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| An indri peers down from the trees in Parc Mitsinjo, Andasibe. |
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| A Parson's chameleon in Parc Mitsinjo. |
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| Tame lemur at Vakôna Lodge: "Oh no, how did I get on top of this human?!" |
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| Kelsey and I relaxing in Tamatave. |
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| The main path and palm trees at Hotel La Baleine. |
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| The Haute Ville neighborhood in Tana, with the Rova palace. |
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| The museum area at Hotel Sakamanga. |
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| Kelsey and I get ready to head to La Varangue from Alyssa's house. |
Fort Dauphin
When I got to the Hotel Zenith in Tana I almost wept for the hot shower. It’d been a long trip up from Fort Dauphin. I was hungry, filthy, sleep-deprived, and mad to boot from dealing with Tana cab drivers.
After a long shower, a shave, and a nap, I went out to find some food. The lack of restaurants around the Zenith means street food. I explored the back alleys until I found a group of men clustered around a food stall where a cook was slinging rice, greens, and pork onto plates. For 800 a plate (40¢), I was happy to ignore the risk of food-borne pathogens.
Feeling pretty good, I walked to the BNI bank on the Avenue de l’Independence to write a check and withdraw enough cash to get Kelsey and me to Tamatave. The bank teller, a well-dressed Chinese-Malagasy, seemed to have trouble believing that I was a law-abiding resident of Fort Dauphin, not a fraud-hungry stereotype of a foreigner. The copy of my passport wasn’t enough for him, and I hadn’t brought any other ID. After giving another sample of my signature, I wound up essentially bullying him to give me the money. Luckily, that tactic worked.
...And left me walking through the most pickpocket-infested neighborhood in Madagascar with 550,000 in my breast pocket. I kept my hand over the cylinder of bills and walked quickly, and made it back to the hotel without incident.
Matt Sims, a Volunteer from Manakara, was staying in the room next to me. Earlier we’d found out our girlfriends were on the same Air France flight. He’d gotten to Tana the day before. We got a taxi to Ivato Airport, figuring we could save money by going before dark. Of course, the downside to that plan was that it left us with five hours with nothing to do but watch the Olympics in the airport restaurant.
Women’s Lightweight Tae Kwon Do: a blonde Frenchwoman handily beats her Egyptian opponent, only to be demolished by a stone-faced Chinese.
As 10:00 came and went, I stared through the windows of the restaurant onto the tarmac, while Matt jostled with the crowd around the Arrivées gate. About 10:45, just as I was turning to leave, the Air France plane whooshed in. Giddily I ran to join Matt.
His girlfriend Angie came through the gate promptly, but it was midnight by the time Kelsey appeared. I didn’t see her come through the doors and she didn’t see me either. She appeared behind me, radiant in a white sweater and pink pants, with two rolling suitcases in tow.
Some time later, for the first time in over a year, I drifted to sleep with my girlfriend in my arms.
We woke with the sun streaming in from the windows. Time to brave the streets of this rat’s nest of a city.
We went for brunch at Cookie Shop, an “American Bakery” owned by a Malagasy woman who lived for a number of years in DC. The food is heavy, but that can be a nice change from feather-light French pastries.
Kelsey mentioned she’d like to withdraw some money of her own, so I led us toward the BNI bank. Very bad decision, putting someone on her first day in Africa through the chaos of downtown Tana. Surging crowds, beggars, traffic, exhaust fumes, broken sidewalks, gabbling merchants everywhere. And most of all the pickpockets.
About halfway to the bank, a woman stopped Kelsey and pointed to her purse. A clean slice marred the gray nylon. Her iPhone was gone. We raced back to the safety of the hotel.
Luckily the thief had left her passport and wallet. Kelsey called Sprint over Skype and was able to place a restriction on the phone.
That evening we met up with some Volunteers and went to Country Director John Reddy’s house for a reception. The food was spectacular: mini-hamburgers, kebabs, spring rolls, cakes, pies. Everyone was excited to meet Kelsey. Until I introduced her, many just assumed she was another Volunteer they hadn’t met before. A dozen of us sat in the living room and watched more Olympics on John’s flatscreen. I tended the fire in the brick corner fireplace, the perfect thing to ward off the cold of a highland evening.
Men’s 200-m Kayaking: Netherlands takes first, Russia second, Germany third, Senegal a woeful dead last.
We headed east, over the insular divide and onto the eastern slope of Madagascar’s mountains. It was my first time taking a Zone Nationale taxi brousse, one that goes directly between major cities instead of stopping at every village. It was surprisingly pleasant, even luxurious. Probably because the drivers observe the rule of one person, one seat, instead of cramming five or six people into one row. They’re also noticeably cleaner than the regional brousses.
The trip took us past clusters of European-style houses perched on the steep hills above emerald green terraced rice paddies. Bare cliffs of red earth loomed where villagers mined clay. Towns that were little more than two rows of buildings either side of the road whizzed past.
At Moramanga, we transferred to a regional brousse to Andasibe, where we checked into Hotel Feo’ny Ala. There are a few buildings with standard hotel rooms, but most of the hotel’s space is individual bungalows. Feo’ny Ala means “song of the forest,” and the name is accurate. Depending on the time of day, you can hear the indri calling loud and clear. Indri are the largest species of lemur, and are known for their echoing, otherworldly cries.
A light but demoralizing rain started, so we stayed in our bungalow the rest of the day, resting up and watching Game of Thrones.
We walked into Andasibe ville the next day, and spent a few hours walking the town’s unpaved streets in the drizzle. I observed that this must be what medieval England looked like: the mud, the pigs, the clapboard buildings, significantly more churches than schools. Lest you think that I look down on Madagascar for being like this, it’s more that I despise its highlands for being so cold and rainy.
In the afternoon we stepped over to the Parc Mitsinjo to see some wild lemurs. An English-speaking guide, Milo, was already about to begin a circuit with Alex, a Swedish tourist, as his only guest. Alex must have been at least six-foot-six, and carried a Nikon with a similarly imposing Sigma telephoto lens. Milo began by showing us a few chameleons perched in the trees around the park entrance.
He also explained how teams of foresters work hard to keep the park free of eucalyptus. The French brought the tree over from Australia during colonization. Since it sprouts and grows so much faster than native trees, it’s highly invasive. And that explains why, in many areas all over the highlands, it’s the only tree you can see for miles.
The colonists also imported pines from Europe, but these are relatively benign. Some types of lemurs have even adopted pine shoots as their favorite food. In fact, these were the kind we saw first, gray-fronted brown lemurs, gamboling around the evergreen branches like fluffy, super-dextrous cats.
A little further on, a troop of indri began calling.
“EEUUUUUUU, EEUUUUUUURRIP, EEUUUUUUUURIP, EEEUUUUUUUUU...”
We ventured off the main trail towards them, picking our way through thick trees and vines. And then, up in the canopy, we spotted them looking down at us, like black and white teddy bears with too-small heads. When they moved, however, they seemed more powerful than cute. They’re the size of dogs, a little smaller than my family’s husky, Anya. They leap from tree to tree as easily as a human walking on level ground; most of the trees are too spindly to support their weight, so they only light on them an instant before bounding to the next one.
The rain picked up, preventing us from getting more shots of the indri. I turned to Milo.
“Should we be concerned about leeches?” I’d read that during showers forest leeches will appear, and crawl up hikers’ legs.
He looked at me with surprise. “Of course!”
But thankfully there were no leeches when we checked ourselves back at the bungalow. That evening we sampled brochettes, small cuts of beef roasted on a skewer, from a street vendor. I thought the meat would have been safe, having been sufficiently cooked over a charcoal fire. But some lingering microbes must have gotten to Kelsey, and kept her in bed the next day.
While she rested, I asked around for a driver to take us to Vakôna Lodge, an isolated, super-fancy forest resort that has a tame lemur sanctuary. I found a local man, and he agreed to take us at three. Kelsey recovered enough by then, so we went.
Once at the lodge, a tidy place built on an artificial lake, it took us a while to find the lemurs. A ways downhill from the resort and the lake dam is a marsh, where, instead of in cages, they keep the lemurs on an island. Hence the unofficial name of the place, Lemur Island.
The crossing to the island is maybe twenty feet by canoe. You get in the canoe, and one paddle stroke later, you’re there. You could probably wade across if you had to. Lemurs must really hate water.
Yet a short distance away from the boat landing were four balls of black and white fur, smaller than the indri, but bigger than many terriers. Ruffed lemurs, named for the fringe of fur around their heads. They sat on a low fence, apparently so accustomed to humans that they didn’t even look up when visitors stroked them.
There were two other types of lemurs, identical but for one kind’s black face mask. They seemed ambivalent towards us, hopping through the trees and play-fighting on the ground, but always keeping a small distance. Their long bushy tails glowed in the afternoon light.
Then one of the guides approached and began offering bits of banana. It was as if a switch had been flipped; they seemed to stop viewing us as fellow animals and start viewing us as ambulatory trees, ones that they had no trouble climbing on to get to the fruit. And once they had the fruit, they were happy to hang around on our heads. One planted itself on my shoulder and started licking my backpack strap intently, sensing some residual sugar or salt.
I was hesitant about the whole excursion at first, until I found out that the residents of Lemur Island have been rescued from illegal captivity, and were unfit to be released into the wild. The chance to see lemurs up that close guilt-free puts Vakôna Lodge at the top of my list of things to do in Madagascar.
From Andasibe we took another Zone Nationale brousse to Tamatave. The last time I went down that serpentine mountain road I had to blindfold myself to keep from getting sick. This time, though, we had dramamine. Unfortunately, that also meant we were operating in a fog of drowsiness. We checked into the Lionel Hotel, a low-key backpacker’s place, and took it easy until the stuff was out of our systems.
How to describe Tamatave? I got a better look around this time than when I was there during Tech Trip. It reminds me of what a town in south Florida would look like if a lot more of the buildings were made of cheap concrete, and a lot of those were crumbling.
The weather was certainly Floridian. A perfectly sunny sky would cloud over, and then a driving storm would commence, all in less than an hour. These cloudbursts came several times a day and left the streets awash, like an African Venice.
We killed some time at the beach, and took a long walk around some of the back streets. But really, the city wasn’t much more than a stopping point before we continued to Île Sainte Marie.
Île Sainte Marie is a small island northeast of Tamatave. It’s widely considered to be the most beautiful spot in all Madagascar. It’s a major tourist hotspot, attracting beachgoers, hikers, scuba divers, equestrians, and fans of pirate history. In August, scores of humpback whales pass the island on their migration south, attracting even more visitors.
To get there we booked with Cap Sainte Marie, a company that does bus and ferry transfers from Tamatave to the island. The bus picked us up at five in the morning from the hotel, along with a quintet of French girls with stereotypically shiny new backpacks, and a distinctly unweathered look about them. The bus’s shocks were ill-suited to the rough road to the ferry crossing at Soanierana-Ivongo. The area through which we drove was rich with history, filled with forts and battlefields where the Merina monarchs had striven to quell the unruly Betsimesaraka tribe in the nineteenth century. Not that we could see any of these sites from the road.
After a hassle of presenting our passports to the Soanierana gendarmes (yeah, maybe if you write down our information often enough it’ll seem like you’re actually policing this country), we boarded the ferry. The wide-bottomed craft puttered out of the harbor canal and into the ocean surf, pitching up and down, spray covering the windows. We felt so safe, though, it was almost boring. The crossing took an hour and a half and we napped for part of that.
At the harbor in Ambodifotatra, the island’s main town, we looked for a taxi to Hotel La Baleine (“the whale” in French). Fortunately, we ran into the hotel’s owner first, who was offering free transfers in his pickup. He led us through the hotel’s restaurant to another bungalow, perched atop a small hill. Luxuriant palm trees shaded the path.
An inviting white beach presented itself in the mornings, but in the afternoons the tide would rise to cover the sand and lap at the very foot of the hotel’s patio. A dock extended about two hundred feet from shore, apparently having been cobbled together after the last one had been annihilated in a cyclone. The water was shallow, only about six feet deep at the end of the dock at mid-tide. Israel said the underwater shelf extends for half a mile, lush with coral and schools of fish, then drops off sharply. When he and Steph went snorkeling past the edge, he said he had a sensation like falling, panicked, and dashed back to the shallows.
We hardly went swimming, just enough to cool off from the sun. We could have gone whale-watching, kayaking, or done any number of such activities, but we were content to just hang around the hotel and relax on the beach.
Even with such liesse our three days on the island flew by. On the ferry ride back to Soanierana I glimpsed a whale on the horizon. The black curve of the back made it look more like a sea serpent than a mammal, then there was a club-shaped plume of spray and it dove again.
Cap Sainte Marie had overbooked the bus back to Tamatave, and for some reason they had chosen Kelsey and me to take a taxi brousse. God forbid any French tourists get their perfectly moisturized hands dirty taking local transport. So the ride was cramped and miserable, like most regional brousse rides.
What really ticked me off was how Cap Sainte Marie refused to give us even a partial refund. When I criticized them for not coordinating between their two offices, the woman in charge made excuses, then got huffy. I’ve encountered this problem before in Madagascar. If you admonish businesspeople for not working in a professional manner, they get indignant, all but asking, “How dare you hold us to the rest of the world’s standards?”
Our second time in Tamatave we checked into the Hotel Génération, just across the street from Lionel Hotel, but twice as fancy. The receptionist recommended the Hotel Océan d’Or for dinner, so we decided to check it out. The hotel was evidently Chinese-run from the red characters adorning the roof. At first glance the restaurant was quite fancy.
But you don’t usually find televisions in fancy places. They had just one, but it was playing the movie Splice. And Frankenstein-inspired horror films do not make the best dinner entertainment. A Malagasy family sitting behind us was entranced, however, while a cluster of Chinese businessmen were too deep in their conversation to pay attention.
Then our food arrived. My shrimp hadn’t been shelled, and Kelsey’s chicken was mostly bone. We picked our way through the meal anyway, but as Splice ended and started playing again, I asked them to put something else on. So we got music videos of Miley Cyrus, and a French girl who must be the Gallic counterpart to Miley Cyrus.
Back at the hotel we used the WiFi to watch HBO’s Girls, a series I highly recommend.
The next day was the long brousse ride all the way back to Tana. Our vehicle kept stalling, and every time it did the driver would fix something just enough to get it running again. On a back street in Tana, however, the engine finally died.
We got a taxi to the Hotel Sakamanga, supposedly the coolest hotel in the city. And it lives up to that promise and then some. The building is a refurbished French mansion that somehow clung to life in downtown Tana while all others like it were being torn down. The halls are decorated with traditional farm tools and weapons, along with tapestries and vintage posters. There’s even a small museum area downstairs, with framed French periodicals about the conquest of Madagascar. Everything is vibrant and artsy, without ever being overdone.
The hotel’s restaurant, speakeasy-like behind a plain brown door, was equally impressive. We had a fantastic meal of eel and salad, with Chilean wine and chocolate fondu for dessert. When I insisted on dipping the mint garnish into the fondu, Kelsey sighed.
“I can’t take you anywhere.”
We were so full we fell asleep almost immediately after getting back to the room.
After a buffet breakfast with too much sugar and too little protein, we checked out. Alyssa, the CDC doctor I worked with on the Androy mission, had invited us to stay at her place in the Ivandry neighborhood, just a block away from Peace Corps HQ.
Alyssa’s husband Ryan let us in, and gave us a brief tour of the place. We dropped our luggage and went out to do some sightseeing. We bought some souvenirs at the Analakely covered market. It was early enough in the day that the place wasn’t too crowded, and this time we weren’t carrying anything worth stealing.
That evening Ryan showed us how to play darts in the garage as we waited for Alyssa to get back from work. We had a wonderful dinner of chicken, broccoli, and quinoa. It was great to see Alyssa again, and to finally meet Ryan.
For Kelsey’s last day we went up to the Rova, the Merina royal place at the highest point in the city. Both the palace and its museum were closed. Museums always seem to be closed in Madagascar. Nevertheless, guides were hanging around the entrance, looking for tourists they could show around the neighborhood. One, Elia (wait, like the princess of Dorne?), cornered us and talked our ears off about how the Chinese and the French were ruining the country. We finally got away and had lunch at the Grille du Rova restaurant. When we came out, Elia was waiting for us, and we practically had to run to get away from him.
We wanted to go to La Varangue for dinner, the fanciest restaurant in the city. Their head chef is ranked the fifth-best in the world, or at least she was back in 2008. We had enough cash to afford their menu, so we figured, why not?
Because neither of you know how really fancy places work, that’s why not! Despite our having dressed up as nice as we could, the concierge turned us away. What we could see of the restaurant was small, just a waiting area with couches. A staircase led up to what must have been the dining area. The place had the same vibe as many around Virginia, the kind with pretensions at English gentility. It must have been reservation-only.
Instead we went to Café de la Gâre, a restaurant in Tana’s now-defunct colonial-era train station. Much more low-key, and the only place I’ve found in Madagascar that knows how to cook a decent American-style cheeseburger.
We got to the airport without any trouble and checked Kelsey’s luggage. We sat together in an out-of-the-way area near the restaurant until it was finally time for her to leave. We said goodbye. I wish I could say I watched until I lost sight of her in the crowd, but something must have distracted me. She was just gone.
Right.
Now for the rest of this Peace Corps thing.
Roll in my sweet baby’s arms
Roll in my sweet baby’s a-a-arms
Well, I’ll lay ‘round the track till the mail train comes back
And I’ll roll in my sweet baby’s arms.
-- The Acoustic Burgoo
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