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!

Market Day in Fianar!

While you can’t walk 15 feet without running into something being sold on the street here, Tuesdays and Fridays are the big market days in Fianarantsoa. Ambinina, a Malagasy sociology student and intern at Ny Tanintsika, had offered to accompany us to this Friday’s market to help us and prevent us from getting ripped off or just generally confused. Prices are not listed, and the people selling produce often don’t speak much French and sometimes give prices in francs, which haven’t been in use since 2003, when the ariary was adopted [for reference, it’s about 1,800 ariary to the dollar, so as Americans we feel like big spenders here!]. Ambinina explained that to get the price in ariary you have to divide by 5; for example, something that costs 5,000 francs is really 1,000 ariary. And yet sometimes when you ask for a price, vendors will give you an outrageous number, assuming you know they’re talking about francs and not ariary! This explains a lot of our confusion at Tuesday’s market, before we had this information!
Friday was foggy and overcast, with intermittent drizzles; this may be the “dry season” in Madagascar, but it’s still wet and cold! I wore a sweatshirt AND a fleece jacket, along with jeans and my boyfriend’s winter socks. Not exactly your mental image of a perfect market day!
We climbed the hill, past the extensive area where secondhand clothes are sold on the street, to the top where produce and other foods are sold. Things familiar: tomatoes (1,200 ariary/kilo), lettuce, eggplant (1,600 ariary/kilo), zucchini, carrots (big fat orange ones, stalks still attached), green beans (haricots verts!), onions (2,000 ariary/kilo), garlic, potatoes, oranges (actually quite yellow), lemons (citron, very round and small), tangerines (1,000 ariary/kilo), herbs (rosemary and thyme), eggs (320 ariary/each). Things less familiar: live turkeys, ducks, and chickens lined up in neat rows right on the walkway, you’d think they’d peck at your ankles, their legs tied together with rope; cuts of meat hanging unrefrigerated and uncovered, flies buzzing around; ground manioc leaf (mounds of green paste; Ambinina said Malagasies eat it with pork); mysterious-looking root vegetables; dark wild honey sold out of old plastic Coca-cola bottles; tall piles of shrimp sitting out unchilled. And best of all: what I thought were little brown crayfish…which turned out to be grasshoppers! Ambinina said that this year there had been an infestation of them in one part of the country, but no matter – Malagasies eat them! This was especially funny to me, having just read a New York Times article that morning about how a massive grasshopper invasion in the US Midwest had called for one of the largest assemblies of insecticide-spraying planes to be deployed (see article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/us/10grasshopper.html?scp=1&sq=grasshoppers&st=cse). Now if only Americans would eat grasshoppers, this wouldn’t be a problem: no one would go hungry, AND we could spare the already-compromised environment the extra pesticides! It was one of those clear Western-world-versus-developing-world moments for me: when life gives Americans grasshoppers, they bring out the big guns, but when life gives Malagasies grasshoppers, they make snacks!
In addition to produce, we also decided to buy that other staple of the Malagasy diet (besides rice): beans. We found a man chatting on his cell phone selling them out of sacks: white beans, red beans, peanuts. Things like rice and beans bought at the open market and coconut oil (which is sold out of giant vats, used for cooking and for haircare) are bought with the Malagasy unit of measure called the kapoka. It’s a little metal cup that looks a lot like a tin can peeled of its label. We bought two kapoka of marbled red beans for 500 ariary/kapoka [see picture].
As we walked home, bags full of produce, we passed more people selling fruit and vegetables along the road, Francesca (who is Haitian) got really excited: one woman was selling not bananas, but plantains! That night we had an almost-authentic (Francesca wasn’t fully satisfied with the rice and beans, although I had no complaints!) Haitian dinner of rice and red beans and fried plantains. Yum!