I blame Julian. She may be Always
Right, but in this instance it’s definitely All Her Fault.
Owing to over a year’s worth of
shoulder pain and an impending operation, we knew we wouldn’t be
able to do the tandem-tour of America we wanted, so we were at a loss
as to where to go for our annual holiday. Tim and I aren’t really
sitting-on-a-beach-people, so we wanted to go somewhere we could Do
Things, but the limitations of a weak shoulder meant that we couldn’t
think of what Things to Do.
“What about this?” said Julian on
that fateful day. “It’s a six-day boat tour of the Nosy Be
archipelago off the north-west coast of Madagascar. There are lemurs
and stuff!”
Thus it was that some months and a lot
of rescheduling to find cheaper airline tickets later, we found
ourselves on a flight to Antananarivo (“Tanarive” in the local
dialect, and “Tana” to anyone who wants to stand a chance of
pronouncing it after a rum or two), capital of Madagascar.
Madagascar, the perfumed isle! Home to
the world’s vanilla and ylang-ylang production! We exited the plane
and headed for the baggage reclaim area, pausing only to admire the
“Sex Tourism is a CRIME” posters in four languages, and the
strong smell of marijuana. We dutifully queued for the not-a-visa
paperwork, which seemed to require everything which a visa does, and
then some. Four rubber stamps, three forms and a signature later, and
we were free to find our driver!
Now, a word of warning to anyone who is
thinking of flying into Tana Airport: the porters are a bunch of
rapacious bastards. They know damn well that you will be unlikely to
have any small change on you (it is virtually impossible to get any
Madagascar Ariary outside of Madagascar), and so they pounce on you
in hordes, manhandle your baggage away from you, steer you to the
government-sanctioned money-changing kiosk, and then take you to your
car and demand a tip despite the fact that the smallest note you now
have is about twenty times the average tipping rate. And then they
pout and feign disappointment in the hope that you’ll give them
more (we didn’t: we’d been warned about this trick). But if
anyone is planning on going to Madagascar, I would be delighted
to lend them some small change to help tip the porters: I believe I
have some coins worth approximately £0.003, which is a pittance even
by Malagasy standards.
Anyway, porters dealt with, we were met
by our driver/guide for the first part of the trip. He was fluent in
French, Italian, Malagasy (obviously), and was looking forward to
driving us around so that he could practise the English he’d been
learning for the past year or so. He introduced himself as
“Zhon-Zo’k” or “Zjhee-Zjhee for short”. After a couple of
days, once our ears had adjusted to the Malagasy accent, we worked
out that he was probably called Jean-Jacques, JJ for short.
Jean-Jacques was short, chatty, cheery
and had a love of telling tall stories and incredibly bad puns (the
more elaborate the set-up, the better). He drove us through Tana and
pointed out places of interest (“Here is the central lake, which we
use both as a sewer and a reservoir. Don’t drink the tap water in
the city.”) and Malagasy four-by-fours (his name for the zebu carts
which were more reliable than the average car
on the streets), and griped about the congestion and price of petrol.
 |
| On the road from Tana |
We left the chaos of Tana behind, and headed east through the
rice-fields and brick-kilns towards the rainforest. After a couple of
hours, we pulled up at the private reserve of Peyreras, which was a
glorified petting zoo with a large collection of chameleons and
reptiles which were legal to collect, and happy being handled. We
were introduced to our guide, a young lad who smelled of stale
alcohol (we learned later that mosquitoes are less likely to bite
rum-drinkers) and who spoke a mixture of hippy-stoner surfer-dude,
Latin nomenclature, and camera-geek.
“Hey man, you wan’ see leaf
chameleon? Genus Brookesia. She cool. You got macro setting
enabled? Cool.”
 |
| Sleepy chameleon! |
 |
| Leaf-tailed gecko |
We spent a fun time feeding the
chameleons, and then an even more fun time seeing what happened to
dead chameleons (aka “feeding the crocodiles”). Once we had
spoffled all the geckos, lizards, chameleons, frogs, snakes and the
fruit bat, it was back to the car and towards the rainforest.
The countryside changed as we wended
our way further east. It became hillier, more wooded, and the earth
and rocks were a vivid pink. Everywhere we went through the forest we
saw signs of deforestation – either for charcoal burning (the
current political/economic situation in Madagascar means that
charcoal is vastly preferred as a cheaper fuel right now – the smog
hanging over Tana was impressively awful), or for slash-and-burn
farming. Our driver explained that everyone knows that deforestation
is bad in the long-term for Madagascar, but if one is growing crops
on a river plain with a risk of flooding, then burning a strip of
forest (which will only provide you with fertile soil for two or
three years at most) and using it as a back-up field/rice terrace can
mean the difference between starving and eating. Unsurprisingly, most
Malagasy consider the option of making sure they’ve got something
to eat next harvest a higher priority than preserving the rainforest,
which is understandable, if sad.
As we drove along, pedestrians walking
along the road waved fruit and chickens for sale, or freshly-caught
fish when we crossed rivers. We passed through Muramanga (lit: “the
place of cheap mangoes”), but saw no sign of the plentiful mango
trees which once gave the town its name. Jean-Jacques explained that
they’d all been chopped down long ago to make charcoal and
furniture – apparently the tribe who lived in this region were
renowned for the wooden chairs which they made and sold! However,
there were an awful lot of cyclists and cycle rickshaws there, and
Jean-Jacques was fascinated to learn that we had cycle rickshaws in
London too. The hierarchy on the roads was pretty simple: if you
caught up anything moving slower than you (cyclists, zebu carts,
lorries, taxi-brousses containing twenty people and a crate of
chickens) and the road wasn’t clear to overtake, you tootled
merrily on your horn, the slower road-user would swerve into the
gutter, and the faster one would whoosh past with inches to spare
whilst tootling a thank-you. I can’t say I would have enjoyed
cycling or walking on the roads, but no-one seemed too unhappy about
the status quo.
On arrival at the Vakona Lodge in
Andasibe National Park we were quite tired from our journey, so we
contented ourselves with investigating the
local equines, had supper and went to bed.
