Gettting to Chile and Celebrating Beard Day 100

Getting to Chile

So from London after a lovely break to sort through my Madagascar photos while watching Columbo on the couch at my former flat and catching up with friends, notable for the Friday evening repeated attacks on my 94 day old beard by J-Fo, I began my official "trip round the world" that left from London to Santiago Chile (via Zurich of course) on November 17, 2008 and returns from Stockholm to London on March 31, 2009.

Well I luckily made it to Chile. You see I barely made my flight. I'm talking minutes or maybe even seconds at the check-in-desk to spare here. Here's what happened:

During my travels in Madagascar I had been listening to a few audiobooks (Catch 22) and lectures from the teaching company on random topics* and some standup comedy. A lot of the time I use my ipod is at nighttime to help drown out ambient noise (like dogs fighting and annoying Malagasy music on taxi brousses) and find that people talking does a better job than music. So while I had some couch/internet time when I was back in london I searched out as many audio books and lectures that I could find to add to the collection. The only problem was that with all the new stuff I now exceeded my 80gigs space on my ipod and had to now select individually the tracks that I wanted to keep. The reason this was such a problem is that I had left it til 2:30pm on the day I was supposed to catch a 6:40 flight from Heathrow to synchronize my ipod. 2 1/2 hours later at 5:00 I had to shut it down the syncronizing process at 50% and make a mad dash for the airport at rush hour.

Since you already know that I made it I'll spare you all the details:

Details like 1)how I was sprinting so fast with my 15kg backpack**that a lady on the Hammersmith and City Line to Paddington offered me a stack of tissues because I was sweating so much. Or that I missed the 5:25 Heathrow Express by one minute***.

Or that 2) my dead all out sprint to terminal 1 was for naught as, despite what my ticket said, Swiss Air actually flies from terminal 2.

Or that 3) another all out sprint from T1 to T2 caught 4 police officers off guard as I charged between them yelling over my shoulder, sorry, I'm late for my flight.

Or that 4) the guy at the check in desk had to check with his supervisor who in turn had to check with her supervisor to see if 6:10 was too late a check in time to let me on the flight. "Ok but he is the last one" was the consensus that I was grateful to hear.

Actually that's quite a lot of details for someone who was leaving out the details. Sounds like something I would do.

Anyway, so I got there and after accidently tipping the taxi driver the equivalent of GBP 20 due to an exchange rate misunderstanding I arrived at the Chili Hostel (play on words deliberate) http://www.ajihostel.cl/ which was a really social place where I met lots of fun people.

One of the fun people was a guy who worked there named Alvaro, a big fan of Rush, which I can't say helped endear him to me but since they are Canadain it fostered conversation about music and in general. Alvaro is a bit of a metal head. Or if not a metal head then definitely a hard rocker.

Anyway, on beard day 100, which happened to coincide with the hostel's Friday nigt bbq, Alvaro broke out the hard liquor, a Chielan firewater called Pisco and then took me and Randy, a guy from the states who is about 10yrs my junior with the energy of a guy about 20 yrs my junior, on a random tour of hard rocker type clubs where the people where scary looking and the music was hard rock (though due to Pisco related memory loss I don't remember any actual songs that we heard).

In general, though much is hazy, beard day 100 celebration was a roaring success and saw me get back to the hostel sometime between 5:30am (the time stamp of the last photo) and 6:30am when Randy scaled a wall and climbed through a 2nd storey window ****to let me in the building because no one was answering the door.
The major issue with the beard day celbration, other than it was to celebrate 100 days of an awesome beard which is less an 'issue' and more a statement of fact, was that I had a 7:51am bus ticket to Mendoza (7hours away across the border into Argentina) already purchased for the next day so waking up at 10am I scrambled around as fast as possible to make it to the bus station in time to catch a bus that would see me arrive in Mendoza before dark.*****

After a healthy breakfast of a double whopper with cheese at BK, I still had about 1/2 hour til the next bus left at 1:30pm so I decided to look through my bags and take inventory of my stuff. Hmmm.....where are my GBP 200 brand new never been worn prescription ski goggles. They should be here. or here. or here. Crap! Crap, crap crap crap crap. I must have left them at the hostel. Damit. there's only 15mins left now til my bus leaves. Decision time....do I say "forget them" and continue on? or forget the bus ticket (after all I was going a day early for my mountain tour anyway) and go back and get them? I can't very well leave them just to get value out of this bus ticket. Guess I'm going back to the hostel for another night.I was greeted with an amused smile from the girl at the desk and sure enough my goggles were there. My pride was nowhere to be found but I had a quiet afternoon and used the time productively to send an email to Mom and Dad informing them that I had planned a kickass Beard Removal Themed party for New Year's Eve at their house if that was all right with them. I was calling in New Beard's Eve and during my mountain expedition it would take on a life of it's own.

Photos 1) Nothing to do with arrival in Chile but I just find it interesting that a guy named O'Higgins was such a great Liberator of Chile that he has the main st named after him. Mental note to wikipedia Chilean history and find out what's up with that? 2) Mi amigo Alvaro and his buddy who's name I don't remember one of the rocker clubs in Chile.3) Me and the official beard calendar. 4) DG and Randy taking a "when in rome" attitude and getting into the spirit of the local rocker clubs.

*The best one being History of Roman Empire which I originally downloaded in April when I went to Rome but revisited in Madagascar due to lack of selection

**Despite now carrying winter weather clothes I still managed to ditch a lot of stuff that I was carrying around Madagascar. Nearly 9kg worth which really helped for the sprinting through airports.

***26 mins from Old st to Paddington is pretty good at rush hour I thought after the fact.

****Before I could even finish my response "No way man I'm way too drunk for that" to his question of who should climb through the window? his feet were already hanging out of the window.

*****Normally I would opt for the overnight bus but since it arrives at 4 in the morning I decided against it.

Madagascar 8 - La Dernier Chapitre

Ok so I´ve left Madagascar and am now in Chile. Big deal. I´ve got a couple of unaccounted for weeks on the blog so instead of writing a chapter on each event (which would be amazing but time consuming) I´ll sum it up with a paragraph on each.

Parc Ranomafana

Amazing park. Greenest place in the whole country with lush rainforest and beautiful waterfalls and rivers along with lots of lemurs and a nice campsite. As I arrived in the middle of the night on a taxi-brousse it was an amazing awaken to the sight of mist rising off the rainforest and birds chirping. That´s right birds. Going tweet-tweet. Not roosters cock-a-doodle-do-ing or dogs barking just nice tranquil bird song. The main problem then was that the hotel was in the village and the parc, my destination, was 6.5kms away. According to the guide book it was a slightly windy road but I figured it must follow the river or something like the road near the hotel so I thought I'd walk it. It turned out to be entirely uphill. Lucky thing I was in training for Aconcagua climb and I had just made an awesome "On-the-go" playlist by selecting 2 songs titles beginnig with each letter of the alphabet. I arrived at the park in the middle of Lenny Kravitz´s "Lady". 13 songs. Not bad time considering it was all uphill. The well deserved honey rhum (a bit on the sweet side though if you ask me) went down a treat and was still in time to tour the park and see some lemurs. The brownish ones.

Ambositra ("Boringtown, Madagascar)

If boredom could be exported and capitalized upon then Ambositra would be the richest town in the world. The guide says something like "all the fresh mountain air you can gulp" and that made me think that since I was going past there anyway, why not stop for a couple of nights and check it out. Except for the scenery and the half decent although seriously difficult mountain biking there is "rein chose a faire la."*

I tried and tried and tried but I just couldn´t make the "woodworking captiatl of Madagascar" interesting. Sure, the little wooden trinkets are hand made but so are pirogues and bricks and just about everything else in Madagascar where labour is cheap and the zebu cart represents cutting edge technology. I think it was a good eye opener for me and reinforces why I am not a writer for guidebooks. If I were under Ambositra I would write "this town sux. Don´t go there. Ok sure. If you really really really think woodworking is interesting and want to buy some mass produced trinkets carved and assembled from wood then stop by for lunch on your way through, but by all means don´t go out of your way". One thing that was cool was that I could pitch my tent in the yard of the hotel for only 2 euros a night and there was a baby tortoise sharing the yard with me I named him Georges because the Malagasy lady and child who welcomed me either didn´t understand me when I asked them his name or they ignored me.

28 Hours in a Taxi-brousse and the Search for Nosy Mistrio

Madagascar is ridiculously huge. So if you want to see the north and you are currently in Boringville, you either need to fly there, (rubbing fingers and thumb together indicating that it's a bit pricey) or suck it up and take to the road. 1,200kms is a long way to go on windy mountain roads at the beginning of the rainy season but in the end after leaving Snoozetown at 9:00 on Thursday I got to, where I thought I wanted to go, at 1:00pm on Friday, Ambilobe, gateway to the north and where the streets are paved with, well, nothing.

Before you read this just remember one thing. I am an idiot. Also, language barriers suck.

The guidebook says that Nosy Be, while amazingly beautiful with world class beaches and diving, is also infested with vazahas, and the island even has direct flights from Italy and France to facilitate vazaha visits. No thanks. Not my cup of tea. The guidebook also says that Nosy Mitsio has even better worldclass diving and hardly any vazahas but it is hard and therefore expensive to get to. BUT, the guidebook map has a dotted line indicating a ferry that goes from Grand Mitsio Island to a mysterious place called Ampasanantenina.** People in and around Ambilobe generally agreed with this and so they dropped me at a place called Port St. Louis. Language barrier issue 1) Is this where I catch a "bateau" to Nosy Mitsio. Technically no. it isn´t but it was where I could catch a pirogue which for some reason is not considered a "boat" even though it floats and has sails and whatnot. Ok then, I´ll go to Ampasanantenina where the "ferry" goes. I knew something was wrong. There was no road to get to this place. Wouldn´t a ferry carry trucks and supplies and stuff? No there was a tiny zebu path and some very surprised children and villagers when I arrived. Luckily, the villagers were friendly and welcoming and let me set up my tent on the beach and it was only after 20 mins or so when they tried to get money out of me. Luckily again they are not that smart and after about 2 hours of negotiations I made them think they got me when in reality I scored a 75% off "boat" trip to the island. One catch, it leaves at 3.00am. For me, I had just travelled 28hrs on a taxi brouse, then 2 hours in the back of a pickup truck, then walked for 90 mins and forgot to eat or pick up extra water and now I was going to sleep on a strange beach in the middle of nowhere and no one knew I was there and then wake up and get in some dudes carved out canoe and sail 31kms offshore to the big island where I had no hotel reservation or even knew if there were even any hotels.

When I got there, the hotelier said, "sure you can stay here (though I don´t think he was expecting guests!) but there is a problem with the food. There is none." What? I said. Well what about water. I mean I haven´t eaten or slept in a while and just spent the first 6 hours of the day in the sun on a "boat". Nowe have no water either. Oh man I felt like crying. I think he could see the deflated look on my face he instructed a guy to climb a tree and get some coconuts and I tell you what that was the best coconut I´ve ever had in my life and maybe even the top beverage ever as well. After I was sufficiently hydrated we established that the problem with the food was not lack of existence but lack of variety which was a much much better problem when you are in the middle of the mozambique channel on a tiny island that you arrived on unexpectedly and unannounced. Hell of a beach though. The guidebook got that bit right.

That night, one of the staff at the hotel, a bit wasted and talking loads of crap, asked me if I was married. I said no. He said was I interested in Malagasy women. I thought he meant generally and I said that they were generally quite pretty and smilely and friendly and then he left and I forgot about him. A while later, after dinner once I was in my room I heard a knock, and so there is this guy with "my choice" of two local village girls.***I had to decline. It was just too weird. Also the 3 carb meal (spaghetti, with fries and a side of rice) combined with no sleep for nearly 2 straight days had me a little on the tired side. Maybe it would have been a night to remember, as it was it was quite memorable, but I´ll never know and I´m ok with that.

Communication problem 2) yes i would like to "plonge" meaning dive. But they also use the same word to mean snorkel. I don´t want to fucking snorkel. I want to dive so I add "avec boutaille" (with tank of air) but for some reason this also got lost in translation. So instead of being taken to the dive store. I was taken to a remote smaller island to snorkel where I felt quite lucky that they didn´t just leave me on it and take all my stuff. After explaining that under no circumstances was I going to leave all my bags and money with my priogue crew while I go snorkeling off a deserted island we headed inland.

Dave is a big stupid idiot: right so we sail all afternoon and get back to the mainland. Port St. Louis where I originally landed. It´s only 27 kms from Ambilobe. If it comes down to it I´m a hardened backpacker and I´ll walk it. (What? that is stupid! don´t be an idiot!) Oh look it might rain. I´ll just get my rainjacket out. That should help. (You are a retard) Ok I´m off I´ll just start walking by myself in rural Madagascar on the verge of darkness on a sunday when there are no taxis this should work out fine (It is a wonder you were´nt mugged and left for dead!). Right well anyhooo, long story short after a brief conversation with a complete physcho I managed to pay a ridiculous but worthwhile sum to a private taxi driver (guy with a car) and just as I got inside it started to piss down rain like I´d never seen before. And lightning. Holy crap the lightning. What great weather this would have been to walk 27 kms with over 30kgs of luggage. Theres roughing it and then there is being stupid. This was a million miles into stupid.

Result: Nosy Mistrio found. Dives completed: 0. Amount of stuff I had left:all (what a ridiculous miracle)

Diego Suarez

This place is like a proper city. Except for the number of old french expats with young Malagasy women****, the city makes sense and is tourist friendly with lots to do. While updating the blog I met up with Nero the poker instrcutor at the local casino and stopped in a couple of times to play. I also climbed my very first real rock face to a ridiculous height of 28m, hung out at the pool at the Grand hotel working on my tan and chilling out, mountain biked about 150kms, climbed French Mountain, would have taken windsurf lessons but a group of russians had booked months in advance for the time I wanted to do it and went on an amazing ATV excursion with my new ami and the coolest guy in Madagascar, Garcia.

Garcia welcomed me into his house for dinner 2 times and showed me the town and even introduced me to lots of ladies (he´s quite the ladies man you see) on halloween when I went out on the town dressed as, yes, Chuck Norris, even though no one else was celebrating halloween.

I ended up making the 1,200km trip back to Tana in time to hang out in the Capital on a Sunday when everything is closed and then got wasted and made my flight to France just in time to pass out and wake up mid flight with my first case of African traveller´s diarreah.

All good now though. Starting the climb of Cerro Aconcagua on Sunday, 6,962m (22,841ft) of Argentinian Mountain. I´ll wave from the top on Dec 8, 9 or 10 so have a look up.



*A phrase that I would repeat over and over while drunk and generally badmouthing Ambositra to my new Malagasy friends when one of them said they were going there. The enthusiam with which I trash talked the town was received with much hilarity and it became a running joke for like a week (ie. What´s going on? I don´t know but I hear there´s lots happening in Ambositra.)
**Amazing that I remembered the name as it´s been about 3.5 weeks now but I asked just about everyone I encountered if I was going the right way.
***He said they were 20 but who the hell knows.
****I still can´t decide whether to cheer them (nice work buddy!) or feel sorry for them (they{re only with you for your money!) I think the fact that none of them were ever smiling despite living in a tropical paradise with enough money to live like a king with a beautiful women on their arms has me leaning towards feeling sorry for them.

Madagascar 7 - Chooo-choooo! All aboard the FCE (Also known as taking the long way through Banana country to get to Parc Ranomafana)

I'll be honest. Originally I had no interest in riding in Madagascar's only passenger train the Fianarotsoa Cote Est (FCE). It's one of those things that they build up in the guide books as being a must do but I could see right through it. Or I could, until some people who had already done it sort of convinced me that it was worthwhile and since I didn't have an agenda anyway I figured I'd give it a go.

I have a couple of problems with this train though:

First, It starts in a city that I had no reason to go to (other than to catch the train)* and ends in a city that I had no desire to go to** and that was a day's travel out of my way (to the extent that I had a "way" not really having a set travel itinerary and all).

The second problem I had is that is overhyped and swarming with vazahas. Actually that's two separate problems but one is a consequence of the other.*** In the description it notes that it traverses "some of Madagascar's most scenic countryside". Having already been here for six weeks I've seen a lot of the countryside and while I can't argue that the view from the train wasn't scenic, it was no more or less scenic than you can see in many other places (and how exactly do you rank whether one amazing landscape is more or less scenic than another anyway?)

It goes on to boast that it "offers the traveller magnificent vistas". Ok this may be true if you had a window seat (which I didn't) and it was on the north side of the train (nope again) then you could hang your head out the window and partake in some vistas and also block the view of all the other passengers such as those sitting on the aisle on the south facing side of the train (ie the side where there is just a sheer rock wall along which they built the railroad of which my view was splendid thanks).

The other descriptive words they use are "liesurely" to describe the pace (aka slow) and "lots of opportunity to enjoy the bustle of the 17 village stations as they come alive with the whistle of the train" (ie the train stops a lot).

As a result of this exotic sounding description the train is swarming with tourists. Not the young hip, bearded backpacker types that I like to socialize with (or non bearded in the case of girls) but the older french vazaha's who wear out of context adventure gear like those old photography vests and big hiking boots even though they now have digital cameras and are presently taking a train. They all go in the first class carriages. Wanting to distance myself from that kind of pre-packaged group travel I booked in 2nd class.

So to recap, the train starts in a city I didn't want to go to in the first place, travels extremely slowly and stops frequently and I can't see the vistas because I'm stuck on the aisle seat on the non vista side of the train having got up at 5:30am in time to get my ticket (oh yes that was the other thing I meant to complain about) and then arrives at a city that I don't really want to be in at night time with no hotel reservation.


Hmm, how did I cope with this situation. Get pissed I bet you're thinking. Well that would have been possible because as I said the train stops a lot. And actually, now that I think about it you could turn the FCE into an all day drinking game/pub crawl. If you had a beer at each of the 17 stops you would be pretty wasted when you got to Manakara (especially since beer comes in big 650ml bottles). But then if you saw the toilet in the 2nd class compartment the last thing you'd want to be doing is drinking more fluids. So no I didn't get drunk until I arrived.

Instead I took photos, lots and lots of photos. Photos of the train stopped, photos of it moving, photos out the window (once people got off at about the 5th stop so I could actually take in a bit of vista action) photos of people on the train, photos of people at the station, photos of chickens crossing the tracks and photos of the biggest most prehistorically huge bananas I've ever seen in my life. Then I switched to videos because hey why not capture some of the sounds as well? If I could have somehow captured the smell of the deisil engine it would really be a collection for the senses (the bananas taste the same so just eat a banana while you check this out for the taste sensation).
The other thing that helped me pass the time was expaining to the locals, especially the kids, how my gps works. Basically, despite having read the wikipedia article explaining how the gps works when I first got it, I have no clue. Malagasy children can't seem to sense BS though so I just started randomly explaining the things I did know (like how many kms were left to where the GPS map thinks Manakara is (it's 5kms from where it actually is btw) and filling in the rest with technical jargon and making sure to pronounce "satelite" with an appropriately authentic sounding french accent.
Once I had a few photos of the beard out the window I felt like the whole train journey was actually worthwhile. After all as long as I got one good keeper beard photo with the train in the background that I can use to encapsulate all of the travels of Dave and his beard and from that perspective I was right it was worthwhile. Hell it was worthwhile just to see those giant bananas.

But then I got to Manakara. Adrien, one of my group members from the Pic Boby ascent told me that it was worthwhile going there because it had a kind of end of the world feeling. Didn't sound all that great to me. I'd been trekking and taxibroussing around for the past 10 days I think some right smack in the thick of the world would be pretty awesome right about now.

Since I was pretty sure I didn't want to go there I had consulted the guide book and just figured I'd get the first pousse-pousse guy to take me and my bags to any hotel he could recommend that might have a room. We agreed the price up front but as I didn' have the correct change he decided to up the price to match the currency I did have (double) on the grounds that the first hotel that he recommended was full and he took me around the corner. I argued that I agreed the ridiculous price that he quoted in the first place on the understanding that he would actually find me a hotel and would therefore save me a lot of hassle but then he brought his kids into it and the hotel wouldn't make change for me so I had to suck it up and pay the man his £3.50. Consulting the guide later saw that there was actually a big article warning against the Manakara pousse-pousse drivers and how ruthless and relentless they were.

Even though a ride from the train station on the outskirts of town to find a hotel in the dark might well be worth way more than the price I paid in London or elsewhere in the world, in Madagascar I should have paid about £0.50 for it and it is the feeling of getting ripped off which starts to wear on you after a while and makes you stop returning peoples smiles knowing that they are almost always followed by some kind of request or scheme for you to give them money.**** I deliberately didn't take another pousse pousse ride just out of spite even though it would have been much easier. On my way out of town I walked with my pack the 4kms to the taxibrousse station passing pousse-pousse after pousse-pousse explaining them my distaste for their dishonest business practices and arguing that since I was generally younger, stronger and fitter than them it really didn't make sense for them to be carrying my stuff anyway. Photos: 1) Train leaving on time (ish) from destination 2) I like this one. You can't really see the red of the engine but you get the kid's head in the foreground looking out. 3) Why did the chickens cross the tracks? Don't know. In this photo they're more walking along side the tracks but it still seemed a bit risky if you're a chicken .4) This one didn't turn out so great partly due to my overwhelming enthusiasm for the pre historic bananas but it's the best one I have that really show's how huge they are. 5) A random one after the bananas were put down and lots of people got off the train at the rest stop and the kid was sleeping. 6) Self portrait out the window of a moving train with the left hand. Let's see you do that with an SLR eh? 7) Ok so Manakara does have a kind of end of the world/old west feel about it. It doesn't mean I'm ever going there again now does it? Just look how lazy those pousse-pousse drivers are! Also I've locked in photo number 5 for the beard chronicles and can save the rest of my train pics for the trans-siberian.



*After spending 2 days there because the Thursday train was cancelled I realized that I also had no desire be there either.
**This was reinforced after I was actually there and had no desire to be there.
***It is overhyped DONC it is swarming with vazaha's. Merçi Simon R. pour la leçon français.
****Actually I smiled but just a sarcastic smile often accompanied by an some english that I know they don't understand. What? don't understand eh? Well I don't understand Malagache so welcome to my world. No "argent" for you. BTW friends beware due to the lack of speaking english I have a lot of pent up sarcasm that will need to be released when I get back so by no means interpret that as me complaining or not enjoying my madagascar experience

Madagascar 6 - Park Andringitra and Pic Immarloto...Pic Imaritooloo....Pic Boby!

Thought I'd had enough of slogging my pack up ridiculously big mountains I bet? Think again.

From Isalo I continued NorthEast to the considerably nicer Ambalavao. I really didn't know if this was a good move but geographically it's the closest town to the National Park Andringitra which features some amazing trekking and the opportunity to summit Madagascar's second highest peak 2643m per the guide book (2658 per the plaque and 2664 per the GPS altimiter).

I didn't really have an agenda except that I wanted to summit the peak, I wanted to not pay full solo trekking price and, once I found out about it I wanted visit the Zebu market where people march their zebu from all over the country to sell/buy or just chat about the latest zebu happenings.

I had to shop around a bit but managed to convince two of the local tour companies to get back to me later in the day so, as the taxi brousse had taken an unexpected two hour break in Ihosy for the driver to get a massage (or whatever) and it took me an while to sort out a hotel (even though it sometimes takes a while and sometimes costs a bit more - but not usually- I haven't yet made one advance hotel reservation except for the first one off the plane) I took an early dinner break.

Sitting there having a nice brouchette de zebu (the first of four straight) and a nice mini bottle of the local red wine (it had a maple leaf on the label so even though it was extremely average tasting I thought it best that I follow it up with another once I had some company). As I was finishing up a girl approached me and asked if I was looking for a group to go trekking. I said I was and we started chatting. A few minutes later another guy shows up and says the same thing. I waited nearly 2 full days at the guidebook recommended meeting place in Isalo and nothing. Now I'm at a random hotel that isn't even in the guide and apparantly all I had to do was order the local vintage red with an early dinner and we've got ourselves a group.

We sorted everything out and once again people were awed by my tenacity and willingness to voluntarily cary a ridiculously heavy pack over mountinous terrain. Though at this stage no one made reference to Chuck Norris and the shirt was really disgusting after three days of trekking in it. We managed to make our way to the park which, unlike Isalo, is in the middle of nowhere and is only accessible by quatre-par-quatre. But the sun was shining and we were all still on a high from having found a good group, me especially since the ultimate price paid was about 1/5th of the initial quote for me trekking solo.

Then two things happened: The first was, it started to rain. After 36 straight days of cloudless skys some big fluffy clouds were pushed up the leeward side (or is it windward) of the mountains and became big black ominous rainy clouds.

The second thing was that the Malagache trail system reared it's ugly head and started to beat me down as we ascended the 600ft from 1500 starting altitude to 2100 campsite altitude but hiking straight up a flight of stairs. Sure it's nice that they've gone to the trouble to arrange massive rocks in a sort of staircase up a mountainside but, as my storyboard drawing (not uploaded yet) illustrates, the preferred way to ascend a mountain when carrying a massive pack is in a nice meandering gradually inclining route. Not a straight line up the mountain. Fuck that was hard work. Our guide, also named David, kept really pissing me off too "Ca-va?" "Voulez-vous que je porte votre sac?" "Est-ce que je peux vous aider?"

"Listen mate, this is hard going, but I deliberately chose to carry this backpack because I'm training to climb a proper mountain in a few short weeks. If you fuckers could be bothered to carve out proper trails up your mountains I'd be able to keep up no problem. If you ask me how I'm doing one more time I will beat you until you won't be able to ask anyone anything ever again. Unless I tell you otherwise assume I'm fine. I know I'm going a bit slow but damit I was on time this morning, I waited for the car to get ready this (1hr) and for us to pick up the other group (.5hr) and for you guides to get your shit together at the park entrance (.5hr) so if it's getting dark that's your problem. I waited for you guys, to the extent it's necessary you can damn well wait for me."

I said all this with my eyes of course keeping my outward sunny disposition but man it was seriously hard work climbing stairs for 2 hours with a massive pack.


After a long 6 hour hike in the rain/fog/damp/drizzle we made camp and except for the fact that I was talked out of bringing my tent in favour if bringing a "two man" tent that actually turned out to be smaller than mine and much harder to set up, especially in the dark, I'd have another record time. At least the porters had hot water to drink (who needs tea bags anyway? When you're cold and wet you'll take what's on offer) and zebu brouchettes for dinner. Small ones but damn tasty ones.

Up early to climb to the summit I left the pack at the campsite as the staircase trail was just too steep (some of the steps were a good 2ft high!) but after all the recent heavy trekking I'd been doing this made me as spry as a baby lemur and I scrambled to the top with the front of the pack ( I actually had the stopwatch going but in my excitement at reaching the summit I forgot to stop it to check the time).

At the top we got to hear the story of why the peak is referred to as Pic Boby but is actually called something else. When a vazaha expedition team were charting the area in the twenties they decided that the first one to the top would get the mountain named after them. The expeditions pet dog Boby was the first one up. Subsequently the Malagache renamed it to, umj,; whatever it's called which I think means "Big ass staircase mountain that it is not recommended to take a heavy pack up lest your dog beats you to the top".

The knees and blisters got a bit of a serious workout on the descent but it's all part of the training. Once we got back to town and celebrated with a few beers and a zebu brouchette I was glad that I'd had such an intense stair climbing workout because that meant I could partake in all the zebu I wanted the next day at the market.
Photos: 1) Morning of the ascent. Now that I look at it I definitely notice a brotherly resemblance to Chuck Norris. 2) Rest stop at the top of the staircase. Man sitting and drinking water never felt so good. Note the pack is off and not in frame. 3) The group at the summit 1664m per Garmin. 4) DG at the zebu market "hmmm I like him but I've had zebu for three days in a row now I really think I should mix it up. Besides £150 seems a bit pricey. I'll give you 20 bucks for him. No? ok then, your loss.

Madagascar 5 - Park Isalo (subtitle: Strong Like Chuck Norris

Turning from the coast I decided that I would take in one of the many awesome National Parks that Madagascar has on offer. The first up geographically is the Park Isalo. The jumping off point for the trekking is the little town of Ranohira which sneaks up on you as the landscape changes at the 3:45 taxi brousse ride almost immediately from coastal scrub to massive boulders and rock massifs* and cliffs.

While waiting for the taxi-brousse to take me there I struck up a conversation with another vazaha named Alvaro. He is from Spain and is an independent film maker making a film about a children's choir who had travelled to spain and have now returned to Madagascar. Oh ya! I said well I've quit my job and am travelling around the world for 7 months so in your face starving film-maker! Well no, not quite like that but we didn't speak much until during the journey until the taxi-brousse stopped for lunch. Afterwhich he randomly goes into his bag and pulls out a couple of stickers and gives them to me saying that his freind started this website and I should check it out and pass around these stickers. That prompted a discussion about last year's Project Chabal and him telling me that only 3 days previously he had just shaved off his really thick and bushy beard (he's spanish remember).

The site is www.wearbeard.com. It is a simple site with a simple message. The message is in the address. I think Alvaro and I will be lifelong friends now. Go see his movie when it comes out.

Anyhoo, the town of Ranohira is located on highway N7 about 2kms past where the GPS map says it should be located. This was a bit of a cause for stress for a few seconds until I remembered that per real life the only road (ie the one we were on) does indeed go through the village and that while the GPS is awesome, the map of Madagascar that comes with it sucks.

When I arrived I was immediately greeted with an outrageous quote for trekking. Trekking and camping in parks is a bit pricey in Madagascar because it is mandatory to have a guide. And you have to pay the guide more per day the longer you want to go. And if you go for more than one day you have to feed the guide. And to feed the guide that means you need a porter to carry the food. etc. etc. etc.

I opted to head to the guidebook recommended Momo-Trek where I thought I'd try and wait for a few other stragglers to show up so we could form a group and drastically reduce our per person costs. This didn't end up happening but it did give me a couple of nights to chill out and pitch my tent in the back garden for the very reasonable sum of about £1.20 per night. He would get me back though wen I caved and paid £120 for a 3 day, 2 night trek through the park solo because I don't like waiting and there is nothing to do in Ranohira and I can only run back and forth on the 8km trail from Momo Trek to the park entrance as hell run/Aconcagua training so many times before getting bored of it.


The fee includes a personal guide who speaks English ( or is learning it anyway) and porters to carry my stuff while I trek. One problem. I'm climbing a mountain in November. A very very big, Argentinian mountain. One that I will have to carry my stuff up all the way without the aid of a porter and with all this sitting around in pirogues, taxi-brousses and beaches I haven't really been training all that seriously for it. ** So I said ok, the porter can carry my food, but I'll carry my other stuff. All my other stuff. Except for a select few things that I took out (like my camera charger etc and a few redundant articles of clothing) I was carrying my full complement of tent, sleeping bag, mask, snorkel, 9 weeks worth of clothes, first aid kit, extra water, etc.

Apparantly not many people opt out of the porter option. This, combined with the fact that the Chuck Norris shirt had made it's way to the top of the rotation had the people saying things like: "You are strong like Chuck Norris" and "You could be Chuck Norris'brother". Awesomely, this kicked off a chain reaction where no fewer than 3 random people over the next few weeks have come up to me and started telling me that I looked like Chuck and talking about his movies while I wasn't even wearing the shirt and they had no way of knowing the shirt even existed!

Malagache dude:"Hey you look like Chuck Norris. You know from the movie the Delta Force"
Moi: "Yes I know and nevermind the Delta Force, what about Missing In Action 3: Braddock's Revenge? What a film eh?"

I've never really thought about it before and explicitly it's never been a goal of mine but getting unsolicited comments comparing me to a former karate world champion and general all around tough guy is pretty cool. I'm going to email Alvaro's buddy who looks after the wearbeard.com website and get him to add this to the list of cool things about wearing a beard.

With somewhere in the 20 - 25kg of backpack the trekking through the park was hard going. Annoyingly the park caters to all age groups so there are day trippers with no packs, old French ladies in tennis shoes walking the same trails and that would have taken some of the adventure out of it except my guide, Lily had so much enthusiasm and was so happy that he could finally practice his english and that I was correcting him and giving him pointers (see below) that he was taking us off piste going out of his way to find lemurs ( and we did see some as well. the fuzzy white ones they call Safikas which are awesome jumpers which is why my photos aren't the best). The problem with this though was, that I'm carrying let's just conservatively call it 20kg of baggage up steep hills and now there is no trail so I'm going through thick forrest as well and the 12km that he originally estimated our route was, by the day's end a whopping 27.5.

Man I was shattered after that day. I must have been on auto pilot though because I set a new tent setup record of 7:07.

Earlier in the day, at the first rest stop in fact, there was a group who had already stopped there who were doing the exact 2night 3 day trek. This meant that, effectively I was travelling with a group even though I paid a premium to travel solo. This kind of sucked since the premium is significant. But once it was already paid it was good to have a group to socialize with and collectively look like vazahas trying to perfect the Malagache dance around the fire.

Much to my surprise I even managed to stay up and listen to the authentic Bara Tribe guitar band that our guides had invited to the camsite to play for us. The night wore on as they played authentic Malagache songs and rhythmically danced about the fire while getting wasted on some kind of home made rhum that could very well have just been lighter fluid in a big bottle. I skipped the getting wasted part but my guide did not.

Feeling pretty damn good after a solid night's sleep I was ready to go. I was happy to hear that on this day we would tackle the steepest hills straight away instead of last like we did on day one. My guide however was walking very very slowly. I kept catching up to him and bumping into him. I thought this was a bit unuusual because I was carrying 20 kg and he was carrying squat. I thought he was doing this deliberately, you know, walking slowly so that the guy with the heavy pack could keep up so I tried to explain to him that with such a heavy pack it actually expended less energy to just keep going so I could maintain my forward momentumn than if we kept stopping and starting all the time. Anyway as it turned out he was just hung over and I gave him no end of grief about his drinking problem (Ranohira is isolated with nothing to do so people drink a lot) and then when he suggested that I was being holier than thou and lecturing him (because the two nights before we left on the trek I also didn't drink anything) I shared with him my recent Ifaty Rhum Adventure to gain back some common ground.

The absolute best part, aside from summiting the mountain (see photo) was that after hiking for about 4 - 5 hours we arrived at the best oasis in the world (the last 90 mins of which felt like eternity because my hungover guide kept saying 20 more mins, 20 more mins), The Cascade des Nymphes. It was particularly amazing because it was well earned but also because it was down in a lush ravine with ferns and pine trees and a waterfall and it was refreshingly freezing cold which felt amazing on my blistering feet. All of this was in stark contrast to the arid and rocky terrain we had trekked through all morning.


I must have been too relaxed from the oasis because I didn't set any records setting up my tent but I did get a comment from a passing Canadian (from Baffin Island of all places) who said "Hey. You have my tent" to which I replied "Bullshit. You have my tent." It was well received because I said it in the kind of top-gun immitation way but really I had bullshit on the tip of my tounge because, as I mentioned earlier I had been giving Lily english lessons.***

Along the route that afternoon Lily points out some dimpling in the rock sort of in a triangle formation that is clearly due to errosion. He starts telling me that it is a fossilized dinosaur footprint and has a big story attached to it. I tell him in plain english, "with all due respect my freind you are full of shit" and went on to explain to him for the next hour or so all the different permutations and combinations how you can tell someone that they are talking complete crap. I went slowly and repeated myself a lot so hopefully a little bit will stick with him and he'll be calling people out on their bullshit remarks with the best of them.

After we returned and I bought the crew a beer I presented Lily with my "Say to vodka, Nyet" shirt that I got in Russia**** as a cadeau reminding him that it said say no to vodka and didn't specifically mention rhum so I guess he could continue getting pissed on rhum as much as he liked since it wouldn't violate the warning of the shirt. He liked that idea and to celebrate we all went out and got drunk on beer and rhum arrangé.*****

Photo 3: I tried and tried but couldn't seem to photographically capture the icy cold water dripping from my beard as I would have liked. This was about the best I could do.

*This, as near as I can figure is like a cross between a cliff and a mountain. Sort of a really tall flatish rock face that is not quite a mountain per se but merits a name of its own.
**I did run on the beach several times while waiting for the pirogues and while hard work is hardly the same.
***Also when I asked her what her best time was, still proud that I set the record just the day before, she said she'd never timed herself. She doesn't deserve my tent!
****This is consistent with my strategy for giving away clothes: only give away ones that are easily replaceable (lonsdale shirt to the kid in Ifaty, Canada soccer shirt to Claude at the Auberge-in in Ifaty who clued me in on some of the missing details of the rhum adventure, vodka shirt). Even the chuck norris shirt and shirt day shirt are actually quite easily replaceable but it would take a pretty hot girl to get me to give those up.
*****I'll explain what this is in a future blog.

Madagascar Response to Comments

It's Just Easier this way...

Catharine
So wait a minute. Matt's login is 'Matt in the Hat' and yours is 'Cat in the Hat'? Married people make me puke.

On the jewelry front um ya well the thing is the street jewelry in third world countries is crap. I mean really not very nice or particularly interesting. I picked you up some crap so you can see for yourself but just to forewarn you. Madagascar does have an exceptional array of rare minerals and gemstones that can be made into jewelry but Matt in the Hat can buy you that.

What up? No congratulations for finishing the book? No 'I hope you liked it' or that sort of thing? Don't tell me you have some kind of life outside of following my blog! Preposterous!

Matt
I see you changed your name back to just Matt Gerhard. Well don't think I didn't notice. Good point on the tent video not emphasising the beard. Don't worry though the beard is prevalent in many a photo. As of writing it is 79 days old. A full 12 days older than the 2007 beard at it's longest point and pushing for 90 which I think deserves a celebration. Shaving to facilitate diving clearly was not an option.

Also with regards to your pousse-pousse business I think you may be onto something as it would be a novelty in Cambridge, ON. Watch out for the downhill bits though. Tip: You might not want to wear flip-flops while doing it. Some times it works and other times- well if you've seen someone streaking downhill, trip over their flip flops, do a face plant and take their pousse-pousse up the ass, well, you don't want to see it again that's for sure.

Friedy/Billsy
Thanks for all the comments. Keep em coming.

As for tent setup it really is quicker with one person especially when the other person doesn't know the tent and doesn't speak your language. However point taken. But it really is hard to tell a well meaning priogue pilot who thinks he's being nice and helping to "fuck off I'm taking a time lapse of the first time in years that I've sent up this tent." I still think it works well as a video. I'm down to sub 7 mins by the way and that is at a standard pace. If I really rushed it I think I could crack 5.

Regarding what I like to call the "prostitute paradox" If you think a girl is a prostitute and ask her if she is if she says yes then you're not interested because she's a prostitute and if she says no then she's not interested because she's insulted that you thought she was a sleazy prostitute. But if you just assume she is a prostitute and stay away from her you get the same amount of action (ie none). But if you assume she isn't a prostitute you could be in for a big surprise when she either asks you for money after the fact or she doesn't even bother and she just waits til you're asleep and steals all your money. It's sort of like the risk reward tradeoff in finance.

Sean
As my sole "follower" I would have thought you'd be down with some comments man!

Sandberg
You stole my thunder a bit on the Chuck Norris Shirt. See next blog where it features prevelantly. Also I read a newspaper from London a few weeks back noting the doom and gloom in the economy and then I put the paper down and went to watch the sunset over a mountain and instantly forgot about it.

Al
Yes it is the same mask that I purchased for the outrageous sum of CAD 125 in 1995 when we were in Tobermorey doing our Advanced Open Water. Oh wait, you didn't write any comments. Nevermind then.

Others
Hope you are passively enjoying the stories from Mada. I'm nearly 3 weeks behind but I've come to the north where it's not only ridiculously hot but also humid so i can see taking some afternoon refuge by the computer to get up to date and start organizing the next leg of the voyage.

Madagascar 4b - Buying Vaseline and Diving in Ifaty

Buying Vaseline

Right. Well. Anyhoo. It's one of those things. If you have facial hair and you are a diver you need a way to make your mask form a seal around your upper lip which, at this point in the story has around 43 days worth of hair on it. From my days leading up to being crowned the Cayman Islands Man of Movember 2005 I am well versed on the various techniques the most effective being a little bit of vaseline on the moustache usually does the trick.

Vaseline is available everywhere here. They have lots of little stands that sell essential things like cold beer, water and various snacks and batteries etc. And after the first one where I purchased the vaseline I realized it was widely available in all subsequent shops. I'm not sure exactly what they use it for but a lone traveller asking for a some vaseline earned me an extremely quizzical look from the old lady minding the shop so maybe the common uses are universal after all.

Diving in Ifaty

There is a really good story about how on Tuesday morning it was too rough to go diving so I went snorkling instead and saw my first ever octopus and then got ridiculously pissed on the local rum with a guy who I had met in Morondava nearly 2 weeks beforehand. But I'm not writing about that here. Ask me later. Most of the details have been filled in now so it makes a nice little tale.

Wednesday morning was a rough one. I barely remember the dive except to say that I had a lot more fish following me than the other divers. Here is the after photo:



Thursday through Saturdays dives were much nicer and saw all kinds of fish and stingrays and eels and some very healthy reefs in crystal clear turquoise tropical water of the Mozambique Channel. I especially like the fish they call the lion fish. They are like the bad guys and the angel fish are like the good guys in some kind of underwater reenactment of the starwars saga.

Generally Ifaty was just a nice place to spend a week so I did. When I wasn't diving I was generally relaxing on the beach reading or napping, careful to give my sensitive skin a break from the intense mid-afternoon sun. I exchanged all the books I had read to Richard the dive-master for 2 of his books. As the version of shock doctrine was missing 100 pages in the middle it was suitable karma that the spy novel I took from his collection started at page 165.

It really is quite stressful all this travelling. After 5 days on the beach and having no clear plan of attack for my remaining 4 1/2 weeks in Madagascar I was really starting to feel the pangs of stress and anxiety so I had to take a break, head into the shade, have a beer and contemplate my next move.

Madagascar 4a - My First Taxi Brousse

My First Taxi Brousse

Taxi-brousse just means bush taxi. It is public transportation to remote areas and can be anything from a tiny 4x4 to a massive coach albiet one that is about 30 years old and is jacked up and made into a 4x4. My first one was somewhere in between with a capacity of about 30 people though there really is no maximum capacity for a Taxi Brousse. I don't have any good photos of a taxi brousse yet but I'll make a point to take some.

We had made the decision to abort the pirogue-de-mer and return to Morombe. My crew helped me secure a place on the next taxi-brousse which departs Morombe at 1:30am and arrives in Ifaty at about 1:30pm. On the grounds that my pirogue "taxi" had not actually successfully gotten me to my destination but, in 8 days of travel only about 1/2 way there I insisted they pay for it but accepted that they pay 1/2. Also, I refused to pay for a hotel for the night since, how hard can it be to stay up until 1:30am anyway.

I'm taking this bit directly from my travel notes it was 2 1/2 weeks ago on Sunday night/Monday morning of 29 Sept.

10:30pm Sunday night - Not wanting to shell out the AR 15,000 on a bungalow (£5) I decided to stay up. But since I had read all my books and wanted to save my ipod batteries for the actual taxi brousse I was sitting around the crabe hotel dining area alone in the dark I grew bored and tired. Robert had suggested that if I wanted I could use the sail to relax on so I layed out on the "grace de dieu" sail which was covering my stuff. At 10:30 Robert and a girl come back to the dining area and also not wanting to shell out on a room took the sail back from me and made a little bed on the cement floor. I couldn't believe it! I had nowhere to go and 3 hours to wait. For all I know Robert and his girl were naked and fucking in the sail of a sea pirogue not 10 ft from me. Luckily either he didn't do anything or they were unbelievably queit but he did make some rude gestures and use some phrases that he had tought me the night before which I hadn't fully understood but I knew were rude.

This is not exactly how I envisioned the "pirogue de mer adventure" ending when I signed up 20 days earlier.

Anyway, I set my alarm for 1:00 because now I really did not want to miss this taxi-brousse. As I'm heading out to the road to check out the situation (all was dark) I encounter a guy engaging me in conversation - at 1:00 am on a Monday morning. I mistakenly assume he is from the taxi-brousse come to help me out or make sure I was up or whatever. No. He was just another pirogue captain staying at the hotel - pissed- trying to solicit my business as he was taking his pirogue south towards Ifaty the next day if I was interested. Fuck that! I've had enough piroguing thanks anyway buddy and I'm definitely not waiting until tomorrow when I've got a taxi-brousse coming to pick me up in a few minutes.

Well since they should be there any minute I figure I want to be waiting for them so I bring my stuff down to the road. It is really really dark. There are maybe three lights on in the whole city.

I'm waiting, I'm waiting. Every now and then a drunk person on their way back from a night out stumbles by but I'm not sure if they see me because it's so dark. 1:30 comes and goes. 1:45. 2:00. 2:15. At this point I'm very terrified that I've missed it. But I can hear a big engine from across town. That must be the taxi brousse right? I can see tail lights. Is that it? I've got to find out. I pick up all my stuff. Hey if the Paris Metro was no big deal then Morombe in the middle of the night shouldn't be a problem.

As I get closer, I can see a guy standing on a raised platform loading stuff onto the roof. This is definitely it. Sweet. I'm going to make it. Robert can do whatever he wants to that girl now. I'm getting on the taxi-brousse. I'm approaching and am maybe 20m away when I hear the gears engage and it starts to pull away accelerating around the corner. I break into as fast a run as I can with a massive backpack on and a smaller one in one hand and a back of misc stuff in the other hand. I'm not going fast enough. I start yelling in frecnch "Attender moi!" "Taxi-Brousse!" "Attend!" But he didn't attend.

So now I'm really paranoid now. Scared even. Here I wait for nearly an hour for the taxi brousse to pick me up as agreed- or at least I thought we had agreed, the self-doubt is seriously creeping in now as to whether or not I understood the arrangement correctly and just as I'm about to catch it, 45 mins after the agreed upon time it drives away and doesn't even stop when I yell after it. GREAT! Another day in Morombe. Morombe, where the beach has more shit on it than grains of sand.

So as I pick up the pace I ask someone who happened to be awake "C'est le taxi-brousse?" just in case I was mistaken and that wasn't even it. He answered yes and helps me chase it down. As we round the corner however I can see that it's not going to be quite as hard to chase down as I thought as it is now stopped and is in front of the main depot. The same depot where I had bought my ticket earlier in the afternoon and is loading up more stuff up onto the roof and thre are only about 10 people on board.

Whew! I did make it after all. And there aren't very many people on board. I thought these things were supposed to be crowded. Maybe I will be lucky. About an hour later after 9 or 10 stops later I have a very uncomfortable and moaning about it chicken under my seat and a drunk guy's feet in my lap. Only 14 more hours to go until Ifaty.

Madagascar 3b - Sand, Salt, Sweat, Sunscreen and Doxycyclene

Sand

It's everywhere. It's not just on the beaches but everywhere else in the country too. Madagascar is an extremely arid country I had been here 36 straight days before I saw a drop of rain. It's hard to capture photographically the sensation of dust in your eyes when you are in a big city or sand in your underwear when you are in your sleeping bag so I didn't bother but it really does get into everything especially the tent but also shorts pockets and nooks and cranies of electronic devices like gps whose case is really not standing up to the rigors of Gerhard travel.

Salt

One thing that you overlook when you sign up for a week (or more) long trek down the coast is that there are not very many sources of fresh water. We bring all of our drinking water so if you want to bathe, you do it in the sea, which feels great at the time, really nice and refreshing but leaves you with no way to rinse of the salt. When you mix that with all the sand that sticks to you when you get out of the water you get a very interesting layer.

Sweat

It is hot here. No really. Like 35 degrees and not a cloud in the sky hot. Sounds awesome right? Well it is but when you start wishing that your pirogue crew would reposition the sail so as to provide you with some shade rather than positioning it so as to capture the wind then that means the intense sun is getting a bit uncomfortable. So to hide from the sun you put on some clothes. But then you're too hot so you start sweating. So then in addition to having sand and salt all over you, you're dripping with sweat. So the next day do you change to a different shirt because the one you were wearing yesterday has sand salt and sweat all over it or do you opt for a clean one which will really only be clean for a few mins before contaminated with the three S's.

Sunscreen

The fourth S. An absolute necessity and I'm glad I brought 2 bottles because it goes fast. It is very hard to apply when you're covered in the first three S's but I still goop it on generously anyway. I'm still getting sunburned though and that is because of:

Doxycyclene

This is the anti-malarial drug that I'm on. It has one good side effect - it helps prevent traveller's diahrreah which I'm happy to have avoided so far despite the fact that all the dishes I've eaten from on my travells have been washed with unpurified water in many cases directly in the river. It has one side effect that hasn't really concerned me too much, when you take it without food it sometimes makes you a bit nauseous but only until you eat some food. And it has one bad side effect - It makes you more sensitive to the sun. As someone who's lived in London for 2 1/2 years I haven't seen much of the sun for a while so when the pharmacist told me to apply lots of sunscreen she was telling me something I was well prepared to do anyway. What she forgot to mention was that it won't make any difference how much sunscreen you put on your hands, nose and forehead because it won't work and you will get burned there regardless. I was slopping so much sunscreen on my hands that they were white and I stopped rubbing it in altogether but was still getting burned.

It is very hard to hide your hands from the sun. Except maybe when you put them in your pockets. Except that because the top of my hands and knuckes are so sunburned it hurts like hell everytime you reach into your pocket to get some money or a handfull of sand.

I finally found the solution though 40 SPF Baby formula. If it doesn't have a picture of a baby on it. I'm not buying it. That and getting away from the coast into the mountains a bit.

Photos: 1) Doesn't really have anything to do with this blog as the lighting you can barely see that my hands are on fire but it does show off the awesome job of trimming the side of my beard with the scissors from my first aid kit and about an hour of patience the night before. It's even symmetrical! 2) Much better view of sunburned forehead and nose waiting for my 2nd taxi brousse in Tulear over a cup of coffee from a roadside stand.

Madagascar 3a - Pirogue de Mer and More Waiting, this time for wind

Mer means sea. A pirogue de mer therefore is a pirogue (recall that is a dug out canoe) that goes on the sea. It looks like this:

"Sailing from Morondava to Tulear down the west coast will take about 8-10 days and you should be able to see migrating whales this time of year. Also you'll be fishing for dinner from the boat and the guides will also teach you to fish with a spear. You will be camping on the beach or in tiny villages remote villages that are only accessible from the sea."

This is how the trip was sold to me and it was for that sense of adventure that I paid what I found out later was an approximate 100°/o stupid vazaha premium. Part of the problem was that I was a bit naive about how much stuff should cost and part of the problem is that I booked my whole trip down the river and to the tsingy park and in the sea for one price and I did not consider that there would be many layers of intermediaries between the person I actually paid and the people actually providing the service.

Don't get me wrong my crew of Felix and Robert were generally competant sailors (though see below for incident) but their veiw of their role and my view couldn't have been more different. I viewed them as an adventure company providing me with an adventure to remote areas that I could not reach on my own and with the opportunity to see and do new things (like whales and spear fishing). They saw themselves as a taxi service. Getting me to the destination as quickly as possible was their primary objective, with their secondary objective of preparing my meals and answering every question with "Ca depend du vent."

Ca depend du vent (It depends on the wind)

Another problem I had with my crew was that they didn't speak french very well. I mean sure they knew some sailing and seafearing type words that I didn't but generally they spoke less french than me. The one thing they did know was how to tell me that if we were to make any progress at all it would depend on the wind. I'm no meteorologist, but I sort of knew that already given that our boat was a sail boat that with the wind was capable of 23.6 km/h and without, with only paddle power and the deadweight of a vazaha and his backpack of about 3.6 km/h.* As the voyage is over 270 kms wind would be integral.

The other thing that threw me is that, all year long, prevailing winds are from the south in the Mozambique Channel. It appears that everyone who I told this story to afterwards knew that already. So travelling south (into the wind) in a canoe is a major problem pretty much every time they do it. Which is probably why their french is so good when it comes to discussing the wind and the clouds is that they get lots of practice.


You'll note from the picture of Felix's sail that it is in pretty rough shape. The reason being is that it is a multi purpose tool and not just a sail. It is used for everything from a beach blanket to eat dinner, (Felix in particuar was a messy eater but hey, it's his sail) to a makeshift tent using the paddles as poles to bedsheets to shag girls in, though I only found out about this behaviour much later.

Certain things were as advertised though. The beaches we camped on were either amazingly remote and isolated or integrated into a little village that didn't see many vazahas. Also we did see whales and dolphins although they were quite far away (the sound of whale breath travels a remarkable distance over water) and my "taxi drivers" were not about to chase after them just so I could get a photo (see what I mean about not being on the same page). What's more was the fresh seafood every night for dinner including just about every type of fish and on one night crab (I couldn't help thinking that it would have been better if we had actually caught the fish instead of buying it from the local fishermen or whatever but it was extremely tasty however we came upon it).


The other thing that was as expected was that there was lots of free time. Sitting on a boat with two guys who answer all my questions with either "oui", "non" or "ca depend du vent" gave me a lot of time go get through some books I had recently acquired through the normal backpacker channels of "Hey, so you're leaving Madagascar tomorrow, have any books I could read?" In the course of my pirogue de mer journey I read 5 books. I haven't been counting but I think that just might exceed the total number of books read since I moved to London nearly 3 years ago.

The Incident

On day 6 as we were approaching Morombe, possibly the most unpleasant city in Madagascar**, the guys decided, despite the waves to keep the sail up and make full speed ahead for land. One problem, we are in a pirogue and full speed ahead is faster than the waves, when the waves are bigger than the boat, and the boat is going faster than the waves in the same direction something very predictable happens although I was unable to articulate this in french at the time not knowing the words for crashing bow first into a massive wave and getting all of my stuff wet. I did happen to recognize this might be the case and managed to lift my small bag with all my important stuff and electronics over my head before the boat was flooded with about 8 inches of water only about 200m from shore. What happened to the Madagascar maxim "Mora, mora" (slowly, slowly) I was wondering?


So ya, 8 days of either sailing into the wind or waiting on the beach and hoping the wind would change I'd had enough and jumped at the chance to rid myself of my ship mates by taking their option of returning to Morombe and taking a 14hr Taxi-Brousse ride to the beach and diving destination of Ifaty.

Photos: 1) Felix's boat "Le Grace de dieu" in the foreground as another pirogue sails by; 2) my view of the sail from my seat in the pirogue; 3) One of many apparantly "abandoned ships" in the shipbuilding capital of Madagascar Belo-sur-Mer. They take over a year to build and I guess something came up in the meantime. 4) My stuff drying in the sun in front of the Morombe beach.

*Official garmin GPS speeds with the maximum being the max and the min being the speed the only time I checked when the lads were paddling.
**It lacks character, charm, is in the middle of nowhere, despite being a significant shipping hub doesn't have a harbour, houses on the beach mean animals and shit on the beach and possibly a direct result the brownest seawater yet.

Madagascar Culture 1 - Being a Vazaha

Well, I finally figured out what it was those kids were shouting at me when I was mountainbiking. It was "vazaha". I mean I could hear that at the time but I know what it means now. It means "stranger". It's sort of like the Mexican "gringo" but without the negative connotation. Children yell it out not as if calling me a name or telling me to get lost or anything but as more of a shout of curiosity sortof "hey, look there's a vazaha".

It's often accompanied with a friendly "bonjour" or a "ca-va?" or "commet s'appelles-tu?" or one time a "quelle heure a-t-il?". These last ones are all questions of course and at first I would answer and follow up with a question of my own but when I wasn't getting anywhere with that I soon realized that those are the first things you learn when you study french and the kids, assuming I am french as are a large portion of the tourists here, are just trying to use the french they know and are not actually interested in how I'm doing (a bit sunburned thanks) what my name is (it's Daveeed in French and sounds awesome when a hot girl says it) or what time it is (time to see if the electricity in the city of Tulear is back on so I can finish up these blogs and get on with things...).

Unfortunately in a lot of cases it's also accompanied by "Donne-moi" (give me). As in "Vazaha, donne-moi de l'argent" (money) or "un stylo" ( a pen) or "un bon bon" or the generic "un cadeau" (a present). All these are easy enough to refuse but sometimes I worry about such a young population (more than 1/2 the population of the entire country is said to be < 18 yrs old) growing up expecting free stuff from travellers.

One thing that I have an even bigger problem with are the adults expecting you to pay them for a service they are providing simply because they are providing it regardless of whether or not you actually want that service. Take for example the pousse-pousse (it is a rickshaw). In certain cities you cannot step foot outside of your hotel without being harassed by a pousse pousse driver wanting to take you for a ride. A lot of these towns aren't very big. You can walk clear accross town in maybe 15 mins. Also, part of the fun of going to new places is in wandering around and checking stuff out. So if I'm going for a walk over to a restaurant that is a couple of blocks away a driver will follow me all the way there with his pousse-pousse explaining how he has a family to support. My advice: be a bit more innovative. Think of a way to either make your pousse pousse an experience unto itself or get out of the well oversaturated pousse pousse racket altogether. I think people growing up expecting handouts are not encouraged to be innovative.

All this said of course I find the Malagasy people exceptionally friendly and welcoming and more than any other impoverished country that I've been to (Brazil) I feel extremeley safe. Panhandlers and street merchants generally take rejection well (sometimes more vocally disappointed than others) and I generally say "Salama" ("hello") to people on the street, sometimes just to pre-empt whatever it is I can tell they're going to ask me but often times just to say "hello". This will cause me to stand out a bit no doubt when I return to London.

Also it is ridiculously dark here at night. There are no street lights and often no lights at all except for generators so if you want to go out after 6pm it is in the pitch black dark of night. Again I've done this alot and have had no problems and still get lots of friendly greetings even at night time so all things considered being a vazaha isn't so bad.