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.

Madagascar 2d - The Wild Life - Lemurs, Chameleons and Zebu - Oh, My!

Lemurs

Except for an extreme close so as to crop out the barbed wire fence at the Croc Parq in Tana, I've yet to get a good photo of a lemur. I've seen lots of them but they just either won't sit still for me or get into some bad lighting or are just hard to pick out of the trees what with my limited point and shoot zoom. So my quest for a cracking shot of a wild lemur continues.


I wish I could elaborate on the lemurs that I've seen. The best I can do is say that that I've seen 4 brown ones, 4 white ones maybe 8-10 greyish browny type ones and 4 mouse lemurs, which are distinctive in that they are tiny and only come out at night and their eyes lightup bright orange when you shine a flashlight on them. Like I said though, I'm no expert. I did meet someone who is an expert (or soon to be when she wraps up her doctoral studies on lemurs) who is studying lemur health. I asked how the lemurs were doing health-wise and she said she'd let me know for sure when the results came back from the lab but indicated that they'd be doing a lot better if the Malagasy people would stop chopping down their habitat to build pirogues and villages and zebu carts.

Chameleons
While I didn't really realize this before I got here and read up on it chameleons are from madagascar. Literally. They don't exist anywhere else in the world at least not naturally. And it turns out that, counterintuitively, they are quite easy to find. Step 1) Wait until they are asleep. Step 2) Take a flashlight and go look for them.


Zebu
Sounds exotic right. Well actually it's just cows. But they are funky looking cows which have a big hump for some reason. They are everywhere, grazing in the fields, grazing in the cities, grazing in the desert. I mean the desert! What the hell are they eating. Who knows! They pull carts (as below), they get led around by a guy with a stick, they get led around by a leash on their back leg, they wander around by themselves. As I said they are everywhere. Culturally they are important for status as well and I'm always sensing that the locals are looking down on me as if to say "Look at that vazaha. He doesn't even own one zebu".

And what's more they are delicious! They are delicious on brouchettes, they are delicious as steak, they are delicious chopped up in a spaghetti bolognese. Zebus are possibly the best animal in Madagascar no question.



Other Animals
There are lots of other wild animals as well. On the river trip we saw all kinds of birds. Blue ones, white ones, greyish ones that looked like herons only smaller, some kind of eagley hawk type bird that I nearly get a good photo of every time but there is always some minor thing wrong like focus. That's not to mention the chickens that run around all over everywhere and wake me up every morning or the stray dogs that either follow me around or sneak up behind me and start barking and scare the crap out of me whenever I'm in a new city.

Madagascar 2c - Tent Setup Extraordinaire and the Trials of Having Other People Take Photos for Yo

Tent Setup

I first bought the tent in 2001 in advance of my first ever backpacking trip to South America. On that trip I was convinced I was going to be camping all over the place but ended up mailing home the tent in about week 3 having never used it. I'd used it occasionally since usually for weekend trips to Algonquin park or the like.

This time would be different. Pirogue trips down the river and soutbound down the coast, trekking in the national parks, even though it's largely unnecessary due to the (so far at least) widespread availability of camping gear for hire, it's nice to have your own stuff and it looks pretty cool too if I do say so myself.

As it turns out I've used it about 11 times or about 1/3 or the time which is not too bad. With more to come as I head away from the coast towards the national parks.

The big questions were: would I remember how to set it up? and how long would it take?
The answers, yes. And see for yourself:

My fastest time so far 8:35 and the longest nearly 17 mins due to some pesky wind that picked up near the end of the day. *

Other People's Photos


Well what can you say? If you want to be in any photos, sometimes you have to take a chance that they are not complete idiots. The above is a photo of me smiling sitting in front of my newly setup tent on the sandy banks of the river just before sunset.

*It is possible to embed the video in the blog but as i'd already uploaded it to youtube (took about 2hrs) before I found out that the blog does not support you tube. It's on the side video bar though.

Madagascar 2b- Tsingy Park & Group Travel

Tsingy Park

From the "Welcome" village we found out exactly why 4x4's (remember your bon pronunciation "quatre-par-quatre") are so essential to Madagascar land travel. The "roads" are mostly nothing more than dusty pathways through the sand and make a journey of about 80kms take all day even in the most rugged 4x4. As a result we had an entire day in a 4x4 which was fine by me as I needed a day out of the sun from which there was no hiding in the pirogue. It also gave me a chance to finish my book* as I have no trouble reading in a vehicle, even in the very back seat of a 4x4 on bumpy Malagasy roads and even though I dropped the book in the river and it was all muddy and had swollen to about twice it's original size it was still legible.


The Tsingy Park itself is really cool. There are ridiculously tall jagged limestone pinacles that appear sort of out of nowhere. You enter the park as though a typical walk through a normal forrest and then suddenly there are these huge black limestone spikes reaching towards the sky.
It occurred to me while hiking through that the caves were not all that dissimilar to the limestone caves in Rattlesnake point that I haven't visited since I was a kid although I think the key thing with the Tsingy is the sheer scale of the thing and the fact that it has been classified a UNESCO world heritage site further underlines that the Niagara Escarpment pales by comparisson.

Group Travel

The remoteness of the Tsingy park makes it even more remarkable that so many people visit. It takes a solid day in a 4x4 to get there and another to get back. It's a fairly rough ride but we kept seeing other groups everytime we'd stop for lunch in a little village or at the campground of the Tsingy park or at the various river crossings (judging by Malagasy infrastructure bridges haven't yet been considered in favour of the 3 car at a time ferry barge system which while effective is a hell of a lot slower).

It's kind of weird because generally while travelling solo I like to try to meet as many people as possible but once you're already in your randomly assigned group the tendancy was to hang out within the group and not intermingle too much with the others.

That said, long rides in a 4x4 (I bet you're already back to pronouncing it "four-by-four" aren't you - for shame!) over dusty and bumpy roads wears people out. Lots of irritiability and complaining by group members about every little thing that isn't exactly as advertised in the "brouchure" really reinforced my general disdain for group travel and though in general the group got on well and we enjoyed the experience, no tears were shed when we parted company in the coastal city of Morondava.




*Catharine! I finally finished it! The Dolphin's Tooth! You know the book that you gave me last Christmas! What an interesting coincidence that it's about a guy who quits his boring desk job to seek out adventure. Really interesting that I didn't find that out until I started reading it once I had quit my job and gone on holiday to Madagascar.