Madagascar 2 - Pirogue-ing it down the River

Pirogue-ing it down the River

Right. Well, finally got going on my adventure. We left Antisirabe in a 4x4 which, in French translates nicely to 'quatre-par-quatre', which I happen to quite like now that I've used it a few times so I think I'll continue using in the all future circumstances where a 4x4 is required.

The groupe was a couple from Belgium, a couple from Australia who are towards the end of a year-long trip around the world (and the guy had a beard so we had lots to talk about especially since they were the first English speaking tourists I had encountered in Madagascar!)* - a french guy, who's girlfriend just happened to be in Canada at the time and myself.

Our guide, Bodo, was an energetic and affable girl but not particularly out going or forthcoming about relevant cultural details. After we chatted for a while about who was the better mountain biker, I contended that I was on the basis of my prowess the day before and she thought that she was, as she was younger and fitter. We called it a draw and didn't have much to talk about until I realized that the backlight on the GPS goes dark once the clock reaches the predetermined sunset time and I thought that that was a very cool feature and got pretty excited about it but no one else seemed to think it was quite as noteworthy. I knew then that we probably all weren't going to keep in touch after this voyage was over.**

The first leg of the journey involved getting from central Madagascar (ie. the 'Brick District') to the actual River which was quite a nice drive through some picturesque mountains. As we descended into darkness towards the lowlands I was informed that this region was renowned for being the hottest in Madagascar, regulary reaching > 40°C in the summer which thankfully was still several months away.

After a night in a hotel, we were up and ready to hit the river at 6:00am (the first of many early mornings which was quite a shock to the system after my London schedule the past couple of years). But, "mora,mora" as they say here which means "slowly, slowly" which is the tempo of all things especially negotiating pirogue's crews and analysing the various packing strategies.

A pirogue is a Malagasy dugout canoe. Despite the fact that it is ridiculously labour intensive to take a Balsa wood log and hollow it out and shape it into a canoe, labour is cheap, the know-how has been passed down for generations, and the raw material doesn't grow on trees but is the actual tree which are abundant. The result is a canoe that is about 1/3 longer than your standard canoe and about 50% tippyer. Tippier? More tippy? More prone to tip over in crocodile infested waters? Whichever.

Soon enough we were underway and our pirougeur was instantly feeling shafted about why he got stuck with the two guys with the most stuff resulting in very little draft and an even more unsteady vessel. Once out on the water, it struck me that we weren't exactly taking the most efficient route, like say pointing the pirogue down river and then going that direction. Instead we were taking a zig-zag type pattern which, even though I have no particular schedule to keep what with having no job and being on permanent vacation and all, still seemed a bit silly.*** I later found out that the zig-zagging is the result of the pirogueur "reading the river" which, with a sandy bottom and a reasonably strong current means that impassable sandbars would build up over time. Fair enough, but we still ran aground often enough that either our guy wasn't very good, or pirogue river navigation is just a crapshoot.


Now, there is definitely a sense of authenticity and adventure associated with taking an authentic local dugout canoe for 3 days down a river, through uninhabited or sparsely inhabited wilderness with the very real chance to see crocodiles, lemurs, bats and birds of all kinds. The fact that we mostly saw zebu (cows) and people (mostly children either fishing or bathing in the river) didn't really take away from the experience and we did see a handfull of lemurs and some sleeping bats but no crocs. At least I personally didn't see the alleged croc because I was reading a book at the time and missed him.

Generally the river passed by very peacefully with lots of time to soak in the attmoshpere, read a book or take a little afternoon nap. It was a nice stop under a big mango tree for lunch that made me realize there were a lot of other groups on the river and everyone sees the same sights and stops at the same "rest stops" (in this case a tree). It's possible that the guide book is correct in its assessment that it is more like a liesurely paced amusement park ride than a rugged adventure but with camping on the sandy river bank, watching the sun set, eating on a beach blanket by candlelight and sampling some home made flavoured rum**** it was still a great experience. Other highlihgts include:

• Being told to stop dipping my feet in the refreshingly cool river (it was over 30° with no clouds every day and nowhere to hide from the sun) because there's a chance a crocodile could bite my foot off. Funny that the children bathing in the river didn't seem to scared but I heeded the advice all the same;
• Swimming in a crystal clear fresh water waterfall, which really broke up some incredibly hot days quite nicely and of which I took some great photos;
• Visiting the "Welcome" village where everyone was super friendly and the children would get so excited just to have you take their photo and view their image on your screen;
• Also while exploring the village we wandered into someone's front yard, struck up a conversation, had a great time taking a few photos of them (one of the girls was quite shy and didn't want to be photographed to the great delight of her family) and then giving them a t-shirt and moving on. Just the cultural difference of it. Imagine going to visit texas for example, wander around some rural area, stumble into someone's yard and start taking photos of them. If you're lucky they'd just call the cops!
• African shower - Take buckets full of dirty river water, let it sit in a rusty barrell in an outhouse-sized room next to the outhouse, then give you a smaller cup to dump the water over your head as you "clean" yourself in the "shower". At least it got the dust off
  

*not counting the two middle aged American ladies hunting for souvenirs that I went out of my way to avoid a couple of days before
** I also made a note to text Matt and let him know what a nice little detail that was and how it was cool not only to see that it was actually dark but to have that validated by the GPS telling me that it was ok because it's supposed to be dark but the phone reception was sketchy that day and after that I forgot. Sorry Matt. Cool feature though eh?
***This revealed a particular frustration with my GPS unit in that it only measures distance in a straight line. So if we'd gone 1km on the GPS we actually would have travelled much much more in zig-zag units. There are ways around this, like resetting the trip meter each day which measures distance actually travelled or making a note of the total mileage at the beginning of each day but I was unwilling to take these extra steps as I had a lot of other stuff going on.

Photos: 1)Sign welcoming me to Welcome Village. 2)View from the pirogue for the tall tall grass on the banks of the Tsiribinhia Riviere. 3) Bored of reading I started playing around with the Camera.

Madagascar 1: Speaking French, Lack of Internet, Playing the Waiting Game and The Best Haircut Photo Ever!

Speaking French

Bonjour! That's what the kids in Madagascar yell out at me with a smile everytime I pass by. It doesn't get old and makes me feel like a rockstar; and with the beard and my new haircut (see below) you'd be hard pressed to argue! The fact that it's in french underlies how hard it would be to travel here if you didn't speak or understand at least a bit of french. Nobody speaks english. Not everyone speaks french either but it will get you far. Malagasy is the native language but one foreign language at a time, eh?

All my interaction with hotels, taxi drivers, waitresses, locals and tour organizers has been in french. Now, I'm nowhere close to being bilingual, but it seems that all that extra effort I put in keeping myself enrolled in "elective" french classes conjugating verbs and learning different tenses has me speaking in scentences with properly conjugated verbs in the correct tense. Or at least they are "correct" as far as i am concernerd.

My main problem is that my working vocabulary of non-verbs, useful things like nouns and adjectives, is terrible. This has me speaking in more scentence fragment type things like "Je cherche ________". Since whatever I'm looking for I don't know the french word for I end up going around in a circle like "I'm looking for something that is sort of like this thing that I do know the word for but is sufficiently different that it's more like that [point] or is [gesture until the person starts listing things that I might recognize]. Anyway it's working. I even had a conversation with a woman. Sure she turned out to be a prostitute but before I found that out we exchanged a lot of other information. And I understood her perfectly when she suggested that I pay her money for sex. "Um. non, merci". Followed by a quick look at the watch and dash out the door after failing to come up with a sasisfactory answer to the follow up question "Pourquoi, pas?"

Lack of Internet

The internet here is slow. It's like if you took Mom and Dad's dial up service that Matt used to use to access bulliten boards back before the internet was even invented and then watched it work in slow motion. You have to be extremely patient. I am not extremely patient but I am waiting for my ipod to charge (I thought that CDG airport would have all kinds of shops where I could get converters and bank machines and stuff before I left but I guess they save that for the terminals that service countries where you can get that stuff when you arrive anyway). Hence, I'm at 1:45 and have typed 4 paragraphs. Don't even get me started on why they moved all the letters on the keyboard around either but they used whiteout to relable it so that's nice.

Playing the Waiting Game

Much like the Carribean tradition "Cayman Time", stuff just happens here when it happens and the way it happens. I don't know if there is a similar phrase like "Temps Malagasy" or whatever but there should be. I've been waiting to commence a 3 week excursion to see all kinds of cool stuff for 3 days now. When told today that, rather than leave at noon as planned we'd be leaving tomorrow instead, I just knew it in my bones that the tomorrow's group would now be the maximum 6 instead of the five that it was two days ago. If I could have accessed the internet I would have bet everything I have! Sure enough, three of them turn up in Antsirabe (central Madagascar jumping off point for tours) with the message that two more would join us tomorrow. 6 total. I don't imagine I missed a big payout though. The odds would have been short as it was just too obvious.

In the meantime the waiting allowed me to take a scenic velo (mountain bike) ride to check out the country side which was stunning in that it was mountainy, with green trees and vibrant red clay that they use to make bricks from that only took me 15 kms further than I meant to ride because the scale on the crude hand drawn map I was using didn't measure up with real life. About 45kms all in a lot of it hard work back up what was a very comfortable and long downhill bit. As I flew or struggled past them (downhill/uphill) I got to hear lots of loud and friendly "Bonjours!" from all the kids plus lots of other stuff as well which I didn't understand but assumed was encouraging. What exactly all those kids were doing on the side of the road on a Friday afternoon breaking rocks, making bricks or playing in the dirt instead of being in school is another story altoigether.

The Best Haircut Photo Ever!

I took a photo of me getting a haircut that certain beard enthusiasts will love and others will just think "big deal it's just a photo of you getting a haircut". When I finally can upload it though remember, to add some context to the photo 1) I'm in freekin' Madagascar; 2) No, seriously, Madagascar; 3) I negotiated the haircut in french (as is the custom in Madagagascar - where I am); 4) I had been turned away by two other Malagasy "Coiffeuses" (possibly a made up word) on, I'm still unsure what grounds, but they were adamant that under no circumstances did they either cut hair (I would have thought that the sign with scissors was an indication otherwise) or would they ever cut my hair (fair enough, it's a free country. Or is it? Who knows?).

Anyway, no bother. Time is on my side. Hope you're checking this from work!

Bristol Festival of Kites and Air Creations

Back in May when down in Newquay with Flora and Dave, I had a go on their kite. It was a two stringer and way more sophisticated than the "single string wraped in a spool that was big enough to fit your arm into and wear like a sleeve" system that I had known growing up. It turns out it was much harder to fly as well. I was rubbish. However, rather than just give up and declare kite flying childish and stupid. I took a step back and ordered a single string panda kite online. Some of you may have seen me flying it in Shoreditch Park. The results had me bragging about my awesome new kite and my abilities to keep it flying for more than 3 minutes continuously on facebook. Shelly, a friend from Bristol, let me know about the annual Bristol kitefest and suggested that, now that I was a kite enthusiast I might want to check it out. She was right!

Even though it was largely, almost exclusively geared towards entertaining children, a grown man with the beginnings of an awesome beard wandering around taking all kinds of photos and time lapse videos did not seem to bother anyone. Thankfully.

Also they had a cool shop selling bandanas which, I thought, would really complement the beard nicely so with some awesome photos in the bag, a new bandana and some great tips on how to fly one of those really cool 4 string kites called the "revolution" should I ever be adventurous enough to get one, I declare my mission to the Bristol Kitefest a success.