Lovers
We got up at 4:30 on Thursday morning, March 3and left home
about 6:15 for Morondava. Our driver was Jocelyn (say “dzoosel”), a male if the
name misleads you. He drove for almost 10 hours to get to Morondava 516 km (321
miles). That’s less than 35 miles per hour (55 kph) on a paved road. It has
lots of potholes and a fair number of towns which often reduce the speed to
that of a walking man.
We traveled with Edwin and Alphie Payet and their two
delightful children Anne (“almost 9”) and Aldwyn aged 6. His name is a
combination of his mother and father’s names. Both kids spoke excellent English
and French.
Morondava is quite a small town. Coconut palms grew along
the outskirts and the usual endless rows of small kiosk like store fronts lined
the streets. Nothing resembling a grocery store like ShopRite in Antsirabe
could we find. Lots of baobabs grew at odd intervals for the last 50 kilometers
(30 miles) along the road. They are slenderer than their African cousins. They
do resemble upside down trees with their branches underground and the stem and
roots up in the air. Since it was the rainy season, they did have leaves and stringy
red flowers on those “roots.”
Anne with a Baobab Flower
We drove directly to the Trecicogne Hotel. We chatted with
the clerk and got an air conditioned room for ourselves. The A/C room cost an
extra 10,000 Ariary (about $3 extra)--the best three dollars I’ve spent in
years! They warned us that the electricity is turned off between 3 and 7 a.m.
every night. So we brought a truck battery and a voltage inverter so Sylvia
could sleep with the benefit of her C-PAP all night. It also meant that the A/C
was off for roughly half the night.
On the first night I awoke about 4:18 a.m. feeling very
warm. I kicked the blanket off. As consciousness slowly worked its way into my
mind, I thought the A/C has gone off
again!... Oh, that must be because the electricity has gone off… Oh…
Yeah…Sylvia’s C-PAP isn’t running… Oh I need to connect her to the battery. I
did. Then I opened all the windows. The other two nights I awoke when the
electricity went off.
The windows have no screens. We slept under a mosquito net
so the mosquitoes didn’t bother us. I was concerned that someone could easily
and noiselessly climb into the room and steal us blind. Eventually I went back
to sleep.
I woke up suddenly as I heard the door handle go down very
slowly. I hopped out of bed, pulled on my pants and unlocked the door. When I
peered out, it was half-daylight, and there stood little Aldwyn looking up at
me with great big, wide-open eyes. “I’m looking for my mother!” His worried
voice carried a note of panic in it. Tears were very close to the surface.
Aldwyn in a Baobab
I stood and talked with him for a while and tried to comfort
him and assure him that his mother would be back very shortly. I invited him
into our room.
“No!” and the panic was back in his voice, “I must go and
find my mother.” He walked purposefully away. I grabbed a shirt and shoes and
headed after him. By this time his mother and father had showed up. They had
walked down to the shops for some supplies. They had told the kids where they
were going (or at least they had told Anne). But Aldwyn hadn’t understood them.
Alphie chewed on the kid pretty hard. I told her that really
she should compliment him. A kid needs to have someone he knows he can talk with
when he feels in trouble or insecure. And we were definitely the right people
in this place where none of us knew anyone. She didn’t see it my way. She was
worried that he had disturbed us. I tried to point out that his feelings were
very important …
The Trecicogne had Wi-Fi, but it was really bad at this
point, so I sat out in the open air cafeteria and texted Elwood for an hour
while Sylvia continued to sleep. The voice phone wouldn’t work at all. Elwood
was really working to get my pool to the point that it wouldn’t cause us to get
a big fine.
Allée des Baobabs
Finally we breakfasted and jumped into the SUV that Jocelyn
had ready for us. In Madagascar when you rent a car, you also get a driver. I
bought another 9 liters of water on our way out. After my experiences in
Namibia and Mexico with drinking tainted water, I was taking no chances.
We headed northeast from Morondava along a secondary road.
It was sand and mud with a lot of holes full of water in it. On our way back to
the hotel, Anne counted the major holes where the SUV had to drive down into
the water and then up the other side. She had me write down that she had
counted 55 of these large holes—not counting the even worse holes we drove
through on the 5 km stretch when we entered the Kirindy Forest Preserve. The
SUV had four-wheel drive and high clearance. It definitely needed the
clearance, but Jocelyn never used the 4WD.
About 10 km off of the National Road we entered the Allée
des Baobabs. Edwin explained that in French allée
means a garden road with roughly the same kind of scenery on both sides of it,
nothing like alley in English. There are upwards of 100 great baobabs on
either side of the road. Two species of baobabs grow in this area. One has a
smooth outer layer, and the other has a rough, flakey kind of scale as bark.
The latter is the more common kind in the Kirindy park where our guide told us
about them. We stopped at one tree, and the kids got to play around it. We
found a number of small baobab trees, less than 6 feet (2m) high nearby. So
they do continue to seed themselves. In shape, their leaves are not unlike
those of marijuana.
The Payets Measure a Baobab, Sylvia Looks On
The road leading north is very rough in spots, and it took
us several hours to reach Kirindy. The road going into the preserve is only
passable by 4x4, high clearance vehicles. We drove into, through, and out of
one vast pond after another. Our path looked like a great sine wave. Many of
the puddles came almost to the headlights of the SUV. Each one had a center
ridge that would have stranded a vehicle with lower clearance.
We got into park headquarters about one o’clock. With
permission, the ladies set up lunch in a covered dining area, and we ate well.
The air temperature was very close to 35°C (95°F) and humidity was close to
100%. Sylvia had brought a bunch of her cinnamon rolls, and they disappeared
like magic. The guides felt we were better likely to see lemurs if we didn’t
hurry into the forest too soon. It was nap time for lemurs as well as people.
As we wandered around the headquarters, we saw dozens of
large lizards, mainly skinks and iguanas. The iguanas are called collared
iguanas and are the smallest of the worldwide iguana family, about 15 inches
(40cm) long. We found two hog-nosed snakes, each about four feet long (a little
over a meter).
Swallowtails at Kirindy Headquarters
They let us use the restroom in one of the cabins. They
insisted that I follow a guide to the cabin, stating that I might get lost. I
laughed because we could see the cabins. But he insisted anyway and called a
guide. She guided me around a stand of bamboo and to the cabin.
Later I needed the facility again, and this time I took a shorter
route. It led right past a wooden structure that appeared to be a bed frame.
There were carvings on each of the four corners of the bed. Two of the
carvings, on opposite corners, were each carved out of a single rosewood log.
They represented a woman sitting on a man’s lap in different poses. Both
figures had extra large sexual organs and would be regarded as pornographic by some.
Our guide book had commented on the very erotic figures carved on the tombs of
this region of Mada. There are very prominent tombs found everywhere in Mada.
Most are made of cement block or rocks. I assume that this bed frame
illustrated that the erotic carvings exist on more than just tombs. I also
assume that it was this bed frame that prompted the ranger to insist a guide
lead me to the restroom. Edwin and Alphie told us that they have a lot of these
in one of the state museums in Tana. We didn’t visit that museum.
At 2:30 we hiked into the forest. This forest is very dry,
unlike the rainforest we had hiked in up in the highlands at Andasibe. Our
guide, John, was very knowledgeable about both the fauna and flora of the
forest. He claimed to be entirely self-taught. We walked steadily for an
hour-and-a-half and saw nothing besides trees and a few, very few, birds and
reptiles. Finally Aldwyn got so tired he was falling asleep on Edwin’s
shoulders. Alphie took him back to camp and put him to sleep in the car. John
walked her to a point where she could make it back to camp on her own before he
returned to us. We kept walking in a large circle (or rather square). It was
obvious that he expected the lemurs to be in this area.
Suddenly a lemur jumped across the trail about a hundred
yards (meters) in front of us. There were four of five red-fronted brown lemurs
in the group. Two of them were very tame. One sat in a fork in a tree just
above Edwin’s head. He reached up and touched its tail. It didn’t like that but
only moved a few feet higher up the tree.
Red-Fronted Brown Lemur at Kirindy
After leaving those lemurs, we came on a troop of four
Verreaux’s sifakas. They are a genus of lemurs with long slender legs, body,
and tail. These were white with a black face. They can easily jump from one
tree, 15 or 20 feet (5 to 7 meters), hit a second tree, and immediately jump an
equal distance to another tree and continue rapidly across the forest. They,
too, stopped and surveyed us while we surveyed them. They showed no fear of us.
When they tired of us, they took off as described above and were gone into the
depths of the forest almost instantaneously.
We paid 25,000 Ariary ($8) each for entry to the park and
another 20,000 Ariary ($6) for John, our guide. He was somewhat past middle age
and spoke very reasonable English. The park gets very few visitors during the
rainy season, so these guides get very little money for their effort. I think
our group was the only one to come that day. There must have been at least a
dozen people working at the headquarters. So our money didn’t go far.
We drove back through the Allée des Baobabs just after
sunset. Sunrise and Sunset are regarded as the best time to view the baobabs
here. The sky was very cloudy, but we did get some excellent colors and good
pictures. I used my Nikon for most of this trip. It is supposed to be better
than my Panasonic Lumix. But it doesn’t focus nearly as well as the Lumix. The
Lumix takes the picture as I press the shutter release whereas the Nikon waits
for almost a second. So I am very disappointed in it. The battery on my Lumix
went flat, and I couldn’t find the replacements before I left home. I did find
them when I got back—too late.
We went straight to bed when we got home, not even taking a
bit of supper.
#MADAGASCAR, #MALAGASY, #EATINGOUT, #MORONDAVA, #KIRINDY, #LEMUR,
#SIFAKA, #SUV, #TRECICOGNE, #POTHOLES, #NIKON, #LUMIX, #SWALLOWTAIL,
#HOGNOSESNAKE, #EROTICA, #FOREST, #IGUANA, #SKINK, #BAOBAB
