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.