and only a few feet away was a Greater Bamboo lemur clutching the top of a bamboo stalk, which he was eating. It had a white radio collar with antenna pointing out. Apparently, this species was less worried by humans, so I stared transfixed until he finished eating.

Adrian, Jimmy and I returned to the campground via the Riana waterfall to check on Leah (thankfully, she was already feeling better), where I rambled about my day, showed her pictures and, of course, my leech wounds.

Posted by David | Permalink | Comments (3)

Many people, when we mentioned we were coming to Madagascar, either asked if it was because of the movie, or started singing the song from the movie for us (thank you, Irene). I found this funny since I hadn't actually associated the movie with the country at all. But it gave me the idea of showing it to "my kids," the Somali family I've tutored for the last three years, as a perfect last visit with them, so when we watched it the first week of May I paid closer attention. And I have to say, the animators didn't do too badly.

You remember the baby lemur in the movie, the one who's left out for the four interlopers from New York to find, and eat if they feel so inclined? The one who bursts out wailing in fright? Well, it turns out they're not babies, they're brown mouse lemurs and they're just adorable! They're nocturnal, lick the tree branches for insects with quick, slightly guilty looking dabs of their tongues, dart from tree to tree very swiftly and weigh 45 grams. (David tells me one penny weighs 5 grams, so do with that information what you will.) We managed to get quite a good video of them, so you may even eventually see them, if we ever manage to upload it.

Our video of the fossa is less clear, but it doesn't matter because the best view we got of it couldn't be captured. We were in a small clearing with about 15 other tourists and their guides, all whispering, hoping to see the nocturnal fossa, all looking at one opening in the surrounding jungle. Adrien, David and I were off to the left of the group and Adrien was explaining that there are three sizes of the fossa. We were hoping to see the medium-sized one, about the size of a well-fed cat. They eat insects, lizards and small lemurs if they can catch them. The big fossa are about the size of a well-built spaniel, but they have a much larger territory hunting for lemurs, which is why they're the villains in the movie. As Adrien was relating all of this, we noticed movement just to the left in front of us and a fossa poked his head through, looking at all of us like an actor checking out how full the house is before the curtain opens. He pulled back and then reappeared a minute later, this time where expected, looking like a sleepy and self-satisfied cat.

We went to bed a few hours later feeling quite satisfied with our night's viewing, as well.

Posted by Leah | Permalink