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