Day Nine – The Nightlife of Mahalina

 The next day was a relatively gentle day – not that we'd had much exertion since joining the Salaama Tsara. Denis and Henri took Tim, Mark, Liz and me for a morning snorkelling trip where we found lobsters (which we were unable to bring back for lunch, despite Henri's exhortions) and Tim found a stingray, but otherwise the reef there was fairly quiet. On the way back to Mahalina, there was a vast amount of fishing excitement as Henri hooked a Kingfish which took over forty minutes to land.

Denis with Kingfish

 Mark and Tim were excited because this was EPIC fishing, and in the absence of Herman they got to have a go at steering the boat. The main reason for my excitement was because this would be something other than mackerel to eat (much as I love fresh fish, after three days of it, mackerel can become monotonous). It was only when I googled it later that day (yay for 3G Kindles!) that I discovered that the Kingfish is also a member of the mackerel family. Oh well!

Kingfisher hunting crabs

Back on the beach in Mahalina we sat around playing cribbage, drinking rum, and chatting. “Did anyone else see the snake spoor?” asked Gayle, whose hut was next to some scrubland.

“Snake spoor? I wouldn't have a clue what it looks like, but there's no reason to worry – there are no venomous snakes in Madagascar,” I replied.

The chatting continued, we drank rum, watched the moon rise, looked at the Milky Way, spotted fireflies, and Mark decided the only thing missing from his life was a cigarette. He'd noticed the crew smoking in the evening, so wandered over to ask if he could have a cigarette too.

“Hi guys, I was wondering about those cigarettes-”

“IT'S NOT MARUJANA!!!” *giggle*

Eventually, we headed for bed. In the middle of the night I woke up with a funny feeling in my foot as if someone had just tickled it. “Must have been a dream caused by the rum and the talk about snakes” I thought, before experiencing it again. I grabbed the torch just in time to see a small rat run away from me, but fail to escape due to the mosquito netting.

“Tim! Wake up! There's a rat somewhere in the bed and I need you to help evict it!”

Tim blearily gave the bed a search, and the rat was chased round and round inside the mosquito net in circles until we lost track of it. “I think it's gone” declared Tim, putting out his torch and going back to sleep. I spent the rest of the night in a somewhat wakeful state, turning the torch back on at every noise.

Moonrise from Mahalina

Day Eight – onwards to Mahalina

 We relocated to a place called Mahalina. On arrival, just as there had been at Russian Bay, we noticed a gaggle of people sat around under a washing line strung with embroidered tablecloths and proffering carved wooden souvenirs. This, we were to learn, was the way the gift-shops operated. Either the boat-operator or the camp caretaker would inform the local trader(s) that a bunch of vahaza were due to arrive, and a dhow would drop them off in advance, they would set up their wares, and then leave later that day. It was relatively civilised – there was no pestering or harassment, and if one wanted to purchase a souvenir one walked over to the washing line, and if one didn't, one remained in the campsite and wondered why a tropical beach paradise had a tradition of making elaborately embroidered tablecloths.

Mahalina was a strip of beach on the edge of a mangrove swamp, and not much else. Fresh water was extremely scarce, and we were warned to be prudent when washing with our rationed bucket of “fresh”¹ water. Again we had A-frame bungalows with tattered mosquito nets as accommodation, but this time they were on the beach, not on stilts.

Accommodation and shower (the bamboo screens back left, plus the bucket)

The afternoon was spent collecting “pretty” shells and sand dollars from the beach, and watching the world go by from our table. The caretaker had a small (about three years old) child named Ali, and Ali had a puppy (named Bobo) and a kitten (named Cat). The three of them together were quite hilarious, since the kitten thought it was a puppy, the puppy was convinced that it could climb like a cat, and Ali thought that they were toys to be dragged around by whichever appendage he could grab. We noticed that in this place, the sacred rock (identifiable by the red cloth tied to it) was fenced off – probably to stop Bobo breaking the “toilet” fady. 

Ali, Bobo and Cat

 

My notes become a little hazy at this point, but I think it was on this evening which the rum-for-tourists ran out (in terms of the bar, rum was free and we were charged for the mixer) and we moved on to drinking the rum-for-the-crew. At least, we think it was rum, but it might equally have been engine-degreaser. Denis seemed amazed when we said we liked it, though I do recall my vision going sporadically black at points.

The sunsets were terribly cliched

1The water was brown and murky and the bottom of the bucket couldn't be seen. The only thing “fresh” about it was that it wasn't salty.

Day Seven – How to respect the Sacred Tree

The next day dawned exceedingly bright and very early, but we found we didn't mind. Since we had no electric lights other than a couple of torches, we all happily adapted to a sunrise-to-sunset clock – and when the sun rose at about five-thirty, by six o'clock it was far too bright and hot to stay in bed for long. 

We breakfasted on fresh fruit and black coffee, consoled Mark for his murderous sentiments towards the chickens adjacent to his hut, and then it was all aboard the Salaama Tsara for a morning of snorkelling on the coast of South Afrika Island. I found a stingray (happily some distance from me), Mark found pretty shells on the beach, and Tim stayed in the water so long that we began to wonder if he'd ever return. As we chugged back towards Russian Bay, we passed a peculiar beehive-shaped island named Ankivonjy, and watched flocks of beautiful white birds with long tails flying around the cliffs.

“What are those called, Henri? The white-tailed birds”

“Them? Called “white-tailed tropicbird””.

Yup. So much for imaginative naming.

Boatlife

After lunch back in Russian Bay, Henri took us for a stroll through the nearby village and up the hill. The first thing he showed us was a large tree with a set of logs (for use as seating) arrayed around it. This, Henri explained, was the village's sacred tree. When a boon was required, one would come and tie a white cloth and a red cloth to the tree, leave a case of beer, offer rum, and later one would return (presumably after fulfilment of the boon) and pour the beer on the ground with elaborate ritual. We listened in interest, and then, aware that the Malagasy have many fady (taboos) relating to their spiritual beliefs (such as not pointing at tombs, or photographing them), we asked whether it was permitted to photograph the tree, and walk as close to it as we were.

“But of course,” replied Henri, looking bemused.

“Well, we just don't want to offend anyone, so please tell us if we're about to do anything inappropriate, since this sacred tree is right next to our campsite. Is there anything we must be careful not to do?”

Henri thought for a few seconds, before responding solemnly “Just don' mak' the toilet on it, OK?”

Following that revelation, the rest of the walk with burrowing crabs, a fish sunbathing in a mangrove tree (mudskippers seem terribly confused creatures), a sea eagle, and a plethora of children making rude noises and laughing at the vahaza had a lot to live up to. 

Mudskipper. In a mangrove tree.

 But it managed it, with the addition of further rum and fireflies on the beach near the sacred tree when we got back to camp.

Day Eleven – Nosy Komba (please exit through the gift shop)

Souvenir stall in Lokobe - note the tablecloths

The island of Nosy Komba is for the tourists. It's where you go to have a lemur sit on you, and to buy embroidered tablecloths. Some aspects are interesting, such as the people wearing designer jeans coupled with the traditional Malagasy clay face-paint (the clay acts as a moisturiser and a sun screen, as well as allowing intricate doodles on the face). Others are annoying, such as the children all attempting to out-volume each other in their “traditional” (allegedly invented in the last twenty years) greeting songs. But we went to the petting zoo and played with the snakes and chameleons, fed the Maki lemurs (who have great banana faces), bought some vanilla, and admired the T-shirts for sale emblazoned with the traditional Malagasy “ALOHA!”.

St Mark of Assisi

Liz, discovering that lemurs tickle

Tim of the Jungle

Communing with nature

Srs 'nana face

Silly 'nana face!

This giant tortoise sneaked up on Mark and startled him. I think that's a record for giant tortoises.

We returned to Lokobe via a fairly dull snorkelling expedition and settled down to enjoy our last night with the boat. I left a banana near the tents in the hope of luring more lemurs down, and we were not disappointed.

Is that a banana?

Tastes like a banana...

OMG! It *is* a banana!

Woo! BANANA!

I also discovered that when one goes to the toilet at dusk and spots something brown and glistening perched on the seat, it's quite a relief to realise that it's a frog. 

Sorry for the lack of focus - oddly enough I didn't have the right lens to hand

Day Ten – Big Scary Teeth!

 The next morning the beach around our hut was covered in snake-tracks. We also spotted a set of rat tracks converging with a snake track, a scuffle, and then just the snake tracks continuing. Poor rat. He must have come into our bed for sanctuary, and we turfed him out to his doom.

Snake spoor

 Having drunk enough coffee to feel vaguely awake, we decamped and headed for Nosy Tanikely, a marine reserve off the coast of Nosy Be. This was probably the most wildlife-rich set of reefs we found, though we were a bit annoyed by the thirty-strong group of Italians who were churning through the water, scaring all the fish and leaving the water cloudy and tasting of sunblock. I was being reasonably brave and exploring the reef, when suddenly a large lump of coral three feet long got up and swam towards me with an open mouth and lots of TEETH! I shot back to the boat and sat there gibbering for about five minutes, when Liz headed rapidly to the boat and scrambled aboard.

“Oh my gosh, there was this huge brown frikkin' ugly... with...TEETH!”

About five minutes after that, Mark swam casually back to the boat.

“Say, Henri, what's the fish that's black and tan, about this big and...”

“TEETH?” asked Liz and I.

“Yeah, TEETH! You guys saw it too?”

Despite Henri's assertion that it was a Rock Cod, and harmless, I didn't go back into the water. Not even when Tim came over to tell us of the turtles he'd been swimming with (he hadn't seen any TEETH).

Nosy Tanikely

Once we'd finished with Nosy Tanikely, we headed for Lokobe Reserve, stopping off at Hell Ville for supplies on the way. Lokobe turned out to be a forest on the eastern coast of Nosy Be, overlooking Nosy Komba (of which more later). The accommodation here was not A-frame bungalows, but instead was pre-pitched tents under a leafy roof. With chickens.

Tent

Mark's friend!

 As we were exploring the beach, watching the mudskippers frolicking in the surf and ignoring the tablecloth salespeople, there was a shout of “lemur!”and we rushed to see a female Maki investigating our tents in the hope of an unguarded banana.

Is that a banana?

Day Six – Welcome to the Salaama Tsara

After a gentle day of loafing on the beach, splooshing in the sea, drinking reasonably-priced flamboyant cocktails in the bar (any drink which requires four cocktail sticks to keep all the slices of fruit and sprigs of flowers in the glass of rum is fine by me!) and giggling at the attempts of two Americans to translate the French menu, we were refreshed and ready for the next stage of our holiday.

We were met by Mohammed bright and early outside the beach-front bar. He introduced us to our fellow voyagers: the two Americans (Mark and Liz), and Gayle, a South-African whose luggage had elected to stay at home. He then proudly showed us his boat, the Salaama Tsara, moored in the bay. Now, as Mohammed explained, “Salaama” is a greeting, and “Tsara” means “beautiful”, so the boat name meant either “A beautiful “good morning”” or “Hello Gorgeous” – I didn’t quite understand which. 

The Salaama Tsara

We were rowed out to the Salaama Tsara where we were introduced to our breakfast and the crew. There was Henri, the boat captain: a small wiry energetic man with a huge grin and a cat-like ability to switch instantly from utter lounging to extreme activity if occasion required. Denis, the second-in-command, or First Mate, or whatever the role’s called, was less chatty and inclined to sit contentedly at the blunt end of the boat. The cook, whose name may have been Aliana, or maybe Eileen, or possibly even Ariadne, was a lamba-clad goddess capable of producing vast platters of fresh fruit and even fresher seafood. Finally, there was Herman (or “’Erman-ii!” when anything was needed): the boat’s cabin boy, runner, gopher and clown. If the rudder was fouled or someone dropped something overboard, he was the one sent into the water to solve the problem, which he would do with puppyish enthusiasm and a cheerful nature.

We settled down to enjoy our bread and jam and coffee in the morning sunlight while the crew kicked the engine into spluttering life, threw fishing lines in the water, and set out across the bay. We were off!

Life on the Salama Tsara was simple and good. That first day set a pretty good precedent. We chugged southwest away from Nosy Be for a few hours, with a brief flurry of excitement when the crew caught a large fish called a “wahoo” (which Henri pronounced “ouaoo”) and a Spanish Mackerel. 

Supper! (and Henri)

 We vahaza lounged in the sun for a bit, then in the shade, and then in the sun, whilst Aliana served snacks. After a few hours, it was time to see how well my fear-of-water-dwellers would cope, as we anchored off the coast of Nosy Ankozoberevina and found our snorkelling gear.

It turned out that I could cope reasonably well once I'd been informed that the little stingy things in the water wouldn't kill me TO DETH, and that there were no sharks on that coast of Madagascar, since the coral reefs kept them out (only now do I wonder how, if this was the case, the bay had become famous as a Whale Shark Spotting location). I decided not to push my luck too much by asking about sea snakes, and found that I was reasonably comfortable in the water as long as I was near someone. Preferably, with someone between me and a coral reef, and someone between me and the open ocean – the panicky part of my brain seemed content that way, on the logic that the others would be eaten first and I would be able to swim to safety whilst this was going on. In fact, I was so happy that when Mark found a five-foot-long Moray eel (which has the most evil expression of any species I've ever seen) I was able to look at it without screaming in fear and widdling myself silly!

Having headed back to the boat (thankfully missing the sand sharks which Gayle had spotted), we dried off in the sun a bit as the crew took us to Russian Bay. Our accommodation there turned out to be wooden A-frame bungalows on stilts perched on the side of a steep hill, and the crew's seemed to be a half-tumbledown hut under a mango tree.

Home Sweet Home

The view from the door (no, there were no windows)

 The hut was just big enough for a mattress on the floor, and an elderly-looking mosquito net. We followed anti-malarial protocol and religiously checked the mosquito net for holes (“Found 'em! Now what?” “Dunno. Shall we go back to the beach?”) before going to investigate the dining area (a bench on the beach with a banana-leaf sunshade) and entertainments. The entertainments turned out to be a hammock, which defeated me With Hilarious Consequences, and a pair of kayaks. We took the kayaks out to explore the mangrove swamps adjacent to the beach, and Mark and Liz provided an impromptu display of synchronised swimming.

The dining room

 We returned to the camp, partook of the facilities (the shower was a bucket of water and a bamboo screen; the toilet was a bamboo screen around a porcelain throne, but the flush mechanism was a bucket of water) and settled down to enjoy a bonfire, a meal of fresh fish, and a selection of potent rum cocktails, before retiring to bed.

Day Five – Adventure in Nosy Be!

The next day dawned dark and far too early. Owing to the vagaries of Air Madagascar and their shortage of airworthy planes, one has to phone the airport a couple of days before travelling to find out when the scheduled internal flight is actually going to be. Thus it was that our planned 11:40 flight to Nosy Be was actually due to take off at 05:20, which meant getting to the airport at 04:20, which meant getting up at 03:30. Which was Not Fun. Jean-Jacques drove us through the deserted streets of Tana, and we bade him a fond farewell at the airport, or as fond as it is possible to be at that hour of the morning.

We flew northwards to the island of Nosy Be, and landed at about seven in the morning. It’s a beautiful airport, but as we feared might happen, someone had blundered. The details of our rescheduled flight had not been adequately relayed to the person due to collect us from the airport, and we had no details for our accommodation that night (they were due to be weather-and-tide dependent). As we wondered what to do and fended off the over-enthusiastic offers of the local taxi-driving population (“Vous voudrez taxi?” “Non, merci, I’m waiting to be collected.” “Oh, Tropic Tours eh?” <reading over my shoulder> “You wan’ me phone them?”), the fastidious staff swept the airport clean and locked the doors, leaving us out in the taxi rank with no other means of transport. At this point, the man who had initially been most insistent with his offers of help, and who now was the only person remaining, waved a phone at us and said that he’d been in touch with our tour operator and would take us to their offices at no cost to us. In an unwise-in-retrospect move, (the word vahaza usually means “white-skin” or “foreigner”, but it can more sinisterly mean “moneybag” – there are places in the south of Madagascar where Europeans are warned against going), we agreed to go with him, being exhausted from our early start and having no other option. The car windscreen was reassuringly cracked, but as our driver and his friend drove us along bumpy roads where we kept encountering groups of youths carrying machetes, we began to realise that this may not have been a Good Idea.

We got to the shanty-huts on the outskirts of Hell-Ville, and one of the deserted tumbledown shacks was waved at and proclaimed to be the offices of our tour operator. I expressed Doubts. The driver shrugged, had a rapid conversation with his companion in Malagasy, and drove us to the centre of Hell-Ville where we halted outside a market. After a short wait, a car with flame decals and tinted windows pulled up, and a flashily-dressed man got out, patted our driver on the back and slipped him a hefty wodge of money. This unsettled me yet further. Tim furtively concealed our money about his person when no-one was looking.

“You go with him,” declared our current driver.

<Er… you are from Tropic Tours?> I asked (fortunately, my normally-poor French becomes moderately fluent when I’m tired or stressed, which has proved a blessing on occasions).

<Oui!>

<Have you got any documentation to prove who you are? That you are from Tropic Tours?>

<Non. I’m not from Tropic Tours.>

At this point, I may have had a Strop. There may have also been a Pout, and mild-to-moderate Panic. I said that we wouldn’t go any further with anyone until we saw some documentation proving that people were actually who they said they were, since we weren’t in an official taxi and had no way of knowing that our current escorts weren’t a bunch of voleurs. Our driver looked hurt, and fished a smashed-up TAXI sign from the boot of his car and said “But it is a proper taxi! I’m not a robber – this is Nosy Be, not Tana! And besides, I know that your tour operator is Tropic Tours, so I must be genuine.”

“But I told you that I was looking for someone from Tropic Tours!”

There was an impasse, and a further lengthy Malagasy conversation, followed by multiple phonecalls.

“Mohammed is coming. He will sort things out.”

After about a ten minute wait outside the market, Mohammed showed up and was introduced as the owner of the boat.

“Have you got anything to prove who you are?” I asked with little optimism.

“No. Why should I need documentation? I know who I am! And besides, what are you doing here? My schedule says that I have to collect two English from the airport at 13:20, the Americans at 17:10, and another person later. Why did you decide to come early? I’m not due to collect you yet! Look: here’s my schedule! I need to be shopping for provisions for the boat, not here!”

This cheered me immeasurably: no-one this pissed-off with us could be trying to mug us. Mohammed gave us his phone number (not that this helped much, since our phones wouldn’t work without great expense in Madagascar), the boat name, the name of the hotel we would be staying in that night, and told us to go with the taxi-driver who was still sulking about my insult to his car.

The taxi-driver took us away from the town, along a very bumpy road, and delivered us to an elegant-looking selection of bungalows and apartments set amidst bougainvillea and mango trees. As porters carried our bags to our bungalow (which was bigger than our home), we surveyed the beach twenty yards from our veranda, and decided that if it was all part of a complicated plan to rob us and leave us dead in a ditch somewhere, we didn’t mind so much after all.