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.
No comments:
Post a Comment