White-flashing fireflies; white-striped mosquitoes; brilliant blue, bright orange, electric pink and fiery red dragonflies; black-spotted iridescent turquoise-back, red-orange-bellied color beetles; neon-cyan fish; yellow and white striped triangular fish; black, blue, translucent and mottled-red crabs; pure green, red-eyed geckos; foot-long grey, white or black chameleons; flashy red-bellied song birds; orange-bandit-masked shore birds; white-shirted magpies; shiny, copper-coated lizards; hand-sized mahogany spiders; slimy, tan-swirled octopuses; burnt-orange-chested sifikas; white-flanked sifikas; slate-blue drogon birds; rich, dark chestnut coo coo birds; dirty white, dusty brown and black Indian cows; furry black-faced sifikas; fuzzy grey mouse lemurs; chocolate-brown forest rats; transparent jumping fish; mottled-red starfish; and, slick, black whales.

Posted by David | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Swedes have left and it's a quiet morning. The guides have split themselves into three groups, each sheltered under one of the grass-thatched picnic areas. Three men are playing scrabble; two are playing cards; and two men and the three women are gathered with the guitarist at the kitchen area.

The caretaker continues raking the brittle, brown, dish platter leaves into piles while the wind scatters the piles from yesterday. The 4 year-old's mom has finished washing the breakfast dishes and is lying outside their tent in her leaf-patterned grey and red-ochre sarong.

The singing group breaks up as Olga and the other woman who can carry a tune wander off leaving only the enthusiastic, perpetually flat-pitched woman before the guitarist gives up. Olga lays down on a picnic table bench, chatting with the painfully thin caretaker.

A group of five small boys from the village next door wander along the cement path trawling for tourist trash. The caretaker's daughter is singing to herself and dancing to a rhythm difficult to follow. The 4 year old has disappeared into the red-brown park office building to receive attention from her dad.

The game groups disperse into the new one-room education center and Olga falls asleep. The caretaker, who's shy smile breaks slowly, has given up his futile task and is washing a shirt at the ablution block.

Posted by Leah | Permalink | Comments (0)

You'd think we've have internet access for the last two weeks or so, but we actually just spent a little over a week at Ankarafantsika National Park. MovableType, the platform we use to post entries, has a really nifty feature named "scheduling" which allows us to pre-load posts, making it appear as though we have consistent access. Of course, this only works if we have something to say and have time to type it all in, which we did while in Toamasina, but it's something that we may start using more regularly. Depending, I suppose, on how much we have to babble about.

Posted by Leah | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although a few people we've met speak English well enough, language has been a minor problem here for me; in retrospect, I should have studied French in school, rather than German. (Even Italian would have been better considering the time I spent in Italy.) That being said, my French language skills are coming along--except listening, speaking, and general comprehension. Although, I do have an excellant, nasal "non" and can flap my arms with disinterest expertly in the French style. Mostly, I tend to stick with stock phrases and sagely nod and brightly say "d'accord" (the French word for "okay") when I don't know what is going on. Leah usually steps in at this point (she wisely did study French and had some time to use it in Morocco), to elaborate on my nodding.

Posted by David | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the statistics I learned while obtaining my public health degree is that on average, indoor air pollution is 5 to 100 times worse than outdoor pollution. 5 to 100 times worse! I just can't get over that. My point in imparting this disturbing statistic is that while we were tramping across Sainte Maire, we camped in a couple of villages and I realized that most of the Gasy probably don't have to worry about the difference between indoor and outdoor air pollution.

Most houses in Madagascar that we've seen are made so there's lots of air flow from inside out and vice versa. There's a frame to the house made of tree branches that are just thick enough to be grabbed around without your thumb and middle finger touching. I really want the walls of the houses to be reeds, nice thick ones, because that's what they look like to me, but Martial, who among other things, is a botanical expert, assured me that the sticks are from a tree. So the walls are actually each a single row of tree branches thin enough that you could grasp four together. These are very carefully lined up vertically between the thicker frame tree parts and kept in line at the bottom by resting them on a thin piece of more or less flat wood. They're cut to fit, so they slot in at the top, just under another horizontal frame piece.

The roofs are all angled, due, I suspect, to the heavy rains that the country gets in various seasons. The covering is almost always rows of large fan palm leaves, carefully overlapped every two inches so there may be five layers at any one point. Sometimes the roofs are made of corrugated tin and sometimes they're a combination of palm and tin, but it's usually just the palm leaves, which are quite effective at keeping out even torrential downpours.

The houses are almost always just one room where everyone sleeps, stays dry and talks together. But not, to my surprise, cooks together. In the first village in which we camped we discovered that the kitchen is actually a separate, slightly smaller, one room house where the women of the two extended families that make up the village prepare the meals. Inside there was an unfinished plank wood table and four similarly rough-cut stools, a charcoal brazier for small dishes and the tea kettle, a free-standing cabinet of sorts where the staples of rice, cassava, oil and spice were stored, and a fire "bank" area where the main cooking was done. The fire area was large enough for three large pots to be going at once and had a three shelf rack built over it where the fire wood was kept. David expressed surprise at this arrangement thinking it might be dangerous, but Martial explained it was the best way to keep the wood dry in the humidity. Plus, it's good for smoking fish. (I am embarrassed to say i hadn't even though about it as a potential fire hazard, which is probably why I no longer have the pleasure of lighting our stove.) Even with all the wood smoke in the kitchen, there's still lots of airflow in and out, especially since doors, if installed, are always left open during the day, and frequently at night, as well.

Despite their non-air polluting benefits, you wouldn't really want to live in one of these houses. Partly because of bugs. With the inevitable spaces that allow airflow comes space for bugs and I am just not a fan of bugs moving around while I sleep. Especially on me. But more importantly, you wouldn't want to live in these houses because they only last for about four years. Can you imagine having to rebuild your house every four years? What a boon for construction workers, though.

And now, having finished this doubtlessly fascinating description of housing construction in Madagascar, may I encourage you all to go outside and enjoy the cleaner air. Unless, of course, you're in the U.S. where we've read that much of the country is on fire.

Posted by Leah | Permalink | Comments (2)

Eating in Madagascar has very little consistency; it's basically a throw of dice. There is so much variation that ordering the same meal from the same restaurant on two consecutive days may result in two different meals. And, not slightly different, but different enough to label one good and the other bad. It's disheartening.

Part of the trouble may be that we must often eat in varied circumstances: hotel restaurants, tourist restaurants, Gasy restaurants or Indian snack shops. Or, we eat street food, or picnic from the supermarket, Gasy market, taxi-brousse (people sell things through the windows when the brousse stops, or even just slows down), or cook with our camp stove. Each one offers completely different choices.

Hotel and tourist restaurants are vastly more expensive (6,000 Ariary - 12,000+ Ariary / about $3 - $6+ per person) and undeniably bland, or just plain bad, although they sometimes seem like the only option. To begin with the food is faux-western, prepared on request and takes hours to arrive, which, after a long day of hiking, is just annoying. It's not unusual for us to order food and then sit at the table and finish a package of crackers, correctly anticipating a one, two, or three hour wait before we are served. When the food does arrive, it would be charitable to call it boring. More than once I've order pasta, rice, French fries or an omelet and been shocked that the food had no flavor, no oil, not even salt. A couple weeks ago, I ordered spaghetti with tomato sauce. After several hours, I was given a dish of boiled noodles with no sauce, only the faintest tint of red. Leah and I questioned the manager.

"White people like very bland food, and if you want some exotic spices, like say, salt, you need to special order it," the manager replied. Maybe those weren't her exact words, but that was the gist.

This has become so maddening that Leah and I have sworn off tourist places for the remainder of the Madagascar portion of the trip, even if this means long walks into nearby villages or picnicking with little more than packages of biscuits.

Gasy restaurants can be more interesting (1,000 Ar - 2,000 Ar / $0.5 - $1). The foundation of most Gasy meals is boiled rice. A huge plate of it is presented in front of you, always with a fork and a big spoon. In a small dish to the side are tasty bits of beef, chicken, fish or, rarely, vegetables. Also present is a bowl of lightly flavored water to be added to the rice. Sometimes a drink made from boiled water at the bottom of the rice pot is included. The food can be good, but usually, especially for me, near the end of the meal, it feels as though I'm merely fueling.

Food only really starts to get exciting when we venture into the Indian snack shops or Gasy markets for street food, although much of the quick, hot food is deep fried: samosas; fried, battered bananas; and, fried, battered bread (Leah loves this curiously redundant food), just to name a few. There are also baked goods (including mufkash, a lightly sweetened rice flour cake/bread), soups, potato salads, cold noodles with vegetables, salads, sandwiches, brochettes and boiled cassava, to name a few more.

Supplementing all of this, we buy from individual vendors: fruits (pineapples, oranges, mandarins, passion fruits, bananas, papayas and coconuts), vegetables (tomatoes, green onions, garlic and corn), roasted peanuts, peanut brittle, wild-flower honey, donut holes and coconut toffee. And, from little shops or supermarkets we buy bottled water, yogurt, French pastries, breads, chocolate (made in Mad!) and crackers.

Finally, when camping there are lots of staples, vegetables and spices available, which is part of the reason we enjoy camping so much.

And now all this writing about food has made me hungry, so we're off to the market for another roll of the dice.

Posted by David | Permalink | Comments (0)

For my graduation at the end of April, David continued his tradition of giving me the perfect gift by presenting me with an eReader. The reader finally harmonizes my two favorite pastimes: reading and travel. They've been out of sync until now because as much as I love traveling, I need to read. I just have to know that I have a book on hand. Since it can be difficult to find books in English when we're traveling, it doesn't even have to be a book I would normally read, it just has to be a book I can understand and have the bare outlines of a plot. We've had trips where the space/weight limitation of carrying enough books for me to read has been too great and then I turn into a listless faintly pathetic figure. As opposed to usual.

But the eReader solves the space/weight problem: before we left Pittsburgh we downloaded 327 book onto it. 327! (It actually holds a whole lot more with the 4 gig card, but we ran out of time to put more on.) Most of the titles are copyright-expired books from Project Gutenburg, a really impressive endeavor to provide ebooks for free. So I have all of Jane Austen's books, some Agatha Christie, both of whom I adore, and then lots of classics.

I do have more contemporary works, too, though. Sony's site gave us a $50.00 credit when we signed up, so by a judicious perusal of their 'packs' I made out like a bandit. I have four Tony Hillerman mysteries, Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, five historical romances (what, like you've never needed to read something completely frivolous to relax?), and a David Sedaris book, for some non-fiction.

Now my only problem is that because I have so much to read, I don't always want to leave the tent. Maybe there's a book about that.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

Toamasina is a very flat, sprawling port city on the east coast of Mad. Main streets are broad and tree lined. And, refreshingly for large cities, the pollution does not overwhelm. This may be because most people walk, bicycle, or pousse-pousse; there are thousands of pousse-pousses. Pousse-pousses (and, I hope I'm spelling this correctly) are a sort of rickshaw, brightly painted in yellow and red. Most are pulled by earnest men in flip-flops (although, many are barefoot), and some are powered by a bicyclist. A long trip seems to cost 2,000 Ariary, a little more than a US dollar. Not expensive, but used frequently, would start to become so. A Peace Corps teacher we met told us, we "shouldn't feel guilty, pousse-pousses were not hard to pull." Adding, I thought dubiously, "...once you get started."

As you may be aware, Leah and I prefer to walk, so we do. And, as we walk, we are followed, sometimes relentlessly, by the pousse-pousseists, to coin a word. They call, whistle, wave, follow, want to know if they should wait for us somewhere and sometimes just sit, looking vaguely forlorn, while waiting for business. At the market there are dozens competing with each other. In the heat of the day, they sleep stretched back in their cart with the handles resting on the ground. I appreciate that pousse-pousses allow cleaner air, provide jobs and are convenient. So, on our first day, after initially repelling them and trying to walk without a map to the hotel ourselves, we took a pousse-pousse.

Not surprisingly, I felt guilty. I sourly hunched forward in the cart with my elbows on my knees and my hands propping up my head. There I was, perfectly capable of walking on my own, having a person tote me around. The other day I saw an exceptionally big, tall Westerner being dragged around by a Malagasy man at least two feet shorter. And, I started thinking, even if they provide jobs, they are terrible jobs and too many people are doing the same terrible jobs--what Leah would refer to as 'under employment', although you would have to ask her to explain that special economic term. (Leah posted about 'under employment' from China last year.) And, there are far more waiting for work than working. Pousse-pousses are not the answer to unemployment. And, while they allow cleaner air, so does walking.

So, I no longer feel like taking pousse-pousses and thought you should know why.

Posted by David | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mel Brooks is a genius, especially in his earlier work. We're quite devoted to Blazing Saddles, a really brilliant satire on racism, in which Madeline Kahn, as a beautiful and entrancing German bar hall performer, sings an ennui-filled song about how she's tired of being admired. David suggested I use the song line as a post title when I said I wanted to write something about being "othered" in Madagascar, and it just fits so well.

We don't blend here. I don't generally have a problem with this since blending is not something I'm good at. Hell, I've only ever blended in Austria and the Netherlands, but David has been used to blending. He blended in Italy, Greece, Morocco and Turkey, so when we first got to Swaziland where everyone else immediately picked up on the fact that he wasn't a native, he had a bit of a shock. Three years later, he still hasn't quite recovered.

What bothers him most is the special treatment we get. There have been several instances in multiple countries in which we've gotten away with breaking the rules just because somehow as white people we're assumed to be special. Never mind that we broke the rules because we didn't, or don't, speak the language, the fact that we don't get called on it really irks David. People in Africa often let us cut in lines, wait on us first and just generally treat us as though we're privileged.

Sometimes I like the special attention. While exhausting, the time this photo captured is one of my favorite memories of Madagascar, so far. We spent a happy half hour talking to each other in mutually incomprehensible languages; proved that everyone has white palms; and that yes, my whiteness extends at least up to my knee.

(David had a slightly less controlled attempt to verify that his whiteness covered his whole body when he had to wave the shower wand at several impish faces peering in at him through a hole at eye-level while he was showering at Ranomafana NP campsite. I was relieved the kids had all been called away when it was my turn to get the grim off.)

Being visibly identified as 'other' works both ways, though. We're targets for all of the people who assume that just because we're white we have fistfuls of cash to fling around and charge us more. This is annoying, but not as bad as having three out of every four kids demanding money, candy or a pen. It's not so much being asked that I find aggravating, but the fact that some irresponsible tourist in the past gave a kid something and created a culture of dependency. David's gotten so tired of saying 'no' all of the time that he wants to get t-shirts printed up saying: I am not your bank, candy shop or stationary store. This would be great except someone would probably ask for it since t-shirts are something else thoughtless tourists have given out in the past.

I am more ambivalent about being othered than David is. I hate the history of colonialism that has led to white people being viewed as special and I get a little weary of continuously saying, "No, thank you" to everyone we meet. But I made those kids' day when we held hands for a while. And when we walk through some rural village and I smile at a woman sitting outside her house cleaning rice in a flat reed-woven platter and she looks startled and then gives me a delighted, beautiful smile back, it makes me really happy. Happier, even, than enjoying Blazing Saddles.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

I'm comforted by the sight of little green men. Not real men, you see, nor from my imagination. Let me explain.

Since the moment we landed in Madagascar, we've been surrounded by advertisements for the Indian Ocean Games. (Actually, its the Islands of the Indian Ocean Games, but that doesn't roll off the tongue so easily.) Almost everywhere there are billboards, posters and television spots for the games. Not that we've watched any TV; it's just that the volume of every set in the country is turned up to be easily heard from neighboring rooms, lobbies and several blocks down the street. A rhythmic ten second ditty associated with the advertisement for the games begins to replay in your mind after a while. Visually, the most noticeable feature of the ads are the little, green, fan palm-headed men rendered in a schematized fashion and engaged in various sports. Oddly, after several months of daily exposure, the sight of the little green men is familiar and sort of comforting.

All of this was brought home a few days after we arrived in Toamasina, when I found myself standing outside a bakery in the pouring rain, frustrated with my failed attempt to buy bread and the complex response in French from the baker, which I didn't understand. It was a common type of frustration when I'm found in a far flung part of the world and unable to speak any of the local languages. But then I noticed a poster for the games and slowly read each sport in my mind, assisted by a picture next to each word: volley ball, athetisme (track & field), basket ball, boxe, cyclisme, foot ball, halterophilie (weightlifting), karate-do, lawn tennis, lutte (wrestling), natation (swimming), petanque (boccie), tae kwon do and tennis de table. Gradually, I became comforted by the green figure in the middle of the poster (and, partly, from the illusion that I spoke French better than I actually do.)

Thus buoyed, I re-entered the store and bought the bread I wanted with my own particularly animated mix of broken French and pantomime.

Posted by David | Permalink

We have this tent from Big Agnes that we just love. It's almost perfect for us: the body is 90% mesh so it's great for hot-weather camping, humid-weather camping and star gazing. Plus, it keeps out the bugs. It's also a very light weight tent: a factor not to be underestimated when we have to carry it over mountains. David had his heart set on it because even though it's a three-person tent (we're big fans of extra space), it's only about 2 pounds.

The only downside to the tent is summed up by a notice printed in bold on the tag inside the tent body. Along with warning the user not to set the tent on fire, always a wise precaution, the notice states: Synthetic fabrics are damaged by overexposure to UV light. Well great, I've always wanted to have to camp indoors. But because shade's a little difficult to come by in desert areas, we've now experienced the damage done to synthetic fabrics by UV light.

On Nosy Nato one of the innumerable times I was futzing with the rainfly just after yet another drizzle, I noticed that the fabric just over one of the cinch points where we stake the fly into the ground had torn just above the seam for about the length of my forearm. It's actually just fine: I sewed up the area a few days ago with the white thread David put in the repair kit. (Don't ask, he somehow thought it was white that goes with everything, which looks great on the seam of my black pants I also stitched up.) David's now going to put a fluorescent-orange patch on and we should be just fine. And if not, I found out from the very nice people at Big Agnes that we can buy a new rainfly and have it shipped anywhere in the world. Oooh, mail while traveling!

Posted by Leah | Permalink | Comments (2)

Would you believe it: we went running this morning. I know, I know, after 2 months of only putting our running shoes on as a respite from our hiking boots or to let our feet recover from the sanding they received on the small islands while wearing our Chacos, I, too, am shocked that we used them in the way they're meant to be.

We're in Toamasina for about a week, Mad's largest port and second largest city, drying out from our exciting, but rain-saturated time on the small islands and taking advantage of a decent internet connection. So decent, in fact, that we've been able to upload some pictures, as well as update our location map. We're also using the connection to type in all of the posts we wrote during our island stint, so there should be about 7 or 8 backdated posts before we leave.

When we do leave we'll head northwest for a 2 week stay in Ankarafantsika NP (quite the mouthful, isn't it). In the meantime we'll continue to enjoy Toamasina's faded grandeur, which lends it a jauntily disreputable air. And of course, the possibility that we might go running again.

Posted by Leah | Permalink | Comments (2)

On the brousse ride from Soanierana-Ivongo to Toamasina (really, the names here are impressive) the driver pulled over in desperate need of a coffee so as not to fall asleep. I was in equally desperate need to find a bathroom, so it was a welcome break for me. When I got back from the pile of huge dead palm leaves (despite my rather constant announcements to the contrary, the world really is your toilet), David was standing at a vendor's shack holding a nubby, thick-skinned, mottled green, irregularly heart-shaped thing twice the size of a big mango and trying to ask how much it cost in French. After handing over 500 ariary, about 34 cents, we piled back in the brousse with our new piece of food, having been assured that it was sweet and good, but with no name to give it.

We got to the hotel where we pulled the fruit out and asked the man at the desk what it was. he knew the name, but only in French and my I-can-get-around-but-can't-hold-real-conversations French didn't recognize it. Another man standing around was able to warn us that it had black seeds and we shouldn't eat them, but he couldn't supply the name in English, either. So we took it to our room and laid it on the little white wooden table. David pulled his knife out after we'd each tried to smell it and hefted it about a bit. He cut into it over the sink in case it was really juicy and exposed a creamy but fiberous white flesh with large black seeds. We each hesitantly took a bite: it was creamily sweet, but slightly tart, and I suddenly exclaimed, "David, it's your body wash!" Because it was. We were the excited tasters of a passion fruit. And I highly recommend it.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

Upon arriving in the largest city on Saint Marie, Ambodifotatra, touts fell upon us selling whale-watching boat tours, which were priced in euros. Reflexively, we recoiled. (Not just in Madagascar, but around the world in developing countries, when prices are set in dollars or euros, it is usually because it is overpriced to the point that the amount in the local currency sounds ludicrous. And, it almost always is.) Later, we learned that whales must stop in order to allow calves to nurse (each calf must drink 600 liters a day), and motor boats disturb and relentlessly pursue the whales so the calves can't drink their fill. We were also told the number of whales is declining each year.

Saddest of all, whales are best viewed, not from a motor boat, but from the beaches, where they come as close as 80 meters. Thankfully, we didn't take a packaged tour. We stayed at a resort called Atafana. The people there kindly let us position our tent between two fancy bungalows. We spent the days relaxing, reading, doing laundry (an important part of camping), eating at the restaurant, walking to the nearby village and, of course, whale watching.

Everyday, we saw whales in the distance: massive black towers, which rose in the distance, hung for a long moment, then silently crashed, chipping the sea into two huge white splashes. We also often saw spouts of water. On four of our six days there whales came close. Close enough to easily reach with a Frisbee! Usually, it started with the barking of the resident dog. People shouted happily to each other. Near the beach 6 or 8 whales broke the surface, spouted, grumbled deeply, flapped their tails or smoothly undulated their slick back, sporting only a smallish, swept dorsal fin.

I don't, as a rule, watch my vacation through a video camera, so, rest assured, this video was taking from the hip, which is why it came out a little cattywampus:

For some time afterwords it was difficult to say anything that didn't sound truly inane. So we usually just stayed silent and enjoyed watching the water smooth itself out.

Posted by David | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nosy Sainte Marie and Nosy Nato, nosy being the Malagasy word for 'island', are extraordinarily popular with vacationing Europeans. From July to September you can see humpback whales up from the Antarctic to give birth to their young because the calves don't initially have enough blubber to survive the frigid waters of home. In fact, from the beach at Atafana where we're camped, we've seen lots of whales. Not always clearly mind you, but we've seen countless sprays of water from blowholes as though there's an enormous creature just under the water's surface puffing on an outsized pipe. And tail slaps with their corresponding splashes of water. And four times, about a football field away, 8 enormous and stately creatures puffing and slowly arcing out of the water, letting it run off their great, slick, black backs before showing off the mottled white underside of their tails.

In addition to the novelty and excitement of whale watching, the two islands boast more traditional features of a tropical paradise. Nato is only 8 kms in circumference and it's possible to walk the entire distance on endless sandy beaches with the Indian ocean lapping at your feet. The land shelf around the island extends under the water for quite a ways so its a safe and pleasant swimming ground. Additionally, on the eastern side of the island, there are some small rocky outcroppings jutting out of the water near the shore, providing a safe haven for electric-blue tetra fish, mottled rock-red starfish, innumerable tiny hermit crabs and other tropical life we've only seen in aquariums.

Sainte Marie's coast provides more variety, since it's much larger than Nato: 50 kms long and 7 kms wide at it's widest point. It also provides more inland variation. Almost all of Nato is a sort of green jungle of overgrown coconut palms, mangoes and mangroves. Sainte Marie has all of that, but also has two different rain forest types--tall and short--and a drier forest as well. On our hike across the island we sampled fresh coconut juice, sugarcane wine and ate our fill of just-knocked-down coconut meat. We're missing mango season by two months, but there are bananas falling off their trees, jack fruit, bread fruit and papayas, most of them just waiting to be plucked and split open. Vanilla, cinnamon and lemongrass are all grown here, providing rich, gorgeous smells whenever you walk past. As for activities you can hike, kayak, deep sea fish, watch whales, swim or sit and stare at the ocean, trying to decipher the tides. Paradisaical really. Except one thing: rain.

As an enormous joke on the part of the weather gods, July and August are also the rainy season for the islands. For the country as a whole this is winter and in most areas winter means its dry. But Mad has several regions, each with their own weather pattern. And the pattern for the northeast, including the islands, is cyclones from January through March, rain and slate-grey clouds in July and August and sunny and dry the rest of the year.

It has rained several times every day we've been here. It's poured every night. The clothes we were wearing when we landed at the airport were soaked through about 20 minutes after we arrived and it took fully four days and a lucky few hours of sun to dry them. David's hat has officially breached the mold barrier and we've taken to washing already wet clothes with no hope of drying them just to restart the mildew clock. When it's not raining it's indescribably humid. Even in the tent, where we're quite waterproof, it's still clammy. And the sky is an almost unrelenting grey cover of clouds. Every afternoon for about 30 minutes the clouds will thin and we'll be teased by the possibility of the blue sky reaching the sun, but it rarely happens.

So go ahead and be jealous of our tropical living, but rest assured it's not paradise. At least not quite.

Posted by Leah | Permalink

Martial, our guide for the next three days, motions for us to join him in the back of a white pickup truck. Throwing the packs in and clambering over the side by heaving ourselves up on the top of the rear right tire since the truck is missing its fender, we try a new transport type.

In populated but poorly served areas people with their own trucks will take passengers. You have to stand in the back; there are no seats and frequently no handholds. The truck bed is filled with whatever else is being carried: sacks of rice, a spare tire, some tools and empty 1.5 liter water bottles. But it's cheaper than the official transport. This truck has a simple frame that's been welded on at the height of the top of the cab, running back, parallel to the sides of the truck bed, but it's broken in half at the back and each side sags down almost touching the tail gate. David will rip several layers of skin off a spot on the back of his hand climbing out.

David and I get the coveted, slightly safer, positions at either corner just behind the cab and then we're off. Racing along with our legs behind the cab and everything else exposed to the wind. Besides the three of us there are two other men in the back, plus the driver and a friend who came into town with him and an elderly man too slow to steady himself in the swaying back, seated in the cab.

We drive past three kilometers of palm-thatched huts, built two feet off the ground in case of high waves and the cyclones that come every year between January and March. The driver honks lightly in warning to the people walking on either side of the narrow strip of smooth black asphalt. Most of the people stop and watch the truck go by and I can see surprise on many of the adults faces at the two vazaha (white people) in the make-shift taxi-brousse. At one spot we cross a small concrete bridge, twice as long as I am tall built over a wide stream flowing into the ocean. On the land side of the bridge women are washing the family clothes, children are splashing around naked in the guise of washing themselves and a man is throwing water up onto his gleaming white truck. We're going fast enough that I tear behind my sunglasses, feeling exhilaratingly unafraid as I wave to the small children who put their hands up and beam.

We round a slight curve and the truck has to slow because there's a knot of people in the road. The driver sounds the horn and people look up, start to part and make for either side, but it's a slow process with more than 50 people. As we squeeze through the opening of people we see another 100 people to the right in a small clearing, some standing, some sitting. The women are singing and clapping their hands and the men are all smoking, talking to each other. Martial tells us it's a turning festival, "Four years after a man dies his family comes back and wraps his body in new cloth and celebrates his life with a big festival." We've heard of the ceremony in Betroka where we stayed for three days waiting for transport south to Fort Dauphin, but there the Bara, the local tribe, hold the ceremony seven years after the initial burial. Ancestor worship, brought with the Malagasy from the Malay peninsula about 2000 years ago, is still strong.

The huts thin out and there's nothing but greenery on either side. Grass on the verge, then thick, tough ferns giving way to the trees overhanging the road: mangroves, mangoes, bamboo, bananas, several palm species and others we can't identify. We have to duck and dodge the suddenly lethal looking palm leaves turned into long jagged knife blades at 40 km/hr. On our left the waves skirt the road and on the right, towering over the trees is a cliff of slick, broken, black rock.

We climb up a little away from the coast. We slow down and then stop at a solitary hut with a woman outside breastfeeding a small toddler. The old man in the cab gets out very slowly and starts shuffling towards her. We've pulled away and are out of sight before he makes it to his home.

Just as I wish we could keep going David spots a sign to the left for Atafana where we plan to stay after our hike and I pound on the cab roof to get the driver's attention. And then we climb down, awkwardly, trying not to fall flat on our faces while Martial manages with much more grace. A state of affairs that will continue for the next three days as we walk on paths through the jungle, slick with rain.

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It started with the "scent tour." We stopped by Ralia's shop on Nosy Nato to buy a tea cake and he started opening up various bottles for us to sniff, pounding the ends of dried sticks to smell and crumpling leaves in his hand to inhale. The essential coconut oil made me hungry, the cinnamon intoxicated David and we both exclaimed over the dried olive leaves used for tea before being enraptured by the vanilla midway through its drying process. By the time we continued on our way to the beach we were both a little giddy from the scent overload.

After that experience we didn't think our noses could be any more delighted, but they have been. On a walk across Sainte Marie, Martial pulled fresh versions from trees and bushes of the dried concoctions we'd inhaled at Ralia's. Dried cinnamon smells pleasant and cosy, but with a small branch of fresh cinnamon you can't breathe deeply enough to satisfy the urge to suck up all of the scent. David tried but ended up somewhat lightheaded. The fresh lemongrass, olive leaves and cloves leaves were similarly intoxicating. But it was the sweet, heavy perfume from the pointed white flowers of the arabica coffee plant that made me wish I could fill a bathtub with them and soak for hours. I'm sorry that the Internet is so thoughtlessly deficient as to not have a mechanism to share scents, or we'd intoxicate you, too.

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We walked into town
paid homage to MTV
admired a vespa
had breakfast
laughed at a sign
drooled over pastries
admired Santa Chiara
oohed over a dog
climbed some stairs
ate some lunch
debated hiking
wandered around
for awhile
said hi to a cat
watched some construction
contemplated some imagery
laughed at the police
drank some spritz
consumed dinner
...and dessert
and discovered we like opera (or at least some of Verdi's arias)
before walking back to the tent and collapsing.

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