August 4, 2007
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.
