stories

Madagascar baby!

(This is an English summary of all Dutch Mada stories)

It is half past six in the morning and I lie safely under my mosquito net in a little hut in the middle of the rainforest. From outside comes the strangest sound, a sound best described as a mixture between an owl and a siren: huuuuuuuuu huuuuuuuuuuuuu. It is the call of the indri indri, who every morning call to the other groups in the forest to let the others know where they're at. Jeroen and I can't wait to also see the indri, so we jump out of bed and get ready for yet another jungle adventure in... Madagascar!

We spent a whole month traveling this awesome country and although I periodically sent Dutch emails home, I didn't get round to also writing some in English. However, I do want to tell you fellow travelers from previous trips about this weird island everybody forgot about until Disney put it back on the map. Warning: this is a very long email, so print it out, sit down, smoke a cigarette or prepare your other drug of choice. Just to lift a tip of the veil: lemurs do dance!

Madagascar doesn't compare to any of the countries I've visited thus far. It is Africa baby, which means flies who prefer to sit on your eyes and little boys with hunger bellies. Madagascar is a country of children: they really really have a lot of children there. Malagasy kids go wild over white foreigners, who are called vazaha. When you pass one, s/he first gathers every brother, sister, neighbor kid that's around, before going completely hysterical screaming 'bonjour vazaha!!'. We always shouted back 'bonjour Malagasy!', which made their parents laugh. The kids are almost as adorable as the lemurs and, as with the lemurs, you just want to take a bunch of them back home. Depending on their familiarity with tourists, the bonjour is followed by the demand for a pen, candy, soap or money (in that order). Every heard a Dutch kid ask for soap? I think not.

Grown up Malagasy are masters of the Art of Staring. In fact, it is the national sport. I kept wondering what would happen if you put a group of Malagasy in a London underground! Staring is done without shame and preferably with big wide eyes and - of course - open mouth. At first we thought we were special and all the staring was especially for us. However, Malagasy also stare at each other and at every taxi-brousse that comes by. Staring is often accompanied by laughing at each other. Yes, not with each other, but at each other. It's done by kids, teens and adults alike. They are a very happy people.

Taxi-brousses are the main local transport. They come in different shapes and sizes: the minibus, the pick up truck with little benches (comparable to South-East Asia's saemtaeng) and big trucks with benches. For all types the non-Western law of transport applies: a taxi-brousse is never full and a journey is not a journey without chickens. As everywhere, the bus never leaves at the announced time of departure. For our first trip, we made reservations a day in advance. When you arrive at a bus station, busboys circle you, demanding to know where you're going. As in South-America, buses do not compete on price, service or comfort. These are all the same for all companies. A smart busboy would then compete a departure time, but no. All buses from Toliara to Ranohira leave at 7 a.m. If you wish to depart at a more decent hour, say 11, you can't. Instead, all buses compete on who shouts the most. Our company of choice urged us to be at the station at 7 sharp. Dutch as we are, we were there at a quarter to. We were the only ones. Slowly all the other passengers arrived. At 9 we could leave because the last person had arrived. She too had made a reservation a day in advance, but she understood the principle of morra morra (mañana mañana) a little better than we did. We decided never to make a reservation again. This principle has served us well. When there was no taxi-brousse, we just hitch-hiked (in French: faire du stop). As a bus is never full, you can always be the 8th person on the front row of a minibus that legally sits 3. Everybody knows that a minibus build for 15, easily fits 25. When you take into account that showers are a luxury here, and that local people tend to vomit much, you understand the experience of the taxi-brousse.

We also had some interesting lifts. In the town of Manakara, all taxi-brousses leave at 4 pm (read at 6 or 7 pm), leading you to arrive at your destination at midnight. Since Malagasy life shuts down at 9 (or 10 in the big cities!), this is not a good idea. The night before we had asked around town for a transport, but without luck. We decided to just go to the beginning of the road and wait what came by. The pousse-pousse dropped us off and immediately we were handed over to a truck (a Renault built in 1912) that was heading our way and was willing to take us on the condition that we walked past all the police posts. Madagascar has a lot of police posts and police men always find a problem. Some cars get fined if they don't carry tourists, others get fined if they do. We were the first passengers for our Renault and spent the day like kings: on the passenger seat, nicely heated by the engine directly below our seat. All the other people, packages and chickens we picked up had to hang in the back. The truck only broke down twice and we only had one flat tire. Not bad! Around 5 p.m. it started to rain, which caused a number of taxi-brousses to break down. No worries, we had space left! We (and the 30 passengers in the back) finally made it to Ranohira, after a 10 hour ride crossing no more than 180 kilometers. But once the beer and zebu-steak are there, it's all just a good story.

A slower mode of transport is the pousse-pousse. A pousse-pousse is a rickshaw without the bicycle, where a man (preferably really old and always barefoot) functions as the bicycle and driver at the same time. The weird thing is, there are many bicycles in Madagascar, but no one has yet had the idea to put his bike in front of the pousse-pousse. Pousse-pousses also compete by shouting the loudest. A second strategy is to follow the walking vazaha whilst arguing the advantages and comfort of the pousse-pousse. In some cases, the vazaha will cease his resistance and will climb (sighing) on the pousse-pousse. It is a horrible experience. First of all, it's not comfortable at all and equally fast as walking yourself (the underfed old guy cannot outwalk the long legged blonde). Secondly, you feel utterly colonial - although of course you joke about taking out the whip to make the pousse go faster!

There aren't many backpackers in Madagascar, mostly 40+ French tourists. This means the tourism industry caters towards them. Most of the hotels are owned by French ex-pats, like Mme Michele. Although Madagascar has been independent of France since the fifties, colonialism is not over here. Michele shouts at her personnel all day, since nothing is ever clean enough. She hardly ever ventures outside the gates of her hotel, because that's the world of zebu (cow like creatures, very tasty), of poop and flies and well, Africa baby! The French still walk around as if they own the place. This means you have to eat three courses over lunch, preferably including foie gras, and you have to speak French all the time. In Thailand, most of the sex tourists have the decency to look ashamed when they sit in a bar with a barely legal girl; in Madagascar the ugly old guys are loud and shameless. It's one of the few downsides of this country, but I guess in today's world sex tourism is inescapable.

Oh! We also met the infamous Malagasy hissing cockroach. These are big mofo's, actually they are so big I did not even recognise them as cockroaches. Besides, they never hissed! From an American peace corps worker I learned that when you press its (gigantic! enormous!) back, it goes hhhaaarggg! You understand that I did not empirically test this!

Anyways, it's all about the country and the country is amazing. Landscapes change from giant sandstone formations, to green hills covered with palm trees, to rice terraces as far as the eye can see. The beaches are beautiful and appropriately deserted, with white sand and the clearest blue water. Off the beach there's snorkeling and if the reef is too far, the local rastafari (Bob Marley is everywhere!) is always willing to take you in his little pirogue, a basic wooden canoe or sailing boat. The fishes seem to come out of tropical aquaria, oh no wait, these oceans are tropical aquaria! All the forests are hippie paradises, as it seems that every plant has medicinal value. Natural Viagra, natural speed, essential oils (god knows what they are) and loads of aloe vera plants, you know, that mysterious substance that is in every cosmetic.

As you all know, the Linda does not like to hike. In Madagascar, it's all about hiking. Hiking to see boabap trees in spiny forests of octopus trees (in Australia the boabap is known as the upside down tree); hiking to see waterfalls (boring!!); hiking to see lemurs. Everybody you meet is working on their lemur checklist: spot as many species as you can. Lemurs are incredibly cute and therefore lemur spotting is quite easy: just follow the sound of tourists going aah and ooh. We spotted many species, but the indri indri are the best. They look like panda beers mutated into koala's: black and white adorable creatures that hang around trees all day. They live in families of papa indri, mama indri and their children, and they make that awesome sound. Like Malagasy, they love to stare at you, which makes for great pictures.

The name indri indri is a story in itself. When the first white people came to check out these lemurs, they obviously were not as photogenic and definitely harder to spot. When finally a few came to sight, the local pointed at the creature and said: indri indri! The white scientists, smart as they are, thought this was the local name and directly made it the scientific name. The thing, however, is that the Malagasy local did not say its name, it only said: look here, look here!

Besides the lemurs, there was one other reason why we wanted to visit Madagascar: its pirate history. The island Saint Marie used to be a safe haven for real pirates. Due to its location (east of the 'mainland' and therefore a convenient spot to pillage ships en route to the East), many a captain Jack Sparrow choose Saint Marie as home. All trip long I dreamt about Johnny Depp and prates and I was super duper excited about our final tourist activity: a visit to the Pirate Cemetery. Really! A pirate cemetery! How cool is that!!

Accompanied by a local toothless guide, who had to spit every other two steps (I never saw Johnny do that in Pirates of the Caribbean...), we walked along rivers and valleys off the coast into the jungle.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. It was a simple 20-minute walk. I only got one wet foot. There were no valleys either, just a wee hill. But the guide did spit a lot and he really had no teeth and he also peed once.

. and there it was! The pirate cemetery! About thirty graves remain, the oldest stemming from the 18th century. There was even a grave with the pirate mark. Really, I'm not lying now: there was a grave with the skull and bones mark! How romantic can you get! I wanted to quit my job right away and take up a pirate's life. Sail the seas with Johnny Depp, looking for treasure, running from the King of England, drinking rum and singing pirate songs! Our toothless friend thought this was all very funny and laughed at me the whole time.

But Johnny Depp lives in France with a French person - and after a month of French I can't stand them anymore. Besides, England no longer has a king but a queen; Johnny Depp is really old; and I don't really like rum. I'd rather travel the world with Jeroen. I'm just afraid treasure is hard to find nowadays, so to afford all this traveling I need to work. But, the life of a PhD researcher is not so different from a pirate's life. In June I'm off to London and in July to Istanbul, looking for international fame and glory - a different kind of treasure!

Velouma!