Madagascar dreaming

On the verandah rail of our beach villa looking out in the direction of the Comores, a collection of ‘les objets trouvés’ slowly accumulated during our week long stay at Anjajavy. There were scallops and cowries from the dazzling white sands immediately below us, smooth coral pebbles and foamy driftwood shapes from the tide line. Seedpods from the size of giant, hairy fist to fairy fingernails. There were wooden artifacts tossed aside in the making of boats, ox carts and fish traps - charred pegs, stone hammers and sharp hooks. There sat creature homes – bird-woven, bee-waxed, termite-chewed, snail-worn. Feathers of the Madagascar hoopoe and the helmeted guinea fowl. Fallen fruits – coconut, mango pip, lychee case, palm kernel, seed gourds. Each objet weathered, washed smooth and steered by the wind. A beachcomber’s careless trousseau of memories and associations.

Anjajavy itself is a wonderful place to contemplate the tides of life. A beach resort set on a slim peninsula of protected indigenous forest, it is one of those deliberately inaccessible places that makes you work and sweat to get there and then rewards you with the balm of a palm framed view over the Mozambique Channel, an infinity pool and a resident troop of Coquerel’s sifakas – oh, and ice cold Three Horses Beer in chunky Star Breweries brown bottles.

The Coquerel’s sifaka was our first lemur sighting of any kind and the first of the three members of the sifaka family that we were to meet in three different locations in a fortnight. Coquerel’s look good enough to eat only in the sense that they are smothered in a mixture of rich chocolate and cream fur. Luckily they are protected both by law and more powerfully by custom and taboo as they and other lemurs are regarded as representing the ancestors – ‘koomba’ or ghosts in the entirely friendly, reassuring sense of the term. Sadly their dry, deciduous coastal forest ranges, full of beautifully light and hard wood, have not been protected nor managed sustainably over the years putting their feeding and breeding ranges under intolerable pressure. Equally sadly they are not immune to the market forces for local bush meat and exotic pets. In Madagascar 20 million of the world’s poorest people share the island with 20% of the world’s rarest species and that tension is manifest everywhere even to the most hedonistic, camera happy tourist. In addition the population has doubled since independence from France in 1960 during which time half the natural forest cover has been consumed by ‘tavy’- subsistence slash and burn agriculture. In less than another 3 million years at the present rate of forest degradation and consequent soil erosion the island will be back to a flat floating vegetation mat with no more than a few hardy plants and animals clinging on for dear life.

None of this seems to bother the Coquerel’s troop who swing by Anjajavy’s Oasis garden sanctuary every afternoon around tea time. The Oasis is a limestone lined pond in a natural glade enhanced by careful plantings of splayed travellers’ palms, chameleon inhabited papyrus, scented frangipani, hibiscus, bougainvillea and plumbago blossoms. On a single, simply dressed table Darjeeling, Earl Grey and Rooibos tea are served alongside iced drinks with coconut macaroons or vanilla almond biscuits. Beside the monogrammed white crockery stands the most important single contribution to a pleasant afternoon’s tea in the shade - a spray canister of mosquito repellent. The sifakas are more interested in the leaves and shoots in the canopy of acacia, hackberry and tamarind trees. They do not drink any liquids at all and rely on their high fibre diet to provide its own moisture. The troop communicate with a constant running commentary of mutterings, squeaks and cluckings and are completely habituated to their daily rather daft sightings of cameras, camcorders, iPhones, binoculars, pith helmets and sensible walking shoes below.

When they descend to the red dusty floor of their forest, these sifakas find that their long, whippy hindquarters and finely furled tails which serve them so well when bounding from tree to tree are a bit of a drawback on the ground and so they resort to a series of manic forward hops like a small child astride its first bouncy spacehopper. Once they have traversed a leaf carpeted clearing successfully, they cling briefly and thankfully to the base of a tree and then leap explosively and yet as gracefully as any trapeze artist into the trailing creepers and branches above where they land and settle, bound by bound, as softly as a soufflé.

Coquerel’s sifakas are amongst the over 80 separate species of lemur found on Madagascar and nowhere else in the world. In our fortnight on the island we met representatives of just 12 of those species suggesting that at least one more serious lemur trekking trip may be required before my wife turns 100. The majority of lemurs are tiny creatures no bigger than your outstretched palm, nocturnal, solitary in their foraging habits, absurdly fearful of their very few natural predators (mainly birds of prey) and spend all day snuggled up together for warmth in nests and colonies which they rent from termites, birds and spiders. Our guide who first introduced us to this secret night life around the Anjajavy estate was Rasolofoson Radolalaina Patrick.

Rado is a born naturalist. An invisible bird calls a single note, a lizard scurries under a leaf or a mouse lemur twitches its tail and he has all four of its names in English, French, Malagasy and Latin at the tip of his tongue. He moves with that unhurried calm of woodsmen everywhere and his eyes light up excitedly when he sees that you share some of his sheer joy in his fragile world. We set off one evening for a stroll in the limestone tsingy rock formations which define this part of the coastal forest and mangrove system. The rocks themselves are spiky extrusions like huge, jagged pumice stones which may or may not have been coral reef formations in a previous life. Almost miraculously they sprout huge baobab trunks and melting waxy strangler fig roots from their gnarled crevices. Somewhere in the subterranean cellars of these tsingy outcrops are trapped aquifer chambers of brackish water sustaining life on their grey, razor sharp flanks. Rado guided us effortlessly through this terrain his searchlight bobbing up against the canopy looking for the telltale twin pinpricks of reflective lemur retina. “There, there – grey mouse lemur!”

That night we saw several of the teacup sized grey mouse lemurs, a golden brown mouse lemur, a rare white footed sportive lemur (only recently recorded as a separate species), a giant forest rat (a potential predator), a clutch of sleeping sifakas wedged into a tree fork, a zebra spider, Oustalet’s chameleon and a hairy land crab scuttling for its burrow and then suddenly standing its ground with its fighting claw raised defiantly like some sort of mutant ninja light sabre. We also heard a Scops owl calling, the plaintive infant cry of the sickle-billed vanga, the distinctive ‘pyok-twoop-twoop’ of the Madagascar nightjar and finally the unmistakable ‘pyop’ of a fine South African wine cork from Anjajavy’s open air dining terrace.

I know that I do not have the full palette of words required to capture the kaleidoscopic magnificence of an Anjajavy sunset. A few that I jotted down on a beer mat during our first brief dusk sit beside me now as a write at the start of a glorious English autumn and remind me of other glowing canvases to come: pink, purple, burnt orange, oyster, pearl, puce, pewter, mauve, taupe, dove, tobacco smoke, inked embers. A good night.

And still the collection of objets trouvés continued to grow. A pebble here, a nut there, a seed pod too tactile to resist. Contemplating my treasure trove at sunset one evening, it struck me that they could be used to tell the story of the island itself - that whole ocean bound evolutionary time capsule that is Madagascar.

Everything represented on our balcony was light enough to float and resilient enough to survive salt water. Animals had come to the island that way and adapted to tap into all the food resources that were lined up on the broad rail in the rapidly fading light. Birds came quite naturally from the African mainland and we had seen many familiar Southern and East African species but with a slight Madagascar twist or trill marking them as endemic to the island. Man had arrived as well in search of food, fuel and shelter and found them largely in the tree species whose pod shapes so attracted my magpie eye. And there were simple tools too represented in the collection – wood, bone, stone, string and metal representing successive waves of human technological evolution. I could have added rubber, glass and plastic from the seashore to help update the story but the balcony was already beginning to resemble some deranged pawnbroker’s groaning shelves.

Contemplating Madagascar

For years I have looked at the map of Africa with its great Madagascar outrigger island and happily assumed that in continental drift terms this massive fragment fitted snugly into its apparently matching curves due west about 400km across the Mozambique Channel – in other words into the ample eastward facing bosom of Mozambique itself. My recent and cursory research into plate tectonics and the Gondwanaland theory suggests that the whole floating ark that is Madagascar actually sheared away from what we now know as the coast of Tanzania and Kenya some 165 million years ago, thus belonging many degrees further north than I had it slotted away – much like a jig-saw puzzle piece that you have jammed into place because of where you want it to fit.

Furthermore I had not realized that the long straight edge of Madagascar’s east coast was once attached to the long straight edge of the Indian sub-continent – which must have been one of the longest, toughest straight edged rips ever - even in geological history. Amazing to think that it was once possible to walk from Mombasa to Mumbai overland by tackling the small mission of crossing Madagascar’s mountainous spine. A mere training run for Sachin Tendulkar.

Madagascar is big. It’s approximately the size of Texas or Botswana and bigger than Spain, Sweden, Japan or France. It’s as if you took all that dough that was used to make the roughly rectangular pie crust that is France and rolled it into a fat, crusty baguette instead. And while we are with the food theme, if you sniff around carefully in your fridge or biscuit tin, you’ll almost certainly find a small part of Madagascar as the island accounts for over half the world’s vanilla bean production.

The island has long held other fascinations for me. Gerald Durrell was largely responsible for the majority of them. His descriptions of searching for mouse lemurs by torchlight, his meeting with the near mythical fossa cat, his fight to save the endangered and incredibly gentle aye-aye all fired my boyhood imagination and fuelled my entirely unfulfilled ambition to become a game ranger. Durrell once described the island as looking like ‘a badly presented omelette’ on his map of the world. I grew up poring over a large wall map of the world in the back room off our kitchen where my mother baked scones. I needed a little footstool made by my grandfather to help me examine the further northern climes in detail – Madagascar on the other hand was close enough to the ground for me to trace its outline at about eye level to a six year old.

Madagascar for me held all the mystery of Narnia, all the menace of Gollum, all the magic of Doctor Dolittle of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. Was it not the island of Sinbad’s encounter with the Roc, surely Gulliver had visited there on his travels? So when I asked my wife where she wanted to go for her 50th birthday and she said ‘Madagascar’, I knew she must have been listening to my various travel fantasy ravings over the years. Oh dear.

While doing the research for a holiday there, I was struck by the number of different names the island has attracted over the years. ‘The Great Red Island’ is how early Portuguese navigators saw it rising out of the sea – a sort of maritime Ayers Rock image. ‘The Island at the End of the Earth’ is attributed to ancient Chinese cartographers who obviously got about a bit but decided they had to draw the line somewhere. ‘Le Grande Isle’ countered the French, who set about turning Madagascar into a colonial market garden and refueling station in the 1880’s - what with the Cape Town stand on the route to the East already being taken.

Marco Polo is credited in some quarters with having coined the term ‘Madagascar’ having confused it in his jumbled explorer’s mind with ‘Malaysia’ – both being ‘down there somewhere’ from Venice presumably. Funnily enough this was exactly the same confusion that the first travel agent I approached was suffering from – which makes you wonder about which agency old Marco used and where he was really trying to get to?

Another nickname that I like for Madagascar is, ‘The Eighth Continent’. It’s more commonly billed as the world’s fourth biggest island behind Greenland (which may in fact be three congealed islands under its increasingly gooey ice cap), New Guinea and Borneo (which both have rather messy country boundaries striped all over them.) However, rather than the dubious distinction of fourth place, I prefer to think of Madagascar jostling Antarctica and Australia in the queue for full continental recognition (‘we’ve got a shelf and all…’) If it’s a Malagasy queue, it could take some time. But then the place has already been some time in the making because the title that is indisputably Madagascar’s is that of ‘the world’s first and oldest island’.

Back to Gondwanaland, the mega-continent, breaking apart all those millions of years ago. I have always struggled to find my frame of reference within geological and evolutionary timescales. The only trick that has come close to working for me is the one where the earth’s entire estimated existence from Big Bang to Big Brother is reduced to the scale of a single calendar year. I find it easier to imagine that great jig-saw of continental land masses cracking up and drifting apart around about early July with the first completely isolated fragment, roughly comprising modern day India, Pakistan and Madagascar, fully surrounded by the one mega-ocean by the end of the month. Then a further crack appears in August shearing off the larger Indian section to begin its headlong charge northwards crashing into the Eurasian plate around mid-September causing that almighty fender bender of a smash that we now call the Himalayas. Madagascar meanwhile floats serenely south across the equator and comes to its gentle bobbing berth a respectable distance from the mother continent by early November. About a month after this continental upheaval settles down, the first lemur wakes up.

The original proto-lemur ancestor was apparently an African who got so fed up with being beaten to a pulp by her rapidly developing gorilla and chimp second cousins that she and a couple of the kids hopped onto a passing vegetation raft in early December and floated across the Mozambique Channel in search of some peace and quiet and a food supply that she could call her own. Luckily she was light enough not to sink her leaky craft on its 400km crossing and sleepy enough not to notice that there were at least six different baobab seed pods on her floating mat. Once they arrived on their new island home, the family fanned out in search of food in an evolutionary process that we now call ‘adaptive radiation’ whereby animal adaptation to the environment is determined by the constraints of specific food niches.

And so today we have the over 80 different fruit and leaf and bamboo and insect and grub eating lemur species. Luckily for all of them all their major predators - not to mention the large and frankly tiresome African apes - had not made it across the water. In fact life really was bliss for the lemurs for a while because the first human settlers only showed up right at the end of December and of course immediately started to cut and burn their forests.

These first human settlers on Madagascar were an intrepid bunch in their own right. They had floated, surfed and occasionally paddled their dug-out canoes complete with balsa wood outriggers and palm fibre sails from India, Indonesia and possibly even further abroad, driven by the trade winds, pelted by monsoons and dragged by all the swirling currents of the Indian Ocean. Madagascar’s eastern seaboard with its lush tropical rainforest running down to white coconut fringed coral sands must have seemed every bit as attractive as it is portrayed in today’s travel brochures. Evidence of this early human settlement can be traced back just over two thousand years (we are already at December the 31st by our one evolutionary year calendar) by which time the Chinese, Egyptians, Malians and Romans had been crawling all over their known worlds for centuries – or seconds depending on your chronometer.

Much of Madagascar’s heritage remains visibly Indo-Malay - the single, polysyllabic language uniting the whole island; the abundant rice paddies in the monsoon facing valleys of the eastern highlands; the pragmatic acceptance of Christianity as just another ancestor-based form of spiritual sustenance; the whistling rickshaws and gaudy taxi-brousses of downtown Antananarivo. And yet there are clear African footprints as well – the widespread currency of zebu cattle; the triangular sailed dhows off the west coast; the baobab groves with their sacrificial offerings; the screaming presidential motorcade on its way to the airport. “We are of Africa but not African,” said our guide at one point. He spoke both French and English impeccably but unfortunately supported Chelsea.

He went on to apologise for the fact that Madagascar’s politics are in a state of extreme flux with a transitional government trying to hammer out a compromise constitution. In the meantime the reins of power seem to be in the hands of a young president who was once mayor of the capital, Antananarivo, and before that a radio DJ. Now Boris Yeltsin was known to seize a baton and conduct a military band and Bill Clinton was elected partly because he played the saxophone on late night TV but Madagascar is the only country I can think of which can claim to be run by a full-time, disc-spinning, headphone-wearing professional DJ. Cool.

Leaving Madagascar

‘Think of it this way.’ said Lalaina, our overall tour guide and mentor in all things Malagasy, ‘every bump in the road takes you closer to what you’ve come to see.’ As a philosophical mantra it was flawless, up there with Proust, although as a travel forecast it had an ominously uncomfortable ring, more Moby Dick.

The road in question lies between the crumbling colonial era seaport of Fort Dauphin on the south-east bump of Madagascar and Berenty Lemur Reserve and Research Station approximately 90 bone-shaking kilometers into the dry, deciduous scrubland of the island’s deep south. Did we have experience of other poorly maintained, permanently pot-holed, flash flood ravaged roads our solicitous guide enquired – building hard on his earlier philosophical soft sell. We most certainly did…

One or two sprang painfully to mind and were not easily banished over the next five hours. The Kampala-Entebbe road shortly after Amin’s tanks had churned it up; Richards Bay to Kozi Bay in Kwa-Zulu Natal along the old, sandy coast road; creaky Land Rover forays into Khutse in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Park. You can be mentally prepared but you cannot hide from the sheer humpty-bumpty, stop-start grind of a truly ghastly broken metalled road surface. You long to be driving the crate yourself rather than riding it as you dimly realize what all your unfortunate passengers on previous switchbacks must have endured. Slowly the stoical, semi-rhythmic silence of shared misery descends on our car load much as it must have sounded in the bowels of a slave galley just without the occasional swish of an overseer’s whip.

The scenery on the drive itself is a welcome, rollicking distraction. The lands immediately around Ft Dauphin are still the remains of the well watered highlands – the tailpiece of the mountain rainforested spine of the island. Paddy fields and mango plots, hands of green bananas beside the road, occasional water meadows covered in immaculate water lilies and here and there the strange concrete obelisks erected in clusters as monuments to the ancestors. Lalaina (his name means ‘beloved’ much akin to ‘Amanda’) explained to us the rudiments of ancestor based worship which is intricately tied to the land and food and family and which is the basis for so many of the major and minor ‘fady’ taboos which govern daily Malagasy life like an invisible protective shroud. The whitewashed and plain concrete cenotaphs are dotted along this road in family plots and often marked with sacrificial zebu skulls mouldering to dust at their base.

As the road deteriorates rapidly, the land begins to dry out, the mountains turn to ash blue in the distance and the scrub takes on a dusty olive green sheen which suggests that it has settled in for a long thirsty wait. This transition forest is marked by more and more unusual trees. The triangular palm puts in an appearance with its triangular boxed cornice supporting its fronds at the top of its rough pillar. It’s endemic to this one particular patch of Madagascar. The travellers’ or ravenala palm is more widespread and appears in clumps here and there as a reminder of its role as a national symbol with the navigationally useful east-west orientation of its splayed trunk. The transition forest is traversed by a few slow, silted rivers carrying the interior topsoil inexorably to the coast. The rivers have been crossed by old railway style bailey bridges, square, rusty and rickety - momentary relief from the shake, rattle and roll of the road.

And then the terrain shifts another gear. Rather than expectant thirst, the tone becomes parched resignation. The softness of the occasional palm stands has gone and is replaced by the strange spikiness of the alludia. The alludia is neither tree nor cactus to my non-botanical eye. It’s a great spiny collection of tubes each with rows of tiny succulent leaves and thorns – as if somebody had left sets of giant pipe cleaners dotted around the desert. The alludia is rightly prized as a Madagascar special with its valuable core of dark hardwood. There are more bulbous baobabs, ripe flowering succulents, familiar aloes, Christ thorn euphorbia, sandpapery pachypodiums and that extreme bad hair shrub - the wild and woolly octopus plant. This great outdoor hothouse of endemic xerophytes has been overrun by any number of alien Mexican invaders - cactus, prickly pear and the original culprit and ultimate bandit plant – sisal. For mile upon mile of our journey we passed through one of the world’s largest sisal plantations. As a monoculture crop sisal takes some beating for bone dry boredom. Even the last desperate flowering of the grandparent plant, which shoots its giant prickly stalk towards the stars in one final firework display of pollination, isn’t enough to alleviate the real dreariness of sisal.

The plant was first introduced from Mexico to the south of Madagascar in the 1920’s as a response to growing industrial demand for rope and hessian lagging. Recently, demand has been re-stimulated by the call for bio-degradable, re-cyclable supermarket packaging. In one of those terrible paradoxes of modern green consumerism, the laudable desire to carry off our supermarket purchases in fashionable hemp bags, has condemned yet more acres of vulnerable dry indigenous forest to being slashed and cultivated. However in the midst of this vast rather depressing southern plantation there remains one beautifully preserved island of Madagascar’s Eden – Berenty.

Berenty is in a sense a small triumph of enlightened commercial self-interest. The local feudal De Heaulme family first arrived in 1928 under very frugal circumstances. Slowly they built up a plantation empire drawing on first colonial, then wartime and now European Community sisal subsidies and established a strong working understanding with the local ‘people of the thorns’, the Tandroy. They also paused in their planting and harvesting of sisal to draw a line around a patch of native gallery forest on a bend in the Mandrare River which today is the Mecca for lemur lovers everywhere whether inspired by Gerald Durrell as I was, or Walt Disney as a later generation have been or possibly by another remarkable naturalist with the popular touch – Alison Jolly. Less well known than Diane Fossey and her gorillas or Jane Goodall and her chimps, Jolly and her ring-tailed lemurs of Berenty have recently enjoyed a burst of BBC publicity. They have played host to what must have been an exhausting succession of comics and celebrity presenters – Douglas Adams, David Attenborough, John Cleese and Stephen Fry although, as Cleese hastens to point out, surprisingly not Michael Palin. It can’t be long before Palin shows up possibly with Geri Halliwell or Joanna Lumley in tow. When they get there Berenty will be ready to host them with its own brand of unhurried 1950’s Rhodesian National Parks charm.

The only evidence that we could find for Madagascar’s most intriguing bird of all time was a single prehistoric intact egg fossil unostentatiously preserved and displayed in Berenty’s small Androy natural and ethnic history museum. The Roc or the Elephant Bird was a giant flightless bird big enough to make an ostrich look like a goose. It has been variously referenced in Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit writings as either similar to the Phoenix or the Griffin or as a mighty raptor of the kind that attacked Sinbad’s boat with an aerial bombardment of large rocks. The last roc specimens appear to have been hunted for their bulky supplies of meat and died out as a result shortly before the Dutch ate the last dodo on neighbouring Mauritius in the mid-seventeenth century.

We finally arrived in Berenty camp after dark and were assigned to a bungalow that was described in the literature as ‘Spartan’ but which in fact was perfectly comfortable with a nice line in bamboo ceiling panels and a scalding hot shower. The generator packs up at 22h00 at Berenty which was some time after our road weary heads had hit our dormitory thin pillows under individual mosquito nets. Waking at first faint light the next morning and walking in the cool morning air, you became aware of what a captivating slice of wildlife has been preserved amidst the sisal ruins. In the gum tree behind the bungalow were two roosting white-browed owls who gave away their post by hooting loudly. A branch or two to their left was a whole row of sleeping ring-tail lemurs, their trademark tails wrapped around the outermost bulges of the group. On the roof of the bungalow itself a red-fronted common brown lemur was helping himself to a drink from a rusty water tank. In the eaves a gecko scuttled for deeper cover.

Our subsequent easy strolls around the stick broom swept paths of the reserve slowly revealed more and more bird, lemur and reptile life. Amongst the autumnal yellow glow of tamarind leaves in the early sunlight, we met whole families of ring-tailed lemurs – matriarchical clans of cat-like creatures sunning themselves, sleepy-eyed on their haunches with semi-opposable thumbs clasped in Zen-like yoga poses. We disturbed a clutch of sifakas in a banyan tree who gradually stretched themselves out along the length of their overnight branch and began their desultory pre-breakfast toilet. We were taken in careful silence to the foot of huge tree colony of the Madagascar flying fox or fruit bat. It’s difficult not to think of them as furry flying lemurs – yet another evolutionary quirk in this fairytale forest.

The undoubted stars of the show here are the dancing Verreaux’s sifakas. Cleese described their antics on the forest floor as the prancings of ‘a deranged Edwardian waiter’ and proceeded to demonstrate exactly what he meant by reprising one of his Monty Python routines straight out of the Ministry of Silly Walks. Once they descend from the trees where they are as acrobatically at home as any lemur, all sifakas have their distinctive ground game which marks them out as the Gene Kellys or John Travoltas of the primate world. The Coquerel’s that we’d seen in Anjajavy hop forwards from a full frontal start and look a little like participants in a sack race. The Verreaux’s on the other hand are sideways movers who flip in mid stride from leading with their left to their right profile. They could be footballers skipping sideways around those little plastic cones or cricketers warming up in the nets with a few dummy bowling run-ups. Whatever favourite sporting or dancing projection you put on their skipping routine, they are endlessly entertaining performers.

Before leaving the island I had two unfulfilled commissions – one from a lifetime Manchester United fan who wanted a picture of a fellow fan in tribal dress (away strip would do, I guess) to add to his collection of similarly attired local supporters in almost one hundred countries around the world. I failed this one so there is still a Madagascar sized hole in his collection. The other was a family interest in visiting a Shoprite supermarket – one of five recently opened on Madagascar by the South African retail giant as it reaches out into Africa. Unfortunately they were closed for trading when we passed the branch closest to the airport at some unearthly hour of the morning. Retail is detail.

So I didn’t actually get to do any grocery shopping while in Antananarivo nor while passing through innumerable villages on our roller-coaster road journeys to Andasibe or Berenty. However I was fascinated by the range of items and produce on sale in town itself, at every taxi-brousse stop, around Total, Shell or Jovenna petrol stations or simply from dozens of wooden market stalls strung out along the main (and often only) road.

The dominant product is charcoal sold in sooty plastic sacks tied together with palm string. Increasingly this charcoal demand is served from the replacement eucalyptus plantations as the once plentiful hardwoods retreat to the most inaccessible reaches of the land. After charcoal comes rice sold in small twists of raffia or huge, industrial sized sacks and every type and volume of container in between. Rice is everywhere and everything - it is a staple, a shaper of valleys and terraces, the destroyer of the forest, a living link with Asia, the feeder of families, the keeper of the hearth. Zebu cattle come next as a measure of wealth and homage to the ancestors, a walking, grazing, fat storing bank and temple on the hoof.

The market places are all tireless industry and ceaseless exchange. Casava, sweet potato and manioc roots, bamboo and sugar cane shoots and all their pestle-pounded extracts. Hats and combs, mats and lambas, tyre sandals and golf umbrellas. Bicycle bush mechanics with piles of spare parts enough to service the Tour de France. Chinese takeaways with counters of glazed duck stalactites and pork samoosas stalagmites. Butcher stalls adorned with streamers of tight little sausages and every possible raw pink cut of zebu hanging from vicious meat hooks. Tailors, carpenters, cobblers, hairdressers, knife sharpeners, blacksmiths, stone masons, watch repairers, medicine men and coffin makers. Soap and palm and coconut oil potions of every unspeakable variety. Bakeries piled with golden pyramids of baguettes and carefully arranged mounds of fresh, sweet bread rolls. Banana fritters, doughnuts, sugared dumplings and biscuits for the sweet-toothed. Colourful stockades of fermented pineapple, lychee and jackfruit juice with much prized bottles wild honey in recycled Jack Daniels bottles. Water cress, dried anchovies and duck eggs all originating from the flooded hand-worked mud-dyke rice paddies which are never far from any settlement. And a little way outside most settlements stand the brick kilns, sawmills and lumber yards of rural light industry. It’s a vivid reminder that four-fifths of the world’s population would not find the subject matter of my market pictures at all strange but rather wonder at my pale legs and enormous camera lens.

And so our magical time suspended in Madagascar’s time warp began to draw to a close. We still had to face the spine-numbing prospect of the drive back to Ft Dauphin airport, a further round of entirely misleading Air Mad flight announcements, a short drive through Antananarivo’s market stall lined streets and some time to be killed writing post cards at Ivato International Airport before catching the Air France flight out to Paris and a whole different world.

I flew out of Madagascar filled with a determination to go back one day as an ardent eco-tourist, armed with a proper wildlife camera and tripod and contributing to one of the many excellent NGO sustainable tree-planting schemes which we had seen in operation busy building green ‘carbon corridors’ between the isolated pockets of remaining indigenous forest.

Velume, Madagascar, Salaam. Big and old, wet and dry, sweet and sour island, home of the lemurs.



© James Gardener September 2009