Sojourn to Madagascar Part 4
Lemurs
Where I grew up the day after Christmas was also a holiday
called Boxing Day. Every time I heard the term, I imagined guys with big, fat
gloves try to punch the other guy in the nose. However, it apparently came from
the idea that wealthy people would receive a horde of gifts from well meaning
or favor seeking people. They would then box them up and pass them on to the
poor and underprivileged. I have never witnessed this generous event; instead
it was simply long lines of disgruntled recipients trying to cash in on the
unwanted gifts at some store or other.
Our Boxing Day also just happened to be a Sabbath. Neither
Sylvia nor I could stomach sitting in church for another 5 or 6 hours listening
to long speeches in a language we could not even distinguish a single word, one
translated by someone sitting two or three people away with a very unfamiliar
accent whom I could barely hear. I could sense that the quality of translation
varied considerably by the various people who did it. I am very aware of the
problem of translating when the speaker pauses to give the translator time to
do it. But running a continuing translation from a continuous speech is an
almost impossible task. I have tried it many times, just to myself, to see if I
could do it. So I have deep appreciation for anyone who tries.
In consequence we decided to go to the University Church
connected with UAZ. Most of the service was done in French. I don’t understand
spoken French although I can often make out the meaning of written French. The
trouble with French is that it has a lot of English words in it, but they are
pronounced extremely incomprehensibly. So it is a puzzle to understand and a
puzzle I enjoy doing. We always had volunteers ready who would sit down and do
their best to translate for us. I found that often I could supply a word that
the translator was groping for.
Sylvia has more trouble with these translators. She often
sits and writes her thoughts about the snatches she does catch from the
translator or the French itself. She catches a lot of the French as well.
We attended the English Sabbath School lesson. Both the
former president and the current president of UAZ were in attendance. Their
theologies don’t quite match, especially on the position of “grace” in a
Christian’s experience. So they were both very restrained in what they said.
From a certain amount of inductive thinking, it appears to me that the former
president had been slated to teach the lesson but at the last minute insisted
that one of the female theology students do it. (They have several female
theology students, but there is no way in the present local church policy that
they can ever become a pastor in Mada.) From my glance at her quarterly, it was
evident that she had studied only 20% of the lesson, so she stretched out that
part for the whole time. The lesson tended to drag on account of that.
UAZ Church
They have a sermon between Sabbath School and church that
used to be called lay activities years ago. This was done in Malagasy. Church
had three women on the platform (no men), which is apparently very unusual at
UAZ. There was another sermon for the offering. (I’ve found that this is
standard for churches in Mada.) Finally they had the sermon of the day labeled
a “homily”, although the label is misleading. The woman who did that had a
Power Point Presentation to go along with it. As usual, I found that I could
understand her PPP much better than I could her spoken French.
It was raining very lightly when we left church. By the time
we had walked the 1.2 km (.75miles) home, we were fairly wet. The jacket I
brought with me is dry clean only, but it seemed to stand up okay to the
mistreatment. So we changed clothes as soon as we got home.
Sylvia fixed lunch, and I helped make the Spanish rice. We
also had some potato salad that I had made for our Christmas Eve supper. Pam
and Gideon joined us for it. We had a great visit. Then they went home, and we
all took our afternoon “lay activities.” Whoever coined that term for church
missionary outreach needed his (her?) head read!
That evening we met with Pam and Gideon and Parany and
Harimalala Razafimahafaly about six o’clock to plan a four day trip to see
Lemurs. I also finished the second part of this Sojourn, but when Gideon took
me to his office, the Internet was down, so I couldn’t send it until after our
trip.
About 4:00 a.m. something on my bedside table started making
a steady beep about once every 2 or 3 minutes. I didn’t want to awaken Sylvia,
so I tried to figure out what was making the beep while lying quietly in bed.
There was a phone and 2 Lumix cameras on the table. Finally, after at least 10
minutes, I sat up in bed and placed one camera on the foot of the bed, one on
the floor at my feet, and the phone on my bedside table. It was the camera on
the floor. I pulled it out of its case, and the back was all lit up with the
error message saying that the zoom was working right on the camera. I tried to
switch the camera off, but it was already off! I switched it from photo mode to
view mode. It dropped the error message and showed the last picture I had
taken. I switched it back to photo mode, and the lens came out this time since
it was not in its case. I pulled the battery out of the camera, and it died as
expected. As soon as I reinserted the battery, it switched on. All of the
functions seemed to be working--except the on/off switch.
We left UAZ at
precisely 8:00 a.m. the next morning. Well… that was the plan anyway. It was
closer to 9:00 by the time we got out away. Our first destination was the Domaine
Saint Francois (DSF) institute west of Tana. Parany’s sister Franza runs the institute
sponsored by layman and the Catholic Church in France. So we were trying to
follow him. However, he seemed to be able to get around the big trucks on the
road more easily than we did. So they would pull over and wait for us every so
often. We noticed that the rivers were considerably higher than they were nine
days previously when we drove south from Tana upon our arrival in Mada. We ate
lunch under a roof in DSF. While we ate, a rain squall caught up with us. If
you are ambitious enough to look up our progress on a map, we came north on
NR-7 and then west on NR-1.
Rear L to R: Wil, Sylvia, Gideon, Pam. Front: L to R Parany, Veronica, Harimalala, Adriana, and
the Manda family
After we cleaned up from lunch, we deposited our cases in
our rooms at DSF. Our room was called Orchidee, I’ll let you guess what that
means. Then we headed to Lemur Park sandwiched between NR-1 and a river that
was definitely in flood. They have about 10 or 12 families of different species
of Lemurs. Each family lives in its own tree. Because the Lemurs are very
territorial, they don’t move away from their tree as long as they are fed. The
staff feed them well, and we had the privilege of seeing them feed several
families. Also because they are terrified of water, the lemurs don’t try to
cross the river. So there are no cages about the lemurs. They’re free to come
and go any time they wish. We paid 20,000 Ar each to get into the park, about
$7 US, which included our guide, Heri. We walked around the park for well over
an hour and saw many of lemurs. Fortunately the rain had stopped by the time we
started walking.
Ring Tailed Lemur and twins
We had arranged with a rental company to provide us with a
nine seat vehicle and driver for two days. The driver was supposed to arrive at
DSF at 9:00 in the morning to pick us up. This included, besides Sylvia and me,
Pam and Gideon and Parany’s family: wife Harimalala, Veronica at 5 years and
Adriana, a babe still at breast. When he hadn’t arrived at 10:00 and we had
received no communication from the company, Harimalala got on the phone and
phoned for about a half hour. At first she tried the company and driver. She
could get no response out of the driver. Then she phoned around until she had
found a new company that offered us the same service for 60,000Ar less.
Our goal had been to get to the Andisabe National Park in time
to tour it that day. Then we would find a place to sleep and come back the next
day to DSF. We had a distance of about 200km (125 miles) to go. The worst part
was to get through the south end of Tana and out on NR-2 going east. Tana has
terrible traffic and no expressways or traffic lights.
We finally left DSF about one o’clock in the afternoon. Our
driver, LaLane (I have no clue how he spelled his name), was a nice soft spoken
young man and an excellent driver. His only English was “I’m sorry, I do not
speak any English.” The road went through gorgeous mountains almost immediately
after leaving Tana.
One of the first mountains we encountered was a massive
rounded granite boulder towering at least a thousand feet (300 m) above the
road, called Slaughter Rock. In the 1800s the Catholic Church sent missionaries
to Madagascar, and thousands of people became Christians, especially in the central
highlands where we were. A new queen came to power and decided to return the
island to its animist heritage. Thousands of Christians were hurled to their
death from this rock and many other such rocks up and down Mada. There is a
great inscription on the rock that I can’t read. I’m guessing it is in
Malagasy. About 80 km (50 miles) further east, the road plunges down about 2000
feet through second growth rain forest and eucalyptus trees. Beautiful cascades
and waterfalls are visible on almost every turn. We got Andisabe (pronounce
this “and disobey”) NP, but the guard at the gate turned us back and told us
the park was closed. They do have night tours, but none of our literature nor
the guard chose to mention this.
Slaughter Rock
The park hotel nearby charged over $200 a night per room. But
we had noticed a brand new hotel, Le Guayave, with a most delightful
architecture just outside of the town of Andisabe. We went back to it, and
Harimalala talked the agent down to a total of 220,000Ar (about $70) for all
three rooms. I had promised to pay for this night, so I was very grateful for
her efforts. Each room was a building in itself, built in Malagasy style: Red
brick exterior and porch, all topped by a beautiful thatched roof, and inside
all wooden doors, tables, chairs, etc, made of very heavy dark red and black
wood. Nothing was nicely finished off. There were holes in the ceiling where
lights were not installed, toilets that flushed--sometimes, parquet flooring
with pieces missing in the corners, mosquito nets that didn’t close enough to
keep the mosquitoes out.
Hotel Le Guayave
Parany was suffering from extreme abdominal discomfort from
gas. I had a bit of his symptoms myself. Pam was feeling very uncomfortable and
had a slight fever. Fortunately we had brought both charcoal capsules and
ibuprofen. So we all got to sleep reasonably well.
The next morning we ate breakfast in Parany’s room. It had
been raining lightly but steadily ever since before we arrived in Andisabe the
previous evening. We arrived back at the entrance to the national park.
Hundreds of people were milling around. A guide came up to us eventually and
asked us what we wanted to do. The expensive tours, 3 hours and more, left from
this point. The regular 2 hour tour left from a different point, and we
probably could have found our night tour there the previous evening. Edwin, the
guide, climbed into the van with all of the rest of us, and we went to the second
place, paid our 20,000Ar, and started out.
It was still raining but got lighter and lighter as we
walked. We were using our umbrellas for the first 20 yards or so until we
entered the second growth rainforest itself. Then the path was too narrow, and
we closed them for the rest of the tour. The vegetation was a wonderland of an
almost infinite variety of different plants. The first thing we saw was a young
male Parsons chameleon. There are over 80 species of chameleons in Madagascar.
The Parsons is the largest species in the world and is always green. It doesn’t
change colors like other species. This one was well over a foot long (30cm).
The trails crisscrossed this section of the rainforest in every direction.
Visibility was very limited. There were lots of parties out, and the guides
would notify each other when they saw something of interest.
Parson’s Chameleon
We crossed over a suspension bridge made of branches an inch
thick or less (2.5 cm). After crossing the bridge we ran into some brown lemurs
first. The brown lemurs didn’t like our company and moved away, sometimes
making flying leaps from tree to tree. We followed them through thick
undergrowth for a while, but they had the distinct advantage of speed over us.
Footbridge
Edwin had promised us
he would show us the indris lemur, the largest lemur species. Unlike the other
lemurs, its tail is less than 4 inches (10cm) long. I heard the guides talking
to each other, and then we took off through the forest, not on a trail, and
found a large family of indris high up in a large tree. Edwin and another guide
started calling them, mimicking their shrill, piercing cry. We had heard a lot
of these cries the previous night while we were at La Guayave. The indris made
no move to come down from their tree or to even leave it. We watched them for a
long time.
Indris
Eventually Edwin called us to come and see a leaf-tailed
gecko. So we walked back to a trail and along it for a while till he stopped,
retraced his steps, and pulled a young tree down to reveal a flat grayish
lizard the same color as the bark. He took hold of the gecko and turned it
crosswise on the narrow stem. It slowly readjusted itself until it blended
perfectly with the bark. It eventually grew tired of the repeated man-handling
and walked slowly up the stem until it was out of reach.
About this time Sylvia saw a chameleon higher up on the same
trunk. The guide identified it as an elephant chameleon. It is named that not
from its size but the shape of its ears. Then the guide took us out to the road
a long ways from where we started, where our driver had mysteriously appeared
with the vehicle.
After driving down the road a little, I discovered a little
back leech about 3 cm long (inch and a quarter) on the back of my left hand. It
had its head starting to attach when I pulled my left hand up. It then put its
tail down and felt all over that part of my hand before suddenly flipping its
head up and over its tail and back onto another spot on my skin. It walked all
over the back of my hand and onto my wrist watch. Then it tried to find a place
on my arm above the watch. But it was distracted by all the hair on my
arm. While this was going on, I pulled
my camera out of its case with my right hand and took a number of pictures of
it. Finally I took it off of me and gently dropped it out of the window onto
the rain soaked highway.
Leech on the back of Wil’s hand
#UAZ,
#MADAGASCAR, #LEMURPARK, #ANDISABENP, #LEMUR, #GECKO, #CHAMELEON, #LEECH,
#SLAUGHTERROCK, #ANTANANARIVO, #SAINTFRANCOIS, #ZURCHERUNIV, #RAINFOREST,
#JUNGLE
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