MadagasCal

It was probably the distant shouting that awoke me from my uncomfortable sleep. Shifting from my tight corner seat in the back of the "taxi-brousse", Malagasy French for an over-stuffed minibus, I noticed we were not moving. This didn't seem ideal for a roughly 18 hour journey from Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, to Morondava, a west coast city on the strait of Mozambique. I drowsily followed some of the passengers out onto a random stretch of road. In the 10pm darkness, I could make out that all the cars were stopped. I heard the shouting erupt again and my fears flared to the worst. "Is there fighting?" I asked my guide Vonjy. "No," he simply replied. We walked towards a bridge in the road and saw a dirt path leading off road down to the river from where the commotion was coming. There I found myself amidst a crowd of Malagasy people shouting and cheering, and witnessed a taxi-brousse attempting to ford the river. Well the river wasn't the problem, it was the steep river bank on the other side.

The taxi-brousse charged up the river bank, reaching halfway before dejectedly sliding back down. A good portion of the crowd laughed, while the rest shouted what I guessed were a mixture of instructions and heckles. Someone procured a rope and tied it to the front bumper, and a group of people coordinated to drag the van up while another group pushed from below. Then the rope snapped, and the woman next to me laughed hysterically. 

Ok so these taxi-brousses, secondhand imports from Korea or Germany, were trying to all-terrain up a ravine in the middle of the night. Confused, I trudged back up and found a truck with its hood popped open right at the entrance to the bridge. This was a semi-truck, 18 wheeler perhaps. Suddenly I realized the gravity and unfortunateness of the situation. The road narrowed into the one-lane bridge and this truck had died in a spot where no car could possibly cross the bridge, leading to the off-road theatrics below. 

"What do we do now?" Vonjy produced another simple reply. "This is Madagascar." How often I've heard variations of that phrase - This is China. This is Africa. Pura vida, eso es Costa Rica. So often we with the privilege of the developed world, when faced with problems, instinctually want to solve them. It can be a tough transition to adopt the mindset of those in less resourced places to accept that sometimes situations are outside your control. As I stood there under the light of a full moon, in the middle of Madagascar far from cell phone coverage, watching the vehicular bottleneck slowly increase, all I could do was smile. If nothing else, I had blog material. 

Up til then, I had done little in Madagascar. This was my first ever trip to Africa, and I had chosen this island nation that had long fascinated me to explore. However, immediately after my first meal, a dessert crepe, in Antananarivo (the capital), I experienced one of the worst food poisonings of my life. I was bedridden for a full day and a half, saved by a doctor who gave me an IV injection in French. I suspect that the crepe was just the straw that broke the camel's back, for my stomach had already made its struggles to adapt to foreign bacteria in my preceding two day layover through Ethiopia. After sleeping off the doctor's visit, I was able to drag myself out to see the palace, and then inquire about a tour to the west coast. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world (183 out of 191) and not a place you can easily see the sights on your own. I had already lost too many days to do the full tour, but the tour company made a revised itinerary. After sending me four emails between 2-4am asking me to confirm that I was ok with the plan, we met early in the morning and he pressured me to leave for the tour right then and there. Realizing that I didn't have many other options for seeing the country, I reluctantly agreed to go, just a day into recovery. The original plan involved taking a "comfort luxury bus" 4 hours to Antsirabe and then 12ish hours to Morondava the next day. However, as we drove around looking for public buses, we couldn't find any supposedly due to the Independence Day three days out. It took a few hours before we found a taxi-brousse, a packed heap (four to a row) far from comfort or luxury, leaving directly for Morondava. I wasn't excited to spend 16 hours in that thing when I couldn't even pass something solid, but I also didn't want to mope around Antananarivo either.

So I had plenty to gripe about even before this indefinite delay. However, the Malagasy spirited imbued the blockade with positivity. Through more shouting of instructions, the taxi-brousses learned to reverse far down the river, then accelerate with enough of a head of steam to clear the riverbank. I saw maybe four or five do this successfully, all to thunderous cheering. A handful of other taxis also swapped out people and cargo, and then U-turned back where they came. Unfortunately our driver was not willing to make either this exchange nor the riverbank maneuver. As the night got colder and colder, folks gathered brush and created fires which dozens of us would huddle around. Someone started brewing coffee, someone else started a small dance party. The waylaid crowd, which might have exceeded two thousand, seemed genuinely upbeat overall. Somehow as so often is the case, I was the only foreigner around. 

Food poisoning update? I had thankfully stopped being desperate to go, but let's just say it was crucial having my own tissues, and there was plenty of remote ground to explore. 

In fact, in that exploration I had climbed to higher ground and saw the roof of my taxi-brousse where a duck was tied up in a bag and rolling around. This explains a phenomenon where earlier I had been spooked by squawking from above. Now I understood - this is Madagascar. I had to accept that I couldn't inform my girlfriend and family of my predicament.  My phone, kindle and external battery slowly drained, and losing my digital attention crutches, I stared up at a night sky teeming with more stars than I'd seen in years and made out the Southern Cross. My thoughts ranged freely from the poverty in the environs, to the plot points of scattered movies from long ago, to the still beauty of this dry remote part of this remote island to sailors from long ago on wooden ships passing the equator and seeing the Southern Cross emerge, this same set of burning gas orbs unfathomably distant as I accessed neurological linkages typically inactive during my domesticated internet-addicted routine-filled existence that now also felt unfathomably distant.

At 5am, the cows came home. Actually they were leaving home going to work. A farmer led four zebus down the road, around the dead truck, over the bridge, and presumably onto his fields. It took until 6:30am for the cavalry to arrive, one small truck to tow the head of the dead truck and a new head to take over the body. It took two frustrating hours before they figured out how to free the head, and just eight more minutes to tow away the body and decongest this rural road. 

Hurdle removed, but there was still so much road ahead. I had been warned that the roads were bad. While this entire route was paved, much of the paving had deteriorated into potholes or worse, and the taxi-brousses would slow down to a crawl when going over them. Finally 80km from Morondava the road stayed paved, and the driver would speed through, making some shocking passes on tight roads. Within sight of our destination, the taxi-brousse made pitstops, picking up firewood and chatting with the vendor. I was apoplectic, having run out of patience hours ago and desperate just to stretch my legs. Remarkably, no one else in our bus seemed perturbed and even the kids behaved well. No one else that is, except for the duck, which had made enough trouble on the roof that they packed him in the trunk with our luggage, where his excrement leaked his way onto my bag. And you didn't think it could get worse. It was night again when we finally rolled into the bus station in Morondava, 29 hours after we had set off.  While passengers alighted and engaged in joyful family reunions, I hightailed it to our hotel and was asleep within 10 minutes. 

*****

The actual tourism part of the trip proceeded and featured a more favorable highlight-to-disaster ratio. Vonjy showed up with a driver friend Nono and a Range Rover that had Korean on its mirrors and romanized Arabic on its license plate. We went north onto dirt roads that made the awful paved roads of the previous day seem like the Autobahn.

Allée des Baobabs

Though many may know Madagascar as a DreamWorks movie, this trip was actually inspired by Geoguessr, where I had once been placed in the Avenue of the Baobabs and learned about a stretch of iconic trees naturally lining the sides of a road like Stanford's Palm Drive. The baobabs arrived surprisingly quickly, popping up sporadically before reaching at the Avenue a density that you'd think might be cultivated. You'd be mistaken, as baobabs reach maturation after a thousand years, nearly as long as humans have been living in the region. Some baobabs had been planted in suitable spots along the road but they were pitiful runts next to the majestic giants whose stout trunks towered in the sky, branchless until they petered out horizontally. What had seemed so far-flung and nearly mystical in Geoguessr was now living and breathing in front of me. Baobabs in Malagasy are called Rainala, mother of forest, and 6 of the 8 species are in Madagascar (one is in mainland Africa, one in Australia, and another in Le Petit Prince). The road meandered around the baobabs and continued through tiny villages. I was surprised to learn that this Avenue was not a tourist trap like the Avenue of the Stars but actually the only way for us to go north. We bumped ahead slowly on a road that during the wet summer season would get untraversably muddy. Now in the winter, it was so uneven that my Fitbit registered 30k steps merely while sitting in the car. 

We passed by cassava and peanut fields and small villages where children would emerge to run after the car. They may have been motivated by money, as they would disappear if you handed over a bill, but likely they were also bored and curious. Frequently children would spot me and shout "Vaza! Vaza!" short for vazaha meaning foreigner.  The villages were mainly collections of thatch huts with few synthetic materials to be found. Madagascar basically doesn't have an electric grid (~25% of the population has access), and villages like these may have had at best a few portable solar panels able to charge phones. I was witnessing the type of poverty one hears of in Ted talks, comparable in my life experience only to some villages I'd trekked through in Myanmar. Some of the huts looked like they could be blown over by a huff and puff from a big bad wolf. One of the villages though did boast a full grown baobab.

We reached the Tsiribihina river, at a place that Google Maps calls "Port Bac Tsimafana" and classifies as a "marina." The marina fleet consists of one wooden raft with a loud motor that can ferry maybe three 4x4s across the river.  Rice cultivation was on the river, a wintertime necessity as the regular paddies dried up. While waiting for another 4x4 to arrive, I witnessed one man stuffing straw into the roof of the only structure around, while another man followed me around staring intensely at my face, undoubtedly wondering what ethnicity I was. The other 4x4 did arrive, and on the ferry I chatted with a gay couple who spoke German to each other, although they told me one was Croatian and the other Turkish, both moving to Munich as adults. The Croatian was shocked to learn that I had randomly spent a night at his hometown of Osijek.

Not the last straw

Belo sur Tsiribihina was a proper city on the other side of the river with its own electric generation. The tour had me getting lunch at a restaurant with an unsettlingly extravagant French menu. Vonjy and Nono didn't even sit with me, likely getting cheaper Malagasy dishes off a separate menu. While I knew this was a scheme to milk tourists with higher prices, the fancy French meal was still $10-$15 US, a huge bargain for Langue de Zebu au poivre (cow tongue). 

After a full 8 hours of jerky driving and two raft ferries, we pulled into a luxury resort. While it wouldn't merit 5 stars in Aruba (the internet trickled out from the one router), the sprawling sets of bungalows, landscaped horticulture, multiple pools and decorated bar felt jarringly opulent after all the poverty I'd just seen. As I stood under a hot shower, made possible by a farm of solar panels on-site, I wondered how many of those villagers had ever had a shower like this.

Left: Sportive Lemur
Right: Decken's Sifaka

The other guests were mostly Europeans, with one lone Japanese woman who did not want to be bothered. I befriended an older Spanish couple who'd traveled together to around 90 countries. Unsurprisingly the travelers in Madagascar were all experienced. We were all with tour guides and convened the next morning to reach the tours' main selling point, the Great Tsingy de Bemaraha. Due to potential of banditry (!), we drove as one long convoy and hiked together. The 5 hour hike started through the forest, where we were delighted to see two species of lemurs hiding or leaping through the trees. The guides also pointed out rare birds and ant holes that tricked snakes into crawling in and getting suffocated. 

Then the trail entered the famous limestone formations of the Tsingy. We alternated between crawling through caves, climbing up ladders, rock climbing through narrow formations (using harnesses) and even crossing a rope bridge. This part felt like a fun adventure course with a UNESCO view.

The Tsingy is a massive series of limestone karst formations, where water and acid rain have cut distinctive patterns. The area used to be seabed, evidenced by fossils of shells that were commonplace. While it was our main destination and certainly a top trip highlight, I don't think I can do this experience justice in writing other than saying natural is marvelous.

The older Spanish couple were able to manage the whole course with great difficulty, and while waiting for them, I shared a glass of orange juice with the German-ish couple. Lacking enough cups, their guide ripped a water bottle in half and poured the orange juice into both halves.

 

Coming back through the main town, it was clear that National Day had arrived. The entire road was crowded surrounding some sort of competitive fighting event. The hotel staff would ask me to eat dinner early for they were going into town to party. Following Cal's travel rule #1, when in doubt go for the better story, I knew I'd need to check this out. And then there I was, walking into a "bar" (read: building where lots of people had beer) with Vonjy and being immediately forced to dance. Vonjy explained to me how different regions of Madagascar had their own types of dance (more hips in the

Most awk photo since braces

north, more shoulders in the south, and in this region join the conga line). Anyone who's ever walked into a party where they didn't know anyone should relate to my awkwardness, and anyone who's a poor dancer should exponentially increase that awkwardness. But hey, when in Madagascar, do as the Malagasy do. 

We departed back the way we came, and now armed with many small bills, I was able to stop by a village and pass them out to a small throng of kids. Eventually we reached the Avenue of the Baobabs again, this time for a sunset money shot.

This Insta destination was where I met the most travelers, including a tour group of 8 old Hong Kongers, who wanted to buy me dinner, and one Brazilian wannabe-model who pushed me out of her photo op.

The tour concluded dropping me off in Morondava, and I spent the next day exploring the city. I walked to the end of the road, the same road I'd spent 29 hours on, and found a plaque commemorating the inauguration of the road in 2012, unexpectedly financed partially by the Import-Export Bank of Korea. I had always pictured infrastructure investments as rail or ports, but now I couldn't have even imagined this trip had that road not been paved, even if sections were in poor condition only 12 years later. Past the road lay an enormous stretch of white sandy beach which was largely devoid of sun bathers despite the 85 degree heat. Many ramshackle dwellings lined the edge of the sand. Several people sold me on a dinghy ride to a nearby island fishing village, where I witnessed several damaged boats beached waiting for the funds to repair, open air markets held in shallow water on boats, a mission led by an Italian priest, and a man climb a coconut tree, knock off two coconuts, then open them with a machete and hand them to me. I found Morondava pretty fascinating - it was much safer than Antananarivo and clearly helped by tourism but demonstrating a vibrant, diversified economy.

I flew back because I wasn't going through that bus experience again. I took a tuk-tuk to a one room airport without x-ray machines, boarded a twin-engine turbo prop ATR72, a plane so old it was made by the company that later became Airbus, and despite preparing for untold delays, arrived on time in Antananarivo. Ironically I would suffer through three separate airline inconveniences on this trip, but none in Madagascar. 

I rounded out my remaining nights in Antananarivo with some visits to smoky pubs where I used more French than I had ever had in my entire life, conversing with people from Madagascar, Réunion, France and Seychelles. I met some people who'd lived all over the world exclusively in French-speaking places and barely spoke English and realized just how parallel the Francophone and Anglophone spheres could be. On a Sunday, I found the normally cantankerous city almost devoid of life, and asked my hotel for help visiting a lemur reserve an hour outside of town. The hotel owner, a Mauritian of Indian descent, showed up and over the car ride told me about his business exploits in the country, how he was divesting from tourism after Covid (Madagascar's tourism still hasn't recovered to half of pre-pandemic levels) and into agriculture. He spoke Mauritian Creole, French, English, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Malagasy and for some reason, Malay. 

Food wise, I was forced to eat a lot of French cuisine as the restaurants on our tour served nothing else - which wasn't the worst. Though I stayed away from the most unprotected street food (even the hotel owner said his stomach couldn't handle it), I did manage to sample the heavily rice-based Malagasy cuisine. Just like in Chinese, the verb "to eat" in Malagasy miniham-bary means "eat rice." I had the national dish Romazava, a thick stew of greens, zebu meat, tomatoes and onions that I poured over red rice, and Ravitoto, a cassava leaves and coconut milk based curry that I ate with shrimp and rice. Occasionally I ate plates with excellent spaghetti thrown in. In Antananarivo I briefly met two Chinese owners of restaurants. One of them had roots in Madagascar dating to 1910 when his Shanghainese grandparents immigrated. He spoke rough Cantonese, and in a first for me in my interactions with the diaspora, we switched back and forth with French to ease intelligibility. Overall I tasted in the cuisine the island's uniqueness as well as its ties to French colonialism and Indian and Arabic trade links.

This was a monumental trip for me bringing me further away from my comfort zone than ever before. I saw a beautiful country with unique biology and a simpler way of life. I was reminded that we sometimes have to accept what we cannot control but that we are also tougher than we think.