Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 16 - Morondava B - The Weekend

With Anne on the Pirogue

In the previous Sojourn I told you of our visit to the Allée des Baobabs and the Kirindy Forest Preserve. Here we fill you in with the rest of the weekend we spent at the coast.

After checking into the Tecicogne (Three Coconut) Resort, which is really just a small hotel with about 10 rooms, we went out to the Morondava Beach. Low waves between a foot and two feet (around 50cm) high broke gently on the sandy beach which seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see in either direction. The flooded river, its mouth opening just south of Morondava, sent a stream of yellow-brown water some two city blocks wide north along the beach. Beyond this stream we saw a sharp line, and then the clear deep blue Indian Ocean stretched to the horizon.

Only a few people sat or strolled on the beach, most of them Malagasies. We crossed the sand and played a bit in the warm waters of the ocean. No one had a real urge to swim in the muddy brown waters. I met a well dressed Japanese woman who is touring the world alone. She taught me a few Japanese sentences and then made a movie of my repeating them to send to her friends.

Pirogue Under Sail

Out in the blue of the ocean a fishing pirogue (dugout canoe made from a balsa log and a side rigger) sporting a large dirty square sail glided lazily northwards. Just about opposite us it turned in towards the beach. As it came in the two fishermen furled the sail and lowered the mast. They easily rode the small breakers in to the beach. Some people standing nearby joined them in pushing the boat up just above the water’s edge. They laid their entire catch on the sand: one stingray and what Sylvia called, a nurse shark. A small, curious crowd gathered around and chatted with them about their experiences. As usual my lack of any understanding of Malagasy precluded my learning anything from their conversation. Eventually someone with some money came by and dickered for the fish. Most of the crowd then grabbed the pirogue and dragged it way up the beach beyond the reaches of a high tide.

Nurse Shark and Sting Ray

Sylvia squatted at the water’s edge and dribbled wet sand into a forest of squirrely trees. Pretty soon the two Payet children joined Sylvia, although the restive Aldwyn couldn’t stay in one place very long. The temperature of the water was a comfortable 80-something degrees (close to 30°C)—a far cry from the Pacific off the California coast.

After breakfast on Sabbath morning, Edwin and I walked out of the hotel and down to the end of a sand peninsula that hosted scores of vessels. Most of them were pirogues, but there were a few larger vessels in various states of disrepair. The two-masted Fahenvenua was about half the size of the Mayflower model in Plymouth Harbor. It was beached like all the other vessels, but the watchman on it told us they were awaiting cargo.

After breakfast we took the families out to an abandoned resort on the beachfront. We sat down on the deck in the shade of one of the A-frame bungalows and listened to the children as they told us stories about their Sabbath School lessons. Ann had a very good story that showed that she had been thinking about it. Aldwyn’s story blended Bible and action fantasy. It had plenty of action but no plot.

Sabbath School at an Abandoned Beach Resort

We ambled slowly back to the Trecicogne because of the heat which was well up into the 90s (30s C). By the time we got back, we decided we were hungry. The ladies pooled all of our leftovers and opened cans of lasagna and lentils. After lunch we sacked out for a well earned, or not, siesta.

About 3:30 people were stirring. We found Gilbert, the pirogue owner, who earlier had offered to take us out in the lagoon and river and show us the mangroves and the fishing village across the wide river. He spoke both English and French, which was an extra plus.

Mick, Ellie, Alphia, Aldwyn, Edwin, and Anne under the Hat

His pirogue was dug out of the trunk of a large balsa tree. The balsas grow south along the coast towards Toliara. It had one outrigger. I often wondered, but not for very long, why they didn’t have two outriggers for greater stability. I had my answer when we docked along a sand bank and I stepped out without getting my feet wet. If there had been a second outrigger, we could never have gotten that close to the bank.

Gilbert pronounced his name as the French would but allowed us to pronounce it in English. He explained that there are three types of mangrove trees. Midwives make a tea of the leaves of the small-leaf mangrove. The mother drinks the tea right after giving birth. I don’t remember what effect the tea had on the woman. Sorry!

Large-Leaf Mangrove Fruit

Women grind up the fruit of the large-leaf mangrove to make a mask that they coat their faces with. Of course it helps keep the direct rays of the sun off of their faces, but they seem to wear the mask for the same reason some women wear lipstick. We saw a lot of women wearing this mask in Morondava. The practice hasn’t seemed to spread to the rest of the island.

The Latest in Mangrove Fashion

Gilbert didn’t tell us about uses for the medium leaf mangrove.

Gilbert’s brother Mick road in the rear and Gilbert in the front. Mick seemed to only understand Malagasy. As we were first getting into the pirogue, Ellie came running up and climbed in, so there were 9 of us in the pirogue.

Ellie was a Greek woman of about 30, I would guess. We had first encountered her at the Thursday evening dinner. She spoke English and French perfectly with hardly any accent. She has an MBA and works at some big international concern in Paris. She tours the world as a financial consultant, and as if she doesn’t get enough travel in that way, on her vacations she flies to exotic places. She had been in Mada for a week or so, and she was leaving early Sunday morning by car to Tana where she would catch a plane back to Paris on Monday and be in the office first thing on Tuesday morning.

She seemed to really enjoy our company. She and Sylvia had had a long discussion on Thursday night. She told Sylvia that she gives the existence of God a 50-50 chance. On the other hand, she was very respectful as we said grace when she joined us for Saturday night supper at the hotel restaurant.

Gilbert took us to a fishing village on the south side of the Morondava River. Thousands of people live there and travel back and forth daily. At low tide there is a large sandbar right down the center of the river. There are two large pirogues that provide transport across the river. One takes people from Morondava across to the sandbar. The people all get out, walk across the sandbar, and then get in the second pirogue and travel on to the island. Of course there is equal traffic crossing the other direction too. At high tide the river covers the sandbar, but the crossing remains the same. People travel to the sandbar. They get out and wade, with the water up above their knees, to the other pirogue and ride on up to the village. Of course they have to wade out from the bank to get into the pirogue and then wade from the pirogue to their destination. The fare is 1000 Ariary one way, that’s about 32¢ U.S. This is indeed a sizeable sum to them. Most of the villagers are extremely poor. The village cannot be reached by road.

We crossed the river higher up than the water taxis do. When we reached the sandbar, Gilbert and Mick jumped out and pushed with all their might to get us across several 100 yards (meters) of sand bank.

 Jocelyn (Dzudzel) and the 50,000 Ar. Home (Under Construction)

We walked around the village with Gilbert. He pointed out a new house that someone was making for themselves out of mangrove poles. They thatch the roof with coconut leaves. The final cash cost for the house will be about 50,000 Ariary (about $15.00 US). Since mangrove poles don’t last too well, the house will probably not last more than 18 months, maximum. There is a large, neatly kept compound in the middle of the village built by nuns. They live in relative luxury compared with the rest of the villagers. A number of these poor houses, including the nunnery, had a satellite TV antenna.

Sunset on the Pirogue

Sunday morning we left Trecicogne for home. We stopped in town so the Payets could buy souvenirs, we could purchase drinking water, and the driver could fill the van with diesel. For about 400 of the 540 km trip the thermometer on my watch read about 105° (over 40°C. We had no air conditioning. Then we hit a rain storm as we got back into the highlands. My pate about froze, and I rode the last hour with my hand on my head to try and keep it warm.

On the trip home we had Edwin and Alphie tell us about their courtship and marriage. He is from Reunion, an island in the Indian Ocean about 875 km (550 miles) from Madagascar. Alphie is from the Philippines, which is about 10 times as far from Madagascar or Reunion. They met at the Adventist graduate university AIIAS in the Philippines.

Arriving Home

We arrived home about 7:30 that Sunday evening, and yes, it was still raining.

We left UAZ one week later. On our last Sabbath we had potluck at the Payet’s home with all of the other expatriates. This time we contributed nothing, nada, since we had essentially nothing in the house. We spent the evening packing. We were only allowed two bags instead of 4 since South African Airways considers this an internal flight. Furthermore they restricted the weight in our bags much more tightly than they had on our international flights. We repacked our bags when we got to the airport so that none of them was more than a kg overweight. We were allowed to take our two smaller bags as carry-on, which they subsequently checked at the gate.

Pam and Gideon took us on a tour of the Adventist organizations in Tana. We briefly toured the ADRA area. Then we spent some time in the Indian Ocean Union Conference area. They have a fairly large medical and dental presence there as well as a print shop and other amenities. Finally we visited the Central Madagascar Conference compound. At one end of the compound it has a huge amphitheatre that they have carved out of a natural valley. It seats several thousand people with a huge baptismal font in the shape of a cross where they can have at least a dozen pastors baptizing people simultaneously.

We had grown to love Mada and its people, and we really hated to leave it all. I about choked up as we flew around Tana on our way out. On the other hand, we were headed home!

#MADAGASCAR, #MALAGASY, #EATINGOUT, #MORONDAVA, #SUV, #TRECICOGNE, #PIROGUE, #MANGROVES, #HEAT, #ADVENTIST, #ROMANCE, #FLYING, #FLOODS

Sojourn to Madagascar - Part 15 - Morondava A - Friday

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.

Verreaux’s Sifaka Ready to Leap

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