Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Taxi-Brousse Travel

By now you’ve probably all heard me talk a lot about travel by taxi-brousse, but you probably don’t have a full sense of what that entails. Never fear, that’s why I’m writing this post – to detail everything you need to know about this uniquely Malagasy form of transportation.
First of all, the name: what does taxi-brousse literally mean? Answer: “bush taxi.”
Next, what kind of vehicle are we talking about here? Well, usually it’s a van with seating for two or three people besides the driver in the front row, and then at least three rows behind, each of which is meant to accommodate three to four passengers, but can often greatly exceed this limit, plus small children and babies on laps.
[This is not a hard and fast rule, however: when we returned home from Ambohimahamasina this last week we rode in a taxi-brousse that was actually a station wagon – and a rickety one at that! The sides of the inside of the car were re-covered with rough wood planks, there were no door handles (only holes where they used to be), and the transmission was actually a household light switch hanging from the end of a wire! Five people were piled into the front seat: the driver, two women, and two boys. We drove in this vehicle down the mountain from Ambohimahamasina to Ambalavao (the halfway point between Ambohimahamasina and Fianar) after a rainstorm: the roads were unpaved, muddy, and deeply rutted, and, as the windshield wipers didn’t work and the windshield gave you a view of the world that looked a lot like Monet’s paintings from the end of his life (when his eyesight was failing), the driver had to drive with his head out the window in order to see. In order to get the car moving (and periodically again throughout our drive) the driver and boys had to jump out and give the car a good push as the driver jiggled the makeshift transmission switch until the motor started running on its own. Nevertheless, we made it down the mountain, all in one piece!]
So who rides in a taxi-brousse? The answer: everyone! There is no public transportation here in Madagascar, so unless you own your own car or motorcycle, chances are, you’ll be using taxi-brousse for any travel that involves moving from one city or town to another. Men, women, children, babies, rich or poor – they all pile in, along with all their belongings. Large bags and cargo are strapped to the top of the van, covered with a tarp and tied down with rope. This cargo can include animals – don’t be surprised if you see ducks or chickens poking their heads out of a basket being loaded up or down from the top of your taxi-brousse! And also don’t be surprised if these birds ride inside the vehicle, too; women will often sit with their newly-purchased duck or chicken in a basket on their laps – squawking may ensue. But the noise goes so well with the screaming babies and too-loud music being blasted!
That’s another thing: the music. I have yet to ride in a taxi-brousse where the driver didn’t have the music on at full blast. Either from CDs or radio, It’s usually Malagasy music, which sounds very island-y, sometimes with lots of influence from American pop, rap, and hip-hop. Occasionally you’ll hear an American song thrown into the mix: on our first taxi-brousse ride from Tana to Fianar we definitely heard some Lady Gaga and Jay Sean’s “Down” (shoutout to Fall Breakout 2009 Pine Ridge team! Miss you guys!). If you’re sitting in the driver’s row at the front (which are usually the most coveted seat because of the extra leg room), you may experience temporary hearing loss!
This is why Francesca and I tend to favor the seats directly behind the driver – sometimes there’s a little ledge where you can put your bags directly in front of the row. Of course, watch out – the driver may put extra passengers (off the books, of course) on this ledge, leaving you awkwardly face-to-face with a complete stranger, his legs in between or on either side of yours!
In our experience this little ledge area has been problematic. Take, for example, our excursion to Ambositra, a few hours north of Fianar. Ambositra is known as le cœur de l’artisanat of Madagascar (the heart of artisanal crafts) and is known for its woodcarving and intricate marqueterie using precious woods. We decided to take a little overnight trip there, taking off one Friday from work, returning to Fianar the following day. The drive there was relatively painless: a mere 3 hours, as expected. But on the way back the next day that same drive took 5 (yes, FIVE) hours. Traffic? you ask. Ha, hardly! It took us five hours because even though all the seats of the taxi-brousse were technically filled up with people who had made reservations at the taxi-brousse station (on the books), the driver kept stopping and picking up and letting off people along the side of the road who just wanted to travel short distances along the way between Ambositra and Fianar. He pocked for himself all the money that these people gave him – none of it went to his taxi-brousse company. But I thought the taxi-brousse was already full!, you protest. Well, all these new passengers sat on the ledge just behind the driver, squashed in facing the people who had paid for their seats on the books.
To make matters worse, not only did we keep stopping to let these passengers on and off, we also stopped any time any passenger felt any bodily urge. One person was hungry and wanted chicken (if you’re traveling around noon and slow to a stop in a village a bunch of women will approach the vehicle with platters of cooked chicken, which passengers buy through the van’s windows and eat with their fingers, replacing the bones on the platter when they’ve finished!) – we stopped. Ten minutes later, another person was hungry for chicken – we stopped. Why couldn’t that guy just have eaten the chicken when the other guy did?! Then someone had to go to the bathroom – peeing in the open air on the side of the road. Sometimes women will even squat along the side of the road if they’re really desperate – you can see them right there, hiking up their skirts to do it. I don’t know what they use for toilet paper. That’s why for long taxi-brousse rides I try not to drink anything all day (that’s the plan for this Sunday’s drive back to Tana! Wish me luck!).
Oh, and another thing – NEVER expect to leave on time. EVER. You may make your reservation days in advance and be told that your taxi-brousse will leave at 7am. But this is the country of mora mora, remember, where the notion of time is a very flexible thing. Each time we’ve traveled by taxi-brousse we’ve waited between one and three hours for our taxi-brousse to leave the stationnement.
What am I to do during that time? you ask. Well, never fear, dear friends – there are a variety of shopping pleasures for you to indulge in during this wait of indeterminate length. You can buy a snack from any of the innumerable vendors who will undoubtedly approach you, even if you’re sitting inside the vehicle with windows and doors closed, ready to go (they will tap on the window to get your attention – may even try to open it from the outside!). For sale, you’ll have your choice of fruits (bananas, tangerines, little mysterious orange fruits whose identity I still have yet to determine), breads (sold out of huge sacks with a container of margarine and a knife on top of the bag, in case you’re so inclined), cakes (piled on trays and carried endlessly by men, women, and children around the stationnement – beware, Francesca saw a guy drop one of his cakes, pick it up off the ground, and replace it on the tray!), mofos (fried dough, often like beignets or donuts) and samosa-looking things (with dipping sauce). In Tana someone shoved a platter of sausages in my face – gross!
In addition to these food vendors, there are people selling cheap electronics, watches, sunglasses, belts, very ill-made baskets, and small toys. And then of course some people are just begging.
At some stationnements de taxi-brousse there are little hotelys and gargottes which are like quick-service restaurants/snack bars. Some are quite suspect-looking, and I advise you to proceed with caution. However, there’s a great little hotely at the stationnement in Ambalavao which we’ve eaten at several times. We were introduced to it by Malagasy friends, who assured us it was quite clean and safe to eat there. We took the gamble and fell in love. Vary sy loaka – traditional Malagasy rice (huge portions!) and sauce (chicken or zebu in broth; I ask for just peas or beans and des breds and they always oblige) – for very cheap, along with the complimentary mug of steaming ranon'ampango (which, strangely, I don’t mind drinking now). On the table you’ll see a strange dark brownish-greenish stuff – that’s piment, a super-spicy paste not for the faint at heart! I love putting it on my rice – keeps my stomach warm for hours afterwards – but the one time I put too much I ended up with tears streaming down my face!
Alright, so let’s assumer you’ve made your reservation, you’ve waited the indeterminate amount of time, all the passengers have piled into the van, the music is blasting, and you pull away (finally!). What do you expect next? The rules of the road – are there any?
Most roads here are about the width of a lane and a half by American standards. So when two vehicles approach from different directions it seems to be a rule of might is right: the smaller vehicle moves to the side a bit and slows. There is always lots of honking, any time another vehicle is approaching, or if the driver sees pedestrians or herds of zebu on the side of the road. Also, any time you approach a blind corner (of which are many on these winding mountain roads), the driver will honk a lot.
There are police checkpoints any time you enter or leave a town. The taxi-brousse will have to stop, the officers will salute and the driver will salute back before handing over some papers to the police for them to verify. Also, if you’re going into or out of a rural area the police may check the van for toaka gasy (TOE-ka GAHsh), which is “artisanal rum” – moonshine, that is – brewed in the woods, so strong it will burn your nostrils from across the table.
If the police see you in the car and you’re a vazaha in some instances they may ask you for your passport. They don’t actually have the right to do this (I mean, really, am I a national security threat to the Republic of Madagascar?), they’re just hoping that you don’t have your passport handy so they can give you hard time and force you to pay a bribe to let you pass. (I actually had a police officer do this to me when I was riding in a rickshaw within a town – absurd! Luckily we had our Malagasy friend and colleague Vero with us and she yelled at the police in Malagasy, definitely something about us being interns with an NGO doing good work for the people of Madagascar. Also, p.s., the rickshaw was not my idea – I hate having someone else do my walking for me!).
As I’ve already explained, you can expect your taxi-brousse to make plenty of stops of snack and bathroom breaks, and you’ll undoubtedly stop at noon so everyone can grab a quick lunch in a hotely.
But all in all, the rule with taxi-brousse is to expect the unexpected. There’s no telling what will happen. It may break down on the side of the road (luckily this hasn’t happened to us yet!). You may be wildly overcharged for your fare, unless you know what the going rate is and refuse outright to pay “vazaha prices.” Your driver may drink – we actually saw our driver on one of our trips of Ambalavao taking swigs of THB (Malagasy beer) as he drove! Although it doesn’t have an extremely high alcohol content, all we could do was sit and pray to make it to Ambalavao safely – no one in the van protested to the drivers’ behavior.
And, if you’re like me, you may get seated next to a drunken man who won’t stop sexually harassing you for the duration of your trip. Leaving Ambalavao once a man (probably in his 40s) started talking to me in broken French and Malagasy. At first I couldn’t understand what he was saying so I listened. Soon I realized he was drunk and getting a huge kick out of talking to a vazaha woman. Lucky me – I was seated right next to him in a cramped van for an hour. As there was nothing I could do, and any sort of interaction would only worsen the situation, I simply turned my head to the neck and started talking to Francesca, completely ignoring him. The disappointing thing was the people sitting in the row behind us started laughing at what the guy was saying to me – everyone thought it was so funny that he could get away with saying whatever the hell he wanted without me understanding. But I did hear the word chambre – “room” in French – so I knew where his mind was. After a while, though, the man got impatient with me ignoring him, kept asking me why I wouldn’t look at him or talk to him. He started poking me in the arm, and at that point I whirled around and yelled in his face “STOP IT!” Finally, people who had been turning a blind eye to the situation took notice. Francesca made a plea to the man sitting next to her, who finally said some things to my buddy in Malagasy. He finally shut up for the rest of the drive, sullen, staring out the window. I win!
[But don’t let that scare you – none of the sexual harassment here really leads to anything dangerous – it’s just culturally acceptable in cities here to call out to women here, whether it’s just a “Salut ma belle!” or “Salama madame!” or hissing sounds to make you turn around. Sometimes they’ll reach out and touch your arm. So you just walk staring straight ahead, not acknowledging anyone. They may persist or laugh, but that’s better than giving them the enjoyment they get out of any sort of response, friendly or angry.]
When you arrive at your destination, be prepared to be swarmed. If people see your white vazaha face through the window of the taxi-brousse they’ll immediately run up asking if you need a porter, a taxi, or even another taxi-brousse! They’ll shout the names of the places they think you might be going, based on your vazaha-y tourist-y-ness. “Ambositra, Madame? Ranomafana! Ambalavao?” (Ha, no – I’ve already been all those places, and what’s more I live here in Fianar!) You can politely say no, or just ignore some of it – you can always pretend you don’t speak French (a good card to play at times. Sometimes someone approaches us asking if we speak English. I reply no. Then they ask if we speak French. I reply no. Out of options, they walk away!). Also, make sure you’re the one that your bag is handed to when it’s unloaded from the top of the taxi-brousse; if not, a porter might get it for you (without having asked you first!) and then will ask for a cadeau (literally “present,” but meaning tip) for what he’s done. I always refuse. As you walk away with your luggage people will keep asking you where you’re going next, hoping you’ll make a taxi-brousse reservation for your next excursion. But, as always, you’re the one in control – don’t get pressured into anything! And you don’t necessarily always need a reservation – you can always just show up the day of!
A lot of tourists rent cars and drivers for themselves, or tour groups will have their own bus. But if you’re a young person up for some adventure and wanting to really experience Malagasy life, then there’s no reason to shy away from taxi-brousse travel – it’s all part of the experience!
Now you know everything you need to know and you’re all set for your taxi-brousse adventure – bon voyage, my friends!

Meet Tsiky!

This is Tsiky (pronounced “TSEEK”), the daughter of Lala, one of our colleagues. She is three, and sometimes she graces us with her presence here at the office. Her name literally means “smile,” which is just one of the many charms she uses to get what she wants. She is a beautiful child, and she knows it! As her mother puts it, “Elle est très coquette!” and quite vain; she loves looking at herself in the mirror and making faces by raising her eyebrows up and down. Lala says Tsiky will cry if she doesn’t put coconut oil and beeswax in her hair so that it’s nice to touch. She wears cute little outfits, and carries around a tiny purse that’s often filled with biscuits – cookies! She’ll munch on them in the office, shamelessly leaving crumbs everywhere!

One day, when Tsiky was running around keeping us from getting any work done, Francesca and I had an idea: knowing how much she loves looking at herself, we decided to show Tsiky Photobooth on our computers. As expected, she was enchanted, fascinated by the various colorful and morphing effects. She would jump out of the frame and ask “Où est Tsiky?” (“Where is Tsiky?”), in a kind of peek-a-boo game with herself. Now every time she comes to the office she runs up to us, asking with a false pout “Où est Tsiky?” asking to play with Photobooth.

Alright, so we may have created a little monster. But she’s a cute one, no?

There Are No Ovens in Madagascar, and Other Mysteries

The picture shown is of our humble little kitchen, showing all the applianced we have to work with (with the exception of our tiny Toshiba fridge, which was behind me when I took the shot). The little camp stove has two working burners, and is attached to a little propane tank (cost of a full tank is a little over 40,000 Ariary). We have a set of low-quality (the screws sometimes come loost and the handles fall off – very dangerous!) pots and pans of varying sizes, which, ironically, came in a box with the slogan “Ideas and innovations for luxurious lifestyles.”

Everyone in Madagascar either works with a gas tank and camp stove or cooks outdoors on coals or open fires.

But back to the point of this post: There are no ovens in Madagascar.

How is that possible? you ask. After all, there is bread: cheap little baguettes sold on the street for 250 Ariary a piece. Where does it come from? This is a mystery to us as well. Is there some central location with one giant oven from which all of the bread in town comes? Apparently, yes – by the Soafia Club (where we went out dancing – see previous post) there is a huge central bakery where all the bread you see sold in Fianar, from the humblest street vendor to the most overpriced vazaha restaurant, is baked.

We’ve also heard talk of something called a four malgache (“Malagasy oven”), but we’re not exactly sure what that is, or if anyone has one in their home (as we’ve yet to see one).

One day Francesca and I were doing some shopping in town at Supermarché 3000 and decided to stop into Clair de Lune, a tiny pastry shop and café in the same area as the supermarché, Le Panda, and Chez Dom (vazaha central, if you recall). If you came across Clair de Lune in the US, you’d think it was a pretty rinky-dink little place, but by Malagasy standards (and prices) it’s quite swanky. We ogled the French-style pastries behind the glass: croissants, pain au chocolat, brioches, viennoiseries. They even had a tiny little freezer where they served house-made gelato.

We looked over their menu, and suddenly, a craving came over me – I had to have pizza. That instant. After weeks of cooking at home with no protein but the occasional egg, my body needed cheese. So we sat down and decided to treat ourselves to lunch out. We ordered the pizza margherita (as it was the only vegetarian option) to share, and were told that it would take about 20 minutes. No problem, I was prepared to wait.

We sat at our little table people-watching out the window, until twenty minutes later, a huge SUV pulled up outside. To our surprise, our waitress ran out and the driver passed her a little pizza box through his window. She came back inside and disappears into the back of the shop.

A minute later she returns with our pizza, plated on a tray. By US standards it was a sorry-looking thing: it actually looked like a bad microwave pizza! Did she place a call soon after we ordered for someone somewhere to microwave a pizza and deliver it to the restaurant? Who knows!

But hey, I was hungry, and amused by the whole situation, so the bad microwave pizza and the laughs were well worth the 8,000 Ariary (~$4)!

Fianar After Hours: Vazaha Night Life!!!

After a rough first couple of weeks here, spent simply walking back and forth between our depressing house and the office right next door, we hit a turning point with our trip to Ambohimahamasina. Ranomafana made things even better - we did finally see lemurs, after all! “Well, at least I can leave Madagascar having checked that off my list,” I thought…

But it wasn’t until our first night out on the town in Fianar that we really started to feel at home here. Romain had promised that when he came back to Fianar he would take us out and show us what it’s all about here. We had no idea what to expect, so we put on the nicest clothes we had (in my case, a V-neck shirt from Target, a black scarf, and my one pair of jeans that actually fit me – dismal, I know), put on a little makeup (the first time in 4 weeks!), and set out.

Romain met us outside the office in a cab. We drove to the same area of the town where Supermarché 3000 is (vazaha central, as we tend to think of it). We would start our night at Le Panda restaurant and bar, a vazaha institution here in Fianar.

Picture this: a restaurant painted red inside and out, red chairs, green place mats on all the tables. A slightly rounded bar with high stools around which some slightly-grungy looking Europeans from age 25 to 50 are smoking. Behind the bar, the bartender Hervé (of Chinese descent, but born and raised in Madagascar) is serving drinks out of jars filled with mysterious liquids with suspicious-looking solids floating in them. A huge old crocodile skin stretched across one of the walls. And on another wall – Le Panda’s iconic piece de résistance – a painting of two copulating pandas, one humping the other.

Take a look at the menu. Inside you will be informed that the restaurant specializes in gibier – game. Indeed, you look at the dishes offered and, alongside the usual pork, zebu, and chicken…past the slightly more exotic calamari and frogs’ legs…you will find dishes with crocodile and bat meat. That’s because Hervé is also the owner and a passionate hunter – all the meat served at Le Panda comes from his kills!

While it may not be the bar from “Cheers,” I think Le Panda would make for quite a setting for a television show. The regular crowd of vazahas, mostly French expats with a few Belgians and Swiss, is an eclectic bunch: everyone knows everyone and hangs out as old friends, regardless of age differences. The mid-twenty- and thirty-somethings are usually here working for NGOs, maybe spending a few years here. (Most people after meeting us here and chatting with us a bit are really surprised to learn that we’re only 20 years old!) There are a few much older people, in their 40s and 50s – one guy said he’s been living here for the past 30 years and now speaks fluent Malagasy!

Francesca and Romain ordered a bit of dinner at Le Panda…Romain had calamares au persil (squid in parsley sauce) and shared zebu carpaccio (the zebu equivalent of the raw meat dish usually made with beef). I marveled at Francesca’s bravery eating raw meat in a developing country, but she didn’t get sick at all! [in fact, knock on wood, we have yet to get sick from anything we’ve eaten here…keep your fingers crossed for us in these next three weeks!]

We then bar-hopped across the street to Chez Dom, which is described in the guidebooks as a “smoky backpacker café where lots of tour guides hang out.” Oh, silly guidebooks. They fail to capture any of the real essence of any of the places I’ve been here in Madagascar…

Chez Dom is very small, very smokey. There are a lot of Malagasy guides, who Adrien (Romain’s best friend since high school in France) says are the only Malagasy people he doesn’t like. They have a parasitic livelihood: leeching off of the vazahas, trying to get them to go on one of their overpriced tours, but at the same time disdainful of foreigners. [I got into an argument with one the other night: after trying to flirt with me for the longest time (asking me if I had a boyfriend, when I was getting married, etc.) he then said I was being “mean” to him when I made comparisons between here and the US; I defended myself, saying I was merely making comparative observations; he dismissed me magnanimously, saying he wouldn’t hold it against me, since I was “young” (being just 20 years old to his 26); I said I may be young, but I’ve traveled a lot in my life; he countered that he meets a lot of people from different countries, as a tour guide – ha! Gotcha! Meeting people from different countries is not the same as actually going there!] They’re all young men, trying to dress European with scarves and brand-name shirts, they’ll try to flirt with you, ask you for your number, put their number in your phone. They disgust me – they’re the epitome in slimy, trying to mix in with the vazaha crowd while simultaneously trying to leech off their money - but you can’t get rid of them, so you just have to put up with it and have a little fun with them sometimes (after all, they will sometimes buy you drinks) by giving made-up answers to the questions they ask you (I get a real kick out of this: sometimes I say I'm married, sometimes I say I have a fiancé...).

Chez Dom has both a good-size TV and an overhead projector, so during the World Cup games we spend weekends there, eating dinner (my favorite dish is their misao, Chinese noodles that I load up with lots of spicy pink chili sauce; the rest of the vazahas go crazy for Chez Dom’s American-style cheeseburger, made with zebu meat), drinking (THB and lots of rhum arrangé, the flavored rum poured from those mysterious jars with the floating fruit and vanilla beans - I'm quite a fan), and watching the game projected up on the wall.

So that first night of going out, after Le Panda and Chez Dom, we didn’t just stop there: as Chez Dom started clearing out, all the vazahas started piping up their votes on which discothèque they wanted to go to. Soafia Dance Club won out in the end over Le Moulin Rouge (yes, they have one of those here, too!), and so we piled into one vazaha’s truck an drove over.

Soafia was…well, hilarious. Francesca, Gaia, and I all got in for free, being girls. We walked down some stairs to a dark room with strobe lights flashing and twirling light effects. A mix of Malagasy pop, and US 80s music. People standing around in groups, some on the dance floor, some at the bar. If it weren’t for the fact that this was Madagascar, this would have been the lamest club ever.

But our group of vazahas took to the dance floor together as one. The Malagasy men would try to dance with us, but our fellow vazahas were always quick to rescue us before anything became awkward. If I felt a hand moving for my hip, I grabbed it and threw it aside without even looking to see who it was – we were having goofy dancing fun, and no one, Malagasy or vazaha, was going to ruin it for me!

Malagasy Avocados: A California Girl’s Disappointment (6/27)

At Ranomafana as we began our trek, our guide pointed out some wild avocado trees to us. Now, I’m a true California girl, raised on guacamole. When my mother didn’t have anything to pack me for lunch she would put an avocado and a spoon in a bag and send me off to school. So - having spent the last five months in New Jersey, far from the Mexican food I love - when I realized there were avocados here in Madagascar, I got really excited. I was just short of scraping the squashed fallen wild avocados off the trail with my bare hands – that excited. When we got back from our trek, we gave our guide a ride back into town and he showed me where I could buy avocados in the market.

I picked up three at 200 Ariary a piece. They were rounder and smoother than what I was used to – not at all like the oval, bumpy-skinned fruit I was used to. Still, I had high hopes. When we went to the little hotely where we had lunch, I asked for a knife and a plate right away – I wanted my avocados now (and Malagasies are just chill like that: Gaia wanted a dish that the restaurant didn’t have, so she went across the street to a different hotely, ordered, spoke with the manager, waited, and came back to eat with us in our hotely with her entire meal brought over from the other place! No one seemed annoyed in the least!)

Anyways, back to the avocado story…

I eagerly cut the fruit, and split it into halves. The pit was huge, leaving very little edible flesh. I sliced off a piece with the knife and put it in my mouth. DISGUSTING! It tasted watery and flavorless – not at all like the rich, creamy avocados of California. Still, I was hungry and my meal still hadn’t arrived. I dug into the other one. Just as gross. Gaia said the Malagasies eat avocados as a dessert with sugar. I was skeptical, but I was willing to do anything to improve the horrible flavor, so I took some of the sugar that had come with Francesca’s coffee and sprinkled it on the pale green flesh. Still gross, if not worse than before.

Saddened, I took the third avocado home just so that I could take a picture of it for you, dear readers [see above]. This last avocado had the most flesh out of the three, but still, after just a few forced bites, I simply had to throw it out. I’ll wait another few weeks until I can have the real deal, the food of my birthplace.
Maybe I’ll even have my mom meet me at the airport with an avocado and a spoon.

Ranomafana National Park: In which we finally see the LEMURS! (6/27)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our friend Gaia called us on Malagasy Independence Day (June 26th) to see if we wanted to go with her to Ranomafana National Park the next day.

Francesca and I have developed an informal motto/philosophy here: “When someone asks you if you want to do something in Madagascar, don’t think. Don’t ask questions. Just say yes.”

Hence, I’m sure you know what our answer to Gaia was…

Gaia decided that the most convenient way for us to get there, instead of putting ourselves at the whims of the notoriously capricious taxi-brousse schedules (which would have made our drive closer to 3 hours with stops), was to hire a taxi driver for the day (which would cut down driving time to a little over an hour, and no waiting). For 80,000 Ariary (about $40, split between the three of us) we had our driver from the time he picked up Gaia at 7:30am until we got back to Fianar after nightfall, a little after 6pm. Sweet deal, no?

The early morning drive was lovely: misty at first (beautiful and mysterious over the rice paddies), then clearing into what would actually pass for a summer day – we actually took off our jackets and put on SHORTS for the first time since we came to this country!

Ranomafana is a rainforest, and looks like everything you would expect one to be. Stretching over steep hillsides, the greenery is dense and deep, made up of leafy trees and thick bamboo stalks (the diet of several lemur species that inhabit the park). A running stream with waterfalls cuts through the valley.

The little town in Ranomafana is everything you would hope for in a tiny tropical town: small, brightly-colored buildings, hotels with little bungalows for guests, a few little hole-in-the-wall hotelys and gargottes (restaurant/snack bars), a plentiful fruit market, banana trees filled with bright geckos, children playing soccer, butterflies.

We parked the taxi and crossed a rickety bridge over a stream, bright in the sunlight – it felt much later then mid-morning. Gaia wanted to swim in the hot springs. We walked up to a little hut of a kiosk to ask. Turns out you had to pay a bit. Also turns out it’s really just a regular pool that happens to be heated by the thermal springs. Gaia still went for a swim, but Francesca and I took our time to wander and explore a bit…

I marveled at the strange flower-like growth on the end of a bunch of bananas still on the tree, then spent a good amount of time playing with camera lenses and settings trying to stalk the little green geckos sunning themselves on it. We followed a few butterflies, some blue, some black and green, waiting for them to land so we could snap a close-up shot. We came across a little garden with a pond of purple water lilies (nénuphars in French; I’ve always liked that word). I looked up into a tree and saw the BIGGEST spider web I’ve ever seen – literally, it stretched at least four feet from the trees’ foliage to some bushes below. Not only that, it was a double web – picture two webs as parallel planes! A spider that size would have to be…HUGE, and indeed I spotted the eight-legged fellow – he/she put Shelob and Ron Weasley outside our kitchen window [see earlier posts if you don’t know what I’m talking about] to shame. Black and orange legs, sitting there in the middle of this giant web, whose threads actually shimmered gold in the sun (I’ll upload pictures to flickr once I’m back in the States).

Once Gaia was done with her swim, we bought some bananas and drove to where we could hire a guide (English-speaking, for Gaia’s sake) and begin our trek. We chose a 3-hour circuit, which they guaranteed us would include spotting some lemurs (which seemed a little suspect to me).
We set off with our guide (who said he had learned a lot of his English from researchers from Duke and Stonybrook who had come to study the lemurs here), crossing a bridge over some rapids, and continued on along a worn path paved with stone. At that point I felt a little silly – we were just walking along a paved trail in the woods – why did I need a guide for that? Our guide pointed out some plants that were used by tribes for medicinal purposes, then the giant bamboo which the lemurs here survive on, despite the fact that it contains enough cyanide to kill a man (this is what the Duke and Stonybrook researchers wanted to study).
At a certain point our guide made a whistling sound, and someone whistled back. Apparently the lemur-spotter had found some lemurs nearby. We walked off the trail, up through the dense forest, trying to be careful where we stepped…over fallen branches, pushing aside leaves, twigs sometimes snapping in our faces.

Our guide beckoned, then pointed upwards. Wayyy up in the trees you could see two furry forms. I whipped out my camera, already set up with my telephoto lens – this is why I bought it! I zoomed all the way in. Sure enough, there they were: two Golden Bamboo Lemurs – one of the rarer species! We watched them cuddle, and later spotted a third. The guide and spotter sort of provoked them by moving some branches, and they moved a bit more. Then one began to urinate – almost directly on us!

Another group with a guide came along to look at these lemurs, so we moved on, and our lemur-spotter disappeared – for the moment...

We continued on up the hill to a point de belle vue (beautiful view point); there was a wooden deck overlooking a huge portion of the forested valley. Our guide beckoned again – he was tossing little pieces of banana to two mongooses. All I really knew about mongooses (mongeese? What is the plural of ‘mongoose’?) are that they’re in the rodent family and that they can kill snakes, even poisonous ones like cobras. These two had reddish brown fur and looked a lot like ferrets – very cut! [pictures will be on flickr in a few weeks]. There were also more of the little green geckos I had seen earlier on the banana trees – they swarmed around the piece of banana the guide offered them [see photo on previous post], licking the fruit with pink tongues. We relaxed – I ate a banana myself, as I was feeling light-headed – and absorbed some sun.

Soon enough, though, our guide got a call on his cell phone – the spotter had found some more lemurs! I was a little disappointed by the whole spotter and cell phone deal – seems like a very artificial way to see wildlife, and the rapidity with which this spotter seemed to be finding these lemurs almost made me think that he was hiding lemurs in cages in the woods and running and releasing them as we made our way over to see them!

Still, I don’t want to complain too much – they were LEMURS after all!

This next group of lemurs were Brown Red-Ruffed Lemurs, very cute [see photo]. We saw both males and females, with the former actually being the smaller, the latter the larger – not what you would expect in the animal kingdom.

We continued hiking…along the way our guide pointed out and ants’ nest, which looked like a little mud blob suspended on a skinny branch, some berries that forest people used as wild coffee, a species of eucalyptus, and a tiny black and gray bird that I’m pretty sure he called a “micro-robin.”

Once again we traveled off the beaten path partway down a steep hillside with not a few thorny vines…this time, it was to catch a glimpse of the nocturnal Sportif Lemur – we were lucky enough to catch him poking his head out of his nest (a hole in a tree) during the day. I was disappointed that our guide thought it appropriate to shake the tree a bit to make him come out more – leave the poor little guy alone! Still, I got some great shots, thanks to my telephoto lens [coming to a flickr account near you]…

We continued back on the trail, then once again left it, this time entering a different part of the forest more heavily populated with bamboo. The amazing thing about bamboo forests is how architectural they can be – the giant bamboo stalks grow straight up, with no tapering, until the start tipping to the side, still holding straight. This can make for a sort of criss-cross effect in the forest, casting stunning shadows warmed by the soft green light passing through the leaves of the upper canopy. Our guide pointed out a traditional forest people memorial – not a tomb, but an arrangement of rocks set in place to commemorate the dead, where zebus were sometimes slaughtered as sacrifices.

Our guide left us for a bit – he seemed to be having an argument with his lemur-spotter (which is part of what made me so suspicious of their methods and business arrangement). Tired, I sat on the ground and looked up – up through the bamboo stalks and leaves, which filtered the sunlight into a dappled pattern on the ground. We were in the rainforest (forêt humide in French) – that place I had dreamed of as a six-year-old watching “Kratt’s Creatures” every day after school, dreaming of oneday becoming a wildlife biologist…now, over a decade later, pursuing academic interests completely different from those of my six-year-old self, I had somehow found myself here, in the bamboo rainforests of Madagascar. Life is funny like that.

Finally, our guide returned – the spotter had located a final group of lemurs: the Broad-Nosed Lemur [again, wait for photos on flickr]. We retraced our steps a bit, walked down a steep hillside and saw them – so close, too! At least five, all completely undisturbed by our presence. Our guide began throwing them chunks of cut bamboo, which they eagerly devoured. I tried to ask our guide why these lemurs were so excited about the bamboo they were giving them, since the lemurs could surely find plenty of their own bamboo right there in the forest, but either he didn’t understand my question, or he chose to avoid it, because he gave me an answer completely unrelated to my question. Suspicious.

We hiked the rest of the way back – there wasn’t enough time left for us to visit one of the waterfalls and natural pools – another time, perhaps. We gave our guide a lift back into town, then stopped to eat at a little hotely where I ordered a pôtage de legumes (vegetable soup), which took forever because it was made to order, puréed and everything, served with chunks of garlicky croutons. My first real meal of the day; all I had had all day were bananas, a total of four. Nonetheless, even after I was full from my soup and the THB the three of us shared, I couldn’t resist ordering bananes flambées au rhum – two sugary bananas on fire in traditional Malagasy rum. Price? 2,000 Ariary (about $1).

One rainforest on a sunny day, three girls, four species of lemurs spotted, and six bananas eaten (two of them flambeed in rum) - awesome, awesome day.

Spelling Correction: "Vasa" is really "Vazaha"

I've been using the word "vasa" a lot - it's the Malagasy word for foreigner, and it's usually what little children and creepy men call out to us when we walk around town in Fianar. We foreigners use it to refer to ourselves, but somehow when it's being called out to you by people in the street, by children point and laughing at you and by men sexually harassing you, you really start to hate the word. It's not meant to be offensive, but somehow it becomes so, I guess because we're from a multicultural, multiethnic country where you can look like literally anybody from anywhere and still not have people point at you and say "FOREIGN!" Like, literally, "YOU DON'T BELONG HERE!" I don't understand why they laugh when they say this - what's so funny about the fact that I'm not Malagasy? There are plenty of other foreigners around town, so it's not like seeing one is such a rarity...I think it's just one of those things that I'll never completely understand, having been raised in a country founded by immigrants that celebrates diversity.

But back to the point of this post: I should have known better than to think that a word in Malagasy would be spelled exactly as it sounds! Turns out it's spelled vazaha, although it is pronounced "vah-ZAH" (with the emphasis on the second syllable, if you're speaking true Malagasy; usually I'm too lazy and just say "VAH-zah")

I realize that most of my readers don't care about this distinction, but I had to make it for the sake of authenticity.

To make this blog post more worth your time, here's a photo preview of my next blog post: it’s a gecko eating a banana at Ranomafana National Park, where I finally saw Madagascar’s most famous celebrities: LEMURS!!!

Spelling Correction: "Vasa" is really "Vazaha"

I've been using the word "vasa" a lot - it's the Malagasy word for foreigner, and it's usually what little children and creepy men call out to us when we walk around town in Fianar. We foreigners use it to refer to ourselves, but somehow when it's being called out to you by people in the street, by children point and laughing at you and by men sexually harassing you, you really start to hate the word. It's not meant to be offensive, but somehow it becomes so, I guess because we're from a multicultural, multiethnic country where you can look like literally anybody from anywhere and still not have people point at you and say "FOREIGN!" Like, literally, "YOU DON'T BELONG HERE!" I don't understand why they laugh when they say this - what's so funny about the fact that I'm not Malagasy? There are plenty of other foreigners around town, so it's not like seeing one is such a rarity...I think it's just one of those things that I'll never completely understand, having been raised in a country founded by immigrants that celebrates diversity.

But back to the point of this post: I should have known better than to think that a word in Malagasy would be spelled exactly as it sounds! Turns out it's spelled "vazaha," although it is pronounced "vah-ZAH" (with the emphasis on the second syllable, if you're speaking true Malagasy; usually I'm too lazy and just say "VAH-zah")

I realize that most of my readers don't care about this distinction, but I had to make it for the sake of authenticity.

To make this blog post more worth your time, here's a photo preview of my next blog post: a gecko eating a banana at Ranomafana National Park, where I finally saw Madagascar's most famous celebrities: LEMURS!!!

Independence Day, Malagasy Style: Celebrating 50 Years (6/25-6)

This year Madagascar celebrated 50 years of independence from French colonial rule – no small milestone. With this in mind, across the country, Malagasies partied accordingly. From an American perspective, coming from a country that’s already celebrated its bicentennial, it was really interesting to watch as well, and to compare the differences between le 26 juin and the 4th of July.
For one thing, the celebration began not on the 26th, but the day before. Most people had the day off from work, and many people took this as an opportunity to get completely wasted by midday. There was a carnival of sorts in the middle Fianar, with a little Ferris wheel and games like shoot-the-bottle and bingo. Children sometimes set off firecrackers, just as the French do for Bastille Day, keeping me on edge all day (have I mentioned that I HATE firecrackers?!).
Saturday the 26th I woke up late (tired from our return trip home from Ambohimahamasina the day before), and when I stumbled down to the kitchen I found that Ambinina had stopped by to visit and was chatting with Francesca. The three of us continued to drink tea and talk about cultural differences, world politics, and religion – what a way to start a day!
Sometime later our landlady, Madame Lulle (sp?) stopped by with “a favor” to ask. She wanted to invite us to have Independence Day lunch at her house as her guests. “Favor”? Hardly! Our pleasure!
I thought it rude to go over to their house without bringing something, so I grabbed the pineapple I had bought the day before and brought it along when we went over at around 12:30. Mme. Lulle led us to her living room, which took me by surprise: she had a large leather couch and huge wooden cabinet unit in the corner, filled with dishes and glass objects. I was impressed: despite the exterior of the house, it seemed like by Malagasy standards Mme. Lulle was quite well-off. She unlocked one of the cabinets to get out a pitcher and plates, and served us orange juice and cookies.
She was the utmost in welcoming, but seemed sad. She explained that her two sons were away, one studying in Tana, the other in Switzerland. “Je suis seule,” (“I am alone”) she said. En plus, she had always wanted daughters, so she was very happy to have us over. We talked a bit about what we were doing for Ny Tanintsika, what we were studying in the US, etc.
Soon (but not before I had eaten many, many cookies!) it was time to sit down to lunch. There were about ten of us total, if I remember correctly. One of the guests was the patissier and saucier from Tsara Guest House, a well-known restaurant in town; I’m pretty sure he brought some of the food, and it was indeed delicious.
Mme. Lulle explained that the meal was typically Malagasy. We started with some salad dishes: a lettuce salad, a dish of potatoes and green beans in some sort of creamy sauce, surrounded by grated carrots, garnished with tomatoes. And of course, bread! More orange juice, along with pineapple juice, Coca-cola, Bonbon Anglais (literally, “English Candy,” found only in Madagascar; actually a disgusting soda that most describe as tasting like Red Bull; I thought it smelled like cotton candy, not in a good way), and the strongest rum I have ever encountered. It burned my nostrils just sitting across from me at the table! But the Tsara Guest house patissier downed glass after glass throughout the meal! He takes his liquor like a Princetonian!
Next came the main course. I had warned them that I was a vegetarian, so a special dish of potatoes in a delicious orange sauce with onions had been prepared for me. Then, of course, there was rice a-plenty: two huge serving dishes full! Impossible to finish. Then, the main attraction: the turkey! The turkey from our yard, the one that’s been waking me up every morning! I may be vegetarian, but I’ll admit, I was glad to see him go. Francesca said he was delicious. He was cut into large pieces and served along with huge pieces of pork; I couldn’t tell which was which. Definitely not kosher!
One of the guests at the meal was a computer science student who lived in our little walled area. He’s seen us teaching English classes in the little room attached to our house, which is what prompted the most hilariously awkward comment from him (he speaks some English): “I’ve noticed you have a very beautiful laptop, I’d like to touch it sometime.” Priceless!
We were so stuffed by the end of the meal, we could hardly move. We thanked Mme. Lulle profusely and returned to our house to digest.
~
Later, unfortunately, we had to go out to the bank; Gaia had called us to ask if we wanted to go to Ranomafana National Park with her tomorrow, and we needed money for the trip. We knew we didn’t want to be out in the streets that day because of all the drunkenness, but we had to make the quick trip.
It was a weird feeling: we were stared at even more than usual. The men hissed at us, called out to us. One punched Francesca in the arm in passing. Every child we passed laughed and pointed at us and yelled “Vasa! Vasa!” Why all the laughing? What’s so funny? Do you not think I know that I’m a foreigner?
It was very disconcerting. I realize that this was the day they were celebrating their independence from the vasas, from the French, but still – WE weren’t French! Strange to see how old animosity dies hard when it comes to national independence. I wonder if Americans were rude to Englishmen visiting the US 50 years after the Revolutionary War.
~
That night there were fireworks. Francesca went over to the office to use the internet, but came back because she said the night guard at the office was completely trashed – he could barely speak and walked into a wall three times! Later, he disappeared – no one was there to guard the office!
Francesca and I cracked open a THB over dinner, safe at home – no need to go out. Let the Malagasies have their fun, we’ll stay here safe and wait for our own Independence Day!

Ambohimahamasina, Part 4: Trek with FIZAM – The Cliffs of Angavoa and the Weavers of Adoharano (6/24)

We had decided that Wednesday we would take a trek with FIZAM, the local association for tourism; after all, the marketing of this ecotourism association was part of our project, so we might as well experience firsthand what we were trying to convince others to do!
We had told the guide that we wanted to leave around 8am Wednesday morning. We showed up somewhere around 8:30, thinking our guide would be running late as well, given the nature of “Malagasy time.” To our surprise, he said he had actually been waiting there for us since 8! Apparently Romain had worked really hard with the guides to drive home the point that when vasas say a certain time, they mean it! So we apologized for being late, but we were also quite glad to know that Romain had been able to get over at least that cultural hurdle, to the benefit of the association.
Our guide’s name was Solo, which is (for some reason that I cannot understand) pronounced “Shool.” He spoke good French, and a little English, so we had fun going back and forth a bit between the two.
Leaving that early in the morning turned out to be a great idea – it was cool and damp, as our trek was fairly physical we were able to beat the heat. The cliffs of Angavoa, which we hiked up to, also looked beautiful veiled in silvery mist, and watching the mist clear to reveal a panoramic view that stretched for miles was stunning.
Along the way we passed traditionally-dressed Betsileo (the name of the tribe group that occupies the Fianarantsoa region; Gaia says they’re the “most gentle” of the Malagasy peoples) men, with their woven straw hats, colorful blankets draped over their shoulders. A lot of people go barefoot here, and it’s not necessarily a sign of poverty.
We also passed a traditional Betsileo tomb: a structure made of piled stones with a white cross on top of a huge boulder.
Our destination was the village of Andoharano (“ahn-doh-AH-rahn”) home to one of the best-run basket-weaving ateliers of the Soamiray association (see previous posts for a description of how all this works). We were greeted by the chef d’atelier and her husband Jean-Pierre, who is also the village hebergeur (hebergeur is really annoying to translate from French into English, but essentially means the one who offers lodging; in this case, he is the homestay host for the FIZAM tourists who choose to spend a night in one of the villages). Jean-Pierre spoke limited French (surprising, with a name like that? But this is Madagascar, after all!), but our guide translated. They were very happy to have us and welcomed us warmly.
First we were shown the weaving atelier. It was a smallish room with mud walls, a window at either end, a ladder going up to a loft where raw materials were stored. On the wall was a handwritten schedule drawn out on a large piece of paper in Malagasy, and a sheet that showed samples of the different colors that could be produced using natural dyes.
In addition to the chef d’atelier, there were four other weavers, who were crouched barefoot (so as not to dirty their work) on a large mat with a pink and green striped pattern. The mat was already quite substantial in size – we were told that they had just started it that morning! Apparently weaving, or at least weaving something flat like a mat, doesn’t take as long as I’d thought!
I asked if it was alright to take pictures, and was given an emphatic yes. I still felt a bit awkward snapping away at the women working so intently, but I guess any publicity I can give to them through my photos is great, right? The lighting conditions were a fun challenge for me, and I’m really proud of some of the shots that I was able to get! I will upload everything to flickr once I’m back in the States with a faster internet connection.
We were shown how the raw materials are prepared: the reeds are cut into three pieces using a knife, then tied into a bunch and pounded with a mortar-and-pestle-like rock and wooden mallet combo.
Having seen all the steps, our guide asked if we’d like to give it a try! So we took off our shoes and crouched on the mat next to the women to learn their craft. “Prend deux, laisse deux, prend deux, laisse deux…” (“Take two, leave two…”) until the edge, then pass a perpendicular piece through, then let the bunch in your hand go. Begin again. It wasn’t difficult, as long as you didn’t accidentally start with the wrong two or miss one of your two, but it took us such a long time compared to the swift fingers of the weavers! They also showed us how they tighten the weave by pushing it with a smooth black stone, then pulling the fibers back with their fingernails.
Every so often a wandering chicken or duck had to be shooed out of the atelier, which made me laugh.
Even Solo, our guide, did some weaving! He said his mother was a weaver, and so he knew how to weave quite well - he was proud to show that Malagasy men could weave, too!
A girl, maybe eleven or twelve years old, came in carrying a baby to its mother who was there weaving. He was crying, but calmed down pretty quickly. The girl posed the baby (who I assume was her little brother) with a cahier (French notebook with tiny little lines for writing; any American who has gone to a French-American school knows what I’m talking about!) and a pen for me to take pictures. He had the biggest, most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. The girl and I had a sweet little exchange, despite our language barrier (I can say “hello,” “how are you?” “thank you,” and “very beautiful”), and I took some great photos of her and the baby, which she loved looking at on my camera’s screen.
Next one of the weavers led us with our guide to where the raw materials are grown. Along the way we passed an angry zebu protecting its calf, a huge fat pig, and countless chickens and ducks. Took a narrow winding path up the hillside to a spot that overlooked the stream that spilled down on the valley over huge boulders. A few women were washing clothes in the stream, and laundry was laid out over bushes to dry.
When we got back to the main part of the village it was lunchtime. We were taken to small, dim room with woven mats covering the entire floor, and even attached to the bottom part of the walls. Our place settings were on the floor, and there were woven “poufs” for seating. Two giant pots of red rice; small, shallow tin bowls with des breds, chicken in broth, and a vegetable soup for me! Our guide and Jean-Pierre the hebergeur ate with us (his wife had cooked the meal and served us), and piled their bowls high with a mountain of rice; they laughed at how little rice we ate comparatively! A pot of ranon'ampango to drink arrived not long thereafter (having been prepared in the rice pots by boiling water); this one was very weak, hardly changed color at all, although there were little bits of rice floating in it. When we had finished this, a basket of bananas (short, fat Malagasy ones) was brought out as dessert, and then a pot of excellent coffee, which we drank out of tiny tin cups with sugar.
After bananas and coffee we continued to sit on the poufs and chatted (with the help of our guide as translator) on subject ranging from where we were from, cultural differences, why Americans speak English (we were once a colony, too!).
We then returned to the room where we had all first met, paid for our meal (5,000 Ariary each – about $2.50 – and paid for half of our guide’s meal, as previously agreed upon), signed their guestbook with heartfelt messages of thanks, looked through some albums of photos that past visitors had taken there and had sent to them – we promised to send them copies of our photos, too! They said they we would return another time and spend the night.
~
Doesn’t that sound like a really cool experience? We certainly thought so! So since we’ve been back we’ve been working on ways to get the word out about FIZAM’s ecotourism opportunities – marketing is definitely not their strong point! I’ve been looking at various travel sites: posting testimonials to sites like TripAdvisor and VirtualTourist, contacting other sites to see if they’d be willing to post information. I also translated the existing FIZAM brochure into English and Francesca redesigned it using photos we took that day.
FIZAM gives you a choice of treks in varying levels of intensity (from 3 hours to 3 days) with the chance to be completely immersed in local cultures, welcomed with open arms. Not only that, all the money you spend (which is not much at all – these treks and meals are such a good deal!) goes to the local community, no middlemen, and to support their efforts to protect the environment.
If you’re planning on coming to Madagascar anytime in the future, please don’t miss out on this awesome opportunity!

Ambohimahamasina, Part 3: Shadowing Henri – Trek to Akarinomby (6/22)

Tuesday morning we again woke early.
Gaia offered us some “fried manioc bread” she had just bought from “the women around the corner.” My mouth was full with the crispy manioc-y little nuggest (not unlike tater-tots; they’d be great with ketchup) when I realized I was eating “street food” – those dreaded fried treats that Princeton University Health Services had warned us about again and again! Visions of having to endure severe gastroenteritis in a squat latrine flashed through my mind. And then, I swallowed. Come what may! I’ll get sick eventually, so why not now and just get it over with?
I didn’t get sick. Nor did I get sick the next time when Romain brought us a bag of mofo bol ("moof ball" - absolutely the most awkward name to use in everyday conversation!) – fried dough balls that we shamelessly double-dipped in vanilla sugar straight from Romain’s jar in the kitchen. Nor did I get sick the next time when Francesca and I bought fried manioc bread on our own. Nor did we get sick when we returned to Fianar and bought a donut from a street vendor. Or the time I bought I fried banana for 100 Ar, which the vendor wrapped in a sheet of someone’s old homework and handed to me.
You get the idea. Health Services did a good job of prepping us for our trip in terms of typhoid and polio vaccines, anti-malarials, and International SOS cards. They warned us about the risks of almost every behavior a traveler might engage in, from eating to driving to crossing the street to unprotected sex. Some of this was common sense, some of it was good advice. But there comes a time when you have to risk a bit to live a little. So we buy fried things on the street. They are delicious. The chances of getting food poisoning are probably a little higher than they are in the US, but so far we’ve been fine. So far my most horrific food poisoning experience came from bad Thai food I ate this past Christmas in Malibu – and could I have avoided that?
~
That morning we accompanied Henri, a Malagasy field agent with Ny Tanintsika, on the job visiting the small village of Akarinomby, home to one of Soamiray’s 15 ateliers. We set out mid-morning in the cool mist, hoods on and umbrellas at the ready (we didn’t end up using them). Though I knew better (heavy moisture in the air is terrible for your camera!), I couldn’t resist taking out my trusty Canon Rebel, and I ended up clicking away for much of the 1+ hour trek.
We followed a red-dirt path that at first would have accommodated a rugged offroad vehicle, then shrank to the tiniest of footpaths that wound precariously round steep mountainsides.
The landscape was exquisite. Rolling hills and steep valleys. Eucalyptus forests (though it should be noted that eucalyptus is an invasive non-native species introduced by French colonists). A small village with three fat turkeys perched together on a limb. Sacred Mt. Ambondrombe, where all Malagasies believe the souls of the dead ascend. The cliffs of Angavoa veiled in mist. Zebus (Malagasy humped cattle) grazing on the hillside, as a group of boys in straw hats with runny noses watched over them, keeping themselves entertained with a little ukelele-sized instrument. Muddy, terraced rice paddies, banana trees, and little patches where pale, skinny stick-like plants grew straight up – manioc, as it turns out. Sluggish streams winding and gathering momentum to become waterfalls; we crossed them on bridges that were sometimes no more than two logs spanning the gulf.
A good ways into our trek we passed a village where a new school had just been completed that February. The children ran to the open window as we passed, yelling and smiling and waving. I snapped a picture, to their delight.
Henri pointed out our destination – a tiny village high on the hillside. Here’s where it got difficult. Last night’s rain had made the red earth sticky and hopelessly muddy. The steep climb was a textbook case of “one step forward, two steps back” by sliding. And poor Francesca in a borrowed pair of Converse-esque shoes from Gaia, a full size too small! By the time we reached the top we were sweating and panting, grateful to have all our limbs intact!
We followed Henri to the site where the new atelier is being built. A group of little children stared at us (Francesca and I, that is) curiously. We passed what looked like a little elevated hut, almost like a treehouse, overlooking the valley; Henri said it was the granary where rice was stored – high up to keep it safe from rodents!
The new atelier was really just a few waist-high mud walls. I helped Henri hold the measuring tape as he took down its dimensions. In the dry mud walls spiders had made little cobwebs that were heavy with condensation, little silver droplets suspended in silk.
We then walked back to where we had been before; Henri spoke to someone outside, and to a woman who poked her head out of a second-floor window. Suddenly, much to our surprise, a vasa (foreign) woman’s face popped out of the window, too.
When we went inside (and I smacked my head on the doorframe as I did so – these houses were built for much shorter people!) and climbed to the second floor (via ladder) the woman introduced herself. Her name was Sophie and she was French; she had done thesis research in the village 5 years earlier, and was now back for the first time since. She spoke Malagasy easily and understood the exchange between Henri and the weavers as we sat upstairs.
Upstairs was dim, and much like an attic – you could see the straw-like roofing material and the beams that held up the ceiling. Occasionally a tiny piece of dirt or roofing material would fall. There were many flies. We walked along the edge of the room: the woven mat on the floor was pulled up along the sides of the room so we could enter without walking on it - it had just been finished and we didn’t want to get mud all over it!
The two adult Malagasy women in the room were the weavers; there were also a few children, mostly girls, who scampered in and out. One little girl [see photo, girl on the right] – a mischievous one with hair that refused to behave – entertained herself by making devilish little faces. The older girls [see photo, second from right] end up as caretakers to the younger children; you see it everywhere you go – a girl between eight and twelve carrying a fat baby or toddler patiently and without complaining. When I think back to what a brat I was when I was that age, I am amazed at their sense of responsibility.
Henri spoke to the women, showed them some forms and read aloud what they said to make sure they understood as they read along. One woman [see photo, woman on left] had a horrible-sounding cough, and covered her face with the blanket she was wrapped in every time she started heaving. I wondered if she had tuberculosis.
We left not too long after, retracing our steps - downhill this time, and just as perilous. Francesca joked that we’d be better off with sleds to toboggan down the muddy slopes! Henri offered us bananas as a snack to keep our energy up for the walk home. The sun had broken through much of the mist, and it was beautiful. As we walked back, we passed a man tending to his zebu. He posed, smiling – he wanted his picture taken.

Ambohimahamasina, Part 2 ADDENDUM: The Beer of Madagascar - le THB!

That night at Romain and Gaia's we also tried an iconic Malagasy beverage: THB (“Three Horses Beer”). I believe it is actually owned by the Coca-Cola Company, which is why the name is in English, but it’s produced and only found here in Madagascar. You see advertisements for it everywhere! I don’t actually like beer at all, but I was willing to give it a try. I was surprised by how light it was – it didn’t have a major, heavy, beer-y flavor to it. I’ve had it several times since when out with friends in Fianar (although my mother is probably cringing as she reads this!); the bottles are big, and are best shared with one or two other people – I highly recommend it while watching a World Cup soccer match!

Ambohimahamasina, Part 2: Monday, Market Day! and the WINTER Solstice (6/21)

We awoke early Monday morning and ate leftover rice and breds for breakfast, along with tea and cake – a sort of Anglo-Malagasy fusion breakfast, I suppose. We left with Gaia for the market, as Monday (along with Thursday) is the big market day in Ambohimahamasina.
Along the way to the market we stopped to say hello to every person passing – not just because Gaia seemed to know everyone, but also because that’s just the custom here. You say “akory kory” and “salama,” and variants thereof, along with nods and half-bows in some sort of greeting ritual, according to your mood. All of it is heartfelt and sincere. Francesca, being a New Yorker at heart, wondered what it would be like if this were the custom in the city – ha!
The market has three parts. One is for secondhand clothes, dumped wrinkled into piles on the ground out of sacks carried on the top of the head to the marketplace. I was told that most of it comes from China, pretty junky stuff. Gaia picked up a waterproof windbreaker for an upcoming trek she was taking through the rainforest corridor. Francesca had to buy a cheap pair of flip-flops (2,000 ariary – less than $1), seeing as she was missing a shoe from last night’s latrine incident.
Next we hit the food section of the market. Produce of all shapes and sizes. Raw meat sitting in the sun. A mound of pungent (to put it nicely) dried fish. Stands with cookies and candies, women frying dough balls in big woks. Huge sacks of rock salt, sold by the kopoka. A makeshift pharmacy, selling packages of pills – goodness knows what! We met Romain and Gaia’s pineapple-growing friends. Francesca and I picked up potatoes, bananas, and rice and took in the atmosphere, with the sacred mountain of Ambondrombe (to which Malagasies believe all souls ascend after death) and the cliffs of Angavoa off in the distance.
Gaia said the third part of the market is what Romain likes to call the “vice market” – where you can find moonshine/artisanal rum called toaka gasy, among other things.
Gaia was planning an upcoming trek through the rainforest corridor with FIZAM (Fizahantany Ambohimahamasina), the local ecotourism association. Since ecotourism is part of our project here, we tagged along with her as she went to discuss the details with her guide, so we could see firsthand how everything worked. It was a tiny little one-room office in centre-ville, with some basketry items for sale (woven by Soamiray’s basket-weavers), some brochures (mostly in French), fees posted on the walls. We chatted with Monsieur George, one of the guides, about the progress the FIZAM has made, and the challenges it still faces. One of these is English proficiency – the guides’ low level of English proficiency makes it harder to lead Anglophone tourists. Gaia has been teaching English to them, and this has helped a lot. Most of their tourists are French, English, or Italian.
The office could definitely be better publicized, so since returning to Fianar, I’ve made it my project to look for better ways to advertize FIZAM’s activities. I’ve been on countless travel websites, made posts on sites like TripAdvisor and VirtualTourist, and I’ve been gathering contact info for other non-blog-type sites so that we can send them information in the hopes that they might post it as well. Also in the works: contacting travel magazines like National Geographic Traveler, National Geographic (French edition), and Geo, Terre Sauvage, and Ulysse (French-language travel/nature websites) to see if they’d be interested in sending someone out here to write an article. Sounds like a longshot, but hey – you never know!
To further help with all these plans, Gaia suggested we take a trek of our own, so we decided that Wednesday we would take a one-day excursion with a guide to the village with the most-developed Soamiray basket-weaving atelier.
We returned back to Gaia and Romain’s. It grew foggy, misty, and finally, rainy (so much for the "dry season" - we've come to realize that really what they mean by that is, the "non-monsoon season"). We were all cold and sleepy - even though it was mid-afternoon, it didn’t feel like it. I realized it was June 21st, the summer solstice – if we were in the Northern Hemisphere, that is. But we’re in the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s now winter; that would make June 21st the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year! Something about how early it gets dark out really changes your biological clock, and being in Ambohimahama with no electricity, you find yourself content just to bundle up and snack by candlelight until dinner and bedtime. Gaia got out her British snack of choice: Marmite, which is apparently a yeast extract spread. I tried it. Did NOT like it!
That night Romain made pasta with another of his pied-noir grandmother’s sauces, called Tchouktchouka. I had him write down the recipe for me, I thought it was SO good:
Tchouktchouka
- 5 tomates
- 2 œufs
- des legumes (courgettes, aubergines…[facultatif])
* couper les legumes en dés
* frire les tomates dans l’huile d’olive
* ajouter les legumes
* casser les œufs dans le plat
* remuer fréquemment et ajouter de l’eau au besoin
* laisser réduire la sauce de manière à ce qu’elle ne soit pas trop liquide
* assaisonner à votre gout (sel, poivre, ail)
Something about the eggs in the sauce, whether the consistency or the taste, was almost like ricotta cheese. Perfect for a lactose-intolerant vegetarian like me, as I need all the protein I can get!

Ambohimahamasina, Part 1: Journey and Arrival (6/20)

So we left for Ambohimahamasina Sunday afternoon, more or less around 2pm (as planned). Packed everything into the back of the rugged Land Rover-esque vehicle. Francesca and I commented that you really don’t realize what a car, or even a taxi-brousse-like van, is capable of until you put it on atrocious uneven, unpaved roads and steep inclines. At first when we got here I had to close my eyes when we drove in certain areas – surely we wouldn’t be able to drive there without tipping over! But now I’m used to it: you have to figure your driven knows what he’s doing, as he’s been getting around just fine his whole life here!
Our driver took us first to his place to pick up his bag, then to Raïssa’s (who is in charge of sanitation projects with Ny Tanintsika) to pick up her and her 9-month-old baby Ephraim, who has a fantastic laugh. Raïssa said she normally wouldn’t bring him to the field, but she’s still in the process of looking for a new nourrice (wet nurse) to look after him.
After picking up Raïssa and Ephraim we stopped for gas at a Jovenna station; I stared straight ahead stoically as the station attendants peered curiously through the windows at my whiter-than-ever face (it’s always so cloudy here! I’m convinced I’ll come back to the US whiter than when I left!). I was riding shotgun, but Raïssa had warned me that this was only temporary; “on sera quatre” (“we will be four”) in the back. I hoped this meant Francesca, me, her, and the baby.
Next we stopped by the Fianar taxi-brousse station to pick up Pierre Louis, a French intern, who got to sit shotgun for the drive because he was “wide,” according to Raïssa – by Malagasy standards, not American, that is! I moved back to the back.
But then we stopped at another gas station to pick up Paul (another NT team member, and Raïssa’s baby’s father, I think), who joined us in the back. Four adults and one baby (who alternated between Raïssa’s and Paul’s laps) – needless to say, a bit of a squeeze! And all without seatbelts (let alone a carseat for the baby), I might add!
The drive was beautiful: hills, mountains, valleys, streams, rice paddies, green with red earth. A flash of a waterfall. Over bridges (the only time the driver ever slowed down! I’m pretty sure there are no road rules here…). As we got father and farther away from Fianar, I felt a sense of elation, the thrill of the road and adventure in the air. The past few weeks of back-and-forth between the house and the office right next to each other had given both Francesca and I a bit of cabin fever; now, it felt so good to be out and seeing new things!
We stopped at a panoramic spot so the men could relieve themselves – alas, again, the limits of female anatomy!
After about an hour’s drive we stopped in Ambalavao, the last major town before our destination (another 1½+ hour’s drive away), for dinner at Chez Mamidà Hotely, a tiny little hole in the wall with three tables and benches. A group of singers was practicing in a back room. Everything on the menu consisted of rice with some sort of meat. Hilarious. Francesca and I were still wary of food we didn’t cook ourselves, so I abstained (remembering my Nutella and peanut butter sandwich waiting for me in the car), while Francesca attempted to order just a bowl of rice.
Just rice? Nothing else? Nothing with it? No, you can’t just order rice. “Just rice” is not on the menu… They actually found Francesca’s request for “just rice” to be stranger than my abstention!
Finally they negotiated something and Francesca got her bowl of plain white rice. The others were served rice with an accompanying bowl of chicken or pork in broth. Raïssa fed baby Ephraim little spoonfuls of brothy rice with little torn up bits of chicken. Bowls of dark brown liquid arrived soon thereafter. Coffee? I wondered. Of course not: it was ranon'ampango, Malagasy rice water, freshly made from boiling water in the rice pot filled with stuck-on burnt rice (in this case, very burnt!).
We were soon back on the road again, and began our climb into the hills as night fell. We passed fewer and fewer small villages, and it became harder to see the scenery. The road was very rough, with deep crevasses in the dirt from where water flowed. The driver tended to try and straddle them with the car, but sometimes we dipped down into them a bit, causing us all to get bumped a bit in the back. Ephraim, once so giggly and well-behaved, began to scream, and kept it up for much of the rest of the drive. Sometimes as we drove I could see people walking along the side of the road, illuminated like ghosts in our headlights. I got lost in my own thoughts, watching the seemingly endless road.
Finally, we arrived in Ambohimahamasina in total darkness. We got out of the car with our backpacks and waited for further instruction. We had no idea where we were staying – none whatsoever. Our boss had kind of left out those details…So we had come prepared for anything – including our own pot to cook in and our own spoons to eat with! I had packed a jar of peanut butter, and was fully mentally prepared to survive on just that if it came down to it!
As seems to be the case with all our adventures here in Madagascar, everything always turns out better than you expect. Romain, a French intern with Ny Tanintsika who’s been here for over a year, came out of one of the buildings – although he had not been expecting us, we, along with Pierre Louis, would be staying chez lui. We climbed up a ladder to the second-floor balcony of a building, walked around to the other side, and entered a small candlelit room (there is only electricity for one hour a day, 6-7pm, in Ambohimahamasina, and no outlets). Inside there was a girl who greeted us in perfect English – I recognized her as Gaia, one of the British med students Ambinina had spoken of. She is Sri Lankan, but grew up in Dubai and was educated in Canada and the UK; she just finished med school and is back in Madagascar for a few more weeks, until mid-July. She and Romain are living here in Ambohimahamasina: Romain working for NT on Projet Pailles, Gaia teaching English to high-schoolers and tour guides, as well as teaching some family planning. Although we were unexpected guests, we were welcomed without hesitation.
Romain began to cook, and although I was still imbued with paranoia induced by too many Princeton Travel Health meetings, I gave in to my hunger. Red rice (particular to the Betsileo region, and a welcome change to boring old white rice; plus it has more nutrients!), des breds (a sort of Chinese leafy green vegetable, served in Madagascar boiled in lots of water to be poured over rice), and a tomato and green pepper sauce that Romain called fritanga, one of his pied-noir (French Algerian, before the Algerian Independence) grandmother’s recipes.
Afterwards, for dessert, dark chocolate and a fresh pineapple, cut in front of us on the table. This pineapple put all other pineapples I’ve eaten in my life to shame – literally, it was as if every other pineapple I’d ever eaten had just been some weak imitation of the fruit we tasted that night. It was succulently sweet, not acidic at all (usually in the States I can only eat a maximum of 3 pieces without killing off the feeling in my tongue), and you could even eat the center (usually too hard to enjoy in pineapples bought in the states). Romain and Gaia get these golden miracles directly from the growers, who live nearby.
Before and during dinner, the five of us (Romain, Gaia, Pierre Louis, Francesca, and I) had one of those wonderful conversations that only occurs when you get together a bunch of young traveler/expats from all over the world. We spoke in both French and English, switching back and forth based on our moods and abilities; everyone was understood. We discussed cultural differences, international politics, education systems, pop culture, everything – all by candlelight in good company over good food. It’s moments like these when you’re reminded that you don’t just travel to see new places: meeting other travelers and foreigners is one of the best parts of traveling, too.
After dinner we washed our faces and brushed our teeth outside on the balcony using buckets of water: two clean water buckets with a small cup to scoop, and a dirty water bucket for soapy water and spitting out toothpaste. I saw nearby where Romain had put dinner’s dirty dishes, which would be washed in the morning, once the sun came up. I came to a stunning realization: you really can manage just fine without running water!
BUT, before going to sleep that night I finally had to face my greatest fear: the squat toilet. Romain’s bathroom is outside and a little ways behind the building. It looks like a small shed with four doors. The two on the right are the toilets for the whole village, while the two on the left are for Romain, and can be opened only by key. One is a shower space (literally, just where you take your bucket when you want to bathe) and the other is the dreaded latrine. There’s a hole in the ground and a place to indicate where to put your feet. Some of you reading this are probably thinking I’m being overdramatic, others are probably sympathizing. In any case, please don’t judge – I had never done this before! There’s something very disconcertingly natural about a squat toilet – like you’re forced to face the fact that, much as we’d like to forget it, we humans are still animals. But alright, it wasn’t so bad. For me, anyways. Francesca, unfortunately, made us all aware of a potential peril of squat toilets, though: she lost one of her shoes down the hole!

So what am I actually doing here?, and Why I went to Ambohimahamasina...

The original assignment given to us by our boss was to read all of Ny Tanintsika’s past project reports and come up with some sort of report evaluating the success of these projects and what the organization could do in the future. Sounds simple enough, right?
Our first two weeks here were spent reading past project reports, and it soon became apparent that this vague report-writing task was not going to work out. First of all, the organization has about 20-30 past projects, each one with 2-4 50-page project reports. These reports are written in detailed and technical French (I’ve learned the necessary vocabulary to talk about mutual health insurance, well-drilling, latrine-building, and basket-weaving), and do a very good job of self-evaluation, discussing in detail difficulties encountered and suggestions for future projects. So why does Ny Tanintsika need two vasa (foreigners), here for only two months, telling them what to do?
We proposed a new idea: we could focus on one of the projects that we had already read about: namely, that of “Projet Paille: La vannerie pour la vie et l’environnement” (“Project Straw: Basket-weaving for life and the environment”).
It’s a project that has created an association of basket-weaving ateliers called Soamiray (SOO-mee-rye). Basket-weaving is a craft practiced by all Malagasy women in rural areas, allowing them to produce household items for their own families as well as for sale in local markets, which allows them to bring in some extra income, especially needed during la période de soudure (the hungry season, which comes right before the harvest). Soamiray organizes some of the best weavers into small ateliers that can take on larger orders and improve the quality of the items produced, hopefully earning higher prices in the market; some items even go to boutiques in Tana and abroad. Ny Tanintsika is working with Soamiray to improve the organization of these small workshops and the quality of their work, as well as improving the quality of life of the weavers and their families, in areas like sanitation (building hygienic latrines, digging wells with uncontaminated water) and healthcare (teaching family planning, starting up some sort of health insurance mutual).
But along the way there have been many bumps in the road. For one thing, these women have been used to weaving in the privacy of their own homes, doing things their own way: now they have to get used to showing up to the atelier on time (when the Malagasy sense of time is decidedly non-Western) and learning the importance of quality norms and using standard measurements to ensure a uniform product. There is difficulty getting people to show up consistently, as sick children, the agricultural calendar and local holidays, and the elaborate funeral traditions of the rural areas can all get in the way. So can jealous husbands, who don’t like their wives traveling to the periodic meetings that the weavers are required to attend. Ny Tanintsika is also trying to get the women to stop using the Pandanus plant as a raw material, as it is a native endangered species. Instead, NT is encouraging the cultivation of alternative materials like vinda and forona, and the use of natural dyes (although they still have to use chemical dyes to produce red and green). The results of NT’s efforts have varied by atelier, but overall the trend is motion in the right direction.
Additionally, there has been cooperation with FIZAM, a local solidarity tourism office, which leads treks through the mountains to these rural villages. Tourists can go to the ateliers, watch the women weave, purchase items, even learn to weave themselves! Each village has a hebergeur who provides simple lodging and traditional meals – a truly one-of-a-kind experience for tourists who want to travel far off the beaten path.
So what do Francesca and I, two American vasa only in Madagascar for two short months, have to offer to NT/Soamiray’s Projet Paille? We can look for new markets for Soamiray’s products; with our French and English language skills and two MacBook computers, we can do a lot of online research and find new places to sell these beautiful woven baskets, hats, and other items, both here in Madagascar (perhaps not just boutiques: how about hotel lobbys? Local tourism offices?), and abroad (France, the UK, and the US). We can find out about the possibility of Soamiray joining a Fair Trade Organization, which could get its products to fair trade/worldshop boutiques abroad (like Ten Thousand Villages in the US). We can get the word out about the solidarity tourism opportunities: make sure English language guidebooks know about the place, maybe contact travel magazines, see if they’d be willing to do a feature. And even if none of these efforts leads to something concrete this summer – there are still internal problems that NT and Soamiray have to deal with – we can leave all this information in a report for NT to use when Soamiray has matured enough and is ready for new opportunities.
We pitched this idea to our new boss Nathalie (Sam has returned to the UK to have her baby), and she liked it. Now, driven by a more focused purpose and a project we are actually excited about, Francesca and I are looking forward to the next month and a half – we feel like we actually have something to contribute, and at the same time we will learn so much!
After accepting our pitch, Nathalie said there was a fast-approaching opportunity for us to go into the field and see Soamiray in action. We would travel to rural Ambohimahamasina (pronounced “ambo-ma-MASH-nah”) with some field agents on Sunday, June 20th and stay there until Thursday. We would talk to the field agents, visit the ateliers, see firsthand what was going on, the things that technical project reports simply can’t communicate to you. We didn’t really have details of where we would be staying or who we would be answering to… But then again, IIP internships are not known for their specificity; come what may, we trust and brace ourselves for whatever lies ahead!