MADAGASCAR: DECEMBER 16, 2016-JANUARY 12, 2017

DECEMBER 15, 2016- THURSDAY – ISTANBUL-MADAGASCAR

Five hours and forty-seven minutes after leaving Istanbul, Turkish Airlines Flight 160 leaves the African continent just southwest of Mogadishu, Somalia and crosses the Equator.

We are in the Southern Hemisphere.

Dennis dozes, crook-necked, in the aisle seat. I have a window seat. The Indian Ocean stretches, to the horizon. There will be only flat blue, and white cloud dots below for three hours and one minute until landfall on the specks of Mauritius, way to the southeast. The flight path is more interesting on my private screen.

It’s 08:27, my morning. While I slept Flight 160 flew down the Nile, crossing Egypt and Sudan, then directly over Addis Ababa, all places we’ve been, vibrant in fact, vivid in memory. There are people we know down there:

In Egypt, elegant Nasser, who set up camp with us in the Great Sand Sea, laid back Bassam, who sends us pictures on Facebook of his on-again, off-again flirtation with Rasta hairstyles, and Muhammed, who taught me how to tie a headscarf

In Sudan, go-getter and all purpose 'fixer' Waleed, who promises to tell us when it’s safe to go to South Sudan, and kind Murtada, archeologist, and reincarnation in all but skin color of my deeply missed buddy, Bob Heinrichs (he even stands the way Bob did, with feet at right angles, and one arm grabbing the other behind his back), and, who, when we ran out of gas for the 4by4s, took us to his family, where his mother fed us…as Bob's mother would have.

And in Ethiopia, lovely Aida, who helped sort out Ethiopian time-keeping for us, and just emailed her disappointment when the Netherlands turned down her application for a tourist visa, and best gift, Birhanu, Menge, Abel, who have made us family

May they all live their lives safely, free of fanaticism in the name of religion or 'progress', and of Armageddon launched by the pig-eyed, pudgy-fingered, smirking ignorance of an egotist who ‘likes war, even nukes', and would love it on his resume.

We fly on.

Somewhere to the south is the northern tip of Madagascar. We will fly past the island, almost to the Tropic of Capricorn, lose and gain passengers in Mauritius, then do a 180 and fly westward back to Antananarivo.

In an hour we land on Mauritius. Up here at 37,000 feet my breakfast tray is the Melania Trump Model. It looks good, but still slides off into your lap. Turkish Airlines, which, up to last night’s truly inedible dinner, got high marks for its efforts at high altitude feeding, plummets to the Marianas Trench of dining with breakfast. Untasty, and unmanageable, I think it is a used car of a breakfast, 'Pre-Owned', an 'Experienced Breakfast', much the worse for the experience.

Nine hours after leaving Istanbul and 3 after leaving Africa, we coast down over Mauritius. It’s mostly flat, which I did not expect, and all green, which I did. Small towns slide together, tin-roofed beads strung on ribbon roads.  The fields are small, variations on green, but multi-textured, suggesting small owner holdings. The coast is barrier reef, deep blue and the white line of surf on one side, pale green and white sand the other. It’s lovely.

I have no idea what the inhabitants of Mauritius looked like originally. Our many off-loaders are a mix of brown complexions and European pallor. Youth and a few straw hats suggest a vacation vibe, with hints of Package Deal, not a candidate for a pin on our Go There Map, beauty passed by.

Flight 160 turns straight west, towards Madagascar 2 hours away, driven by the sun on our tail. It sharpens our wing, red-tipped silver invader amidst the blue, and above the scattered puffs.

The blue stops at a white line, backed by green, that stretches to the northern horizon.

Madagascar.

DECEMBER 16, 2016 - FRIDAY-MADAGASCAR-DAY 1 - ANTANANARIVO-ANTSIRABE

Where the HELL are we?

The young man leap-jogs through the traffic, looks at us, turns the peak of his baseball cap sideways, waves, and grins widely out of a face straight off the streets of the Philippines, or Indonesia, or Malaysia, or Borneo…. all at least 4,000 miles eastward.  But not of Africa, 350 miles to the west.

Joce, our guide, and Victor, our driver have the same kind of faces, from the very far east, not the very near west. Yesterday we met, figured out a possible route around their country and managed money. Today, we’re off at 9, semi-recovered from a night on Flight 160, less so from that second bottle of local beer.

Day One explodes with bits and pieces.

The houses are colorful with a Caribbean vibe. People greet with the Arabic 'Salaam', thank with 'Merci'. The signs are in French, and in Malagasy, which specializes in very long words. Like French, spoken Malagasy has misplaced the connection with the written language. Many of the letters in those long words don’t survive the journey from page to tongue. You'd think all those dropped vowels and consonants would clutter the streets, but the streets are as free of language litter as they are of other jetsam.

The currency is best measured in pounds, not the British kind, in pence, but the weighty kind, in ounces. Or, in inches. Joce sorts us out with 12,200,000 Ariary. The largest bill is 10,000 Ariary. 12,200,000 Ariary stacks up to 1,200 of the 10,000 Ariary notes, a good 6 inches, a good half pound. We’re loaded.

Madagascar is already a place apart, an adventure for the taking.

Separated from Africa 80 million years ago, the island, fourth largest of all islands, sailed off on a spectacular evolutionary journey. Ninety percent of its plants and animals don't exist anywhere else. Nature forgot to include any large carnivores in Madagascar’s menagerie, opting for some wonderful experiments free of fear of being someone’s dinner. Most famous are the lemurs, distant relatives of the folks reading this. There was a lemur the size of a healthy gorilla, and a bird nine feet tall running around when the first humans arrived about two thousand years ago, but no more. Their smaller relatives are the draw here for most people. And, for the anthropologist? Read on.

Most of the people of Madagascar are the descendants of great adventurers. The western-most travelers of the great diaspora that populated the islands of the Pacific, including Hawai’i, New Zealand, and Easter Island, their ancestors brought the languages, culture…and faces… of island Asia westward across 4,000 miles of water. It’s one of the great epic voyages of our species. In the 2,000 years since, they have become 18 tribes, and some faces carry the features and color of the peoples of nearby Africa, but, culturally and linguistically, Madagascar is uniform, especially in complex rules of behavior that grow out reverence for departed ancestors. Anthropologist heaven.

For today, we settle for getting straight on the itinerary (ambitious, but flexible), the currency (heavy), and a sense of the cost of things (cheap).

A bag of crisp peanuts is 30 cents. Slabs of fresh pineapple all around come to 50 cents. Lunch for 5 of us is $18. Our bungalow in a garden is $15. We whittle away at our inches and ounces of Ariary. Slowly.

Madagascar will do. Definitely.

Thank you is 'merci', or, even better, 'misotr'.

2016-12-17- SATURDAY-MADAGASCAR-DAY 2- ANTSIRABE-MORONDAVA

Bang. Bang. BANG. From the left rear wheel. It has thrown all its lug nuts. Nothing holds the wheel to the car.

We’re stuck. But not alone. Within minutes 3 handsome and smiling brothers putt-putt up in their putt-mobile, gather up 4 of us and putt-putt us back 5 kilometers to town. We don’t need photos to break the ice. Their smiles would endanger Greenland. But, they get their photos anyway.  (I’ve posted them on Facebook). We find fried rice. Victor goes off with the brothers and finds his handful of lug nuts. The Putt-Putt Guys take us back to Joce and the car and don’t wave goodbye until wheel is on, nuts are lugged, and we’re safely off. They wave. We smile.

We have provided entertainment. A breakdown is instant spectacle. Add foreigners, one with a mass of red hair, and it verges towards the legendary. The photos we give the Putt-Putt Guys will be their proof. In return, these guys have provided proof, once again, of the reservoir of kindness we share as humans. Surely, it can swamp the hate some would spill over us.

Yesterday we drove south from Antananarivo (Tana, for short) to Antsirabe, in the cool highlands and slept in round bungalows wrapped in flowers.  Today we leave at 6 am, descend to the warmer lowlands, and hope to beat the rainy season to the rough roads in the west. I thank the French for their legacy of croissants, pain au chocolat, and café au lait

Up here, where the rains are more predictable, the green terraces of rice sculpt the landscape. Prosperity wheels by. Bicycles, rare in Ethiopia, and in many places across the Straits, in Africa, are common here. But…'We do all work by hand. We have no money for machines.' And Joce gets us past the bikes to the people bent over their rice shoots, carrying baskets of mud to build the bunds between fields, plowing with braces of cattle.

Young rice plants define green, intimidating other colors. They recede…but don’t give up. There are the houses, frequently raucously assertive.  And the hats. The Malagasy (don’t let the eyes mislead…its Malagashe on the tongue) sprout festivals of head pieces, from cloche, to fedora, to baseball, to sombrero, in cotton, Chinese processed dinosaur, and, most beautifully, in woven straw, it’s hatdom on parade. With panache. (Eyes and tongue in synch on that one.) City wear disappears, can’t compete with the colors swishing by on sarongs and body wraps. Madagascar has seeped into us already. It’s taken 36 hours.

As we head west and start the long slow descent out of the highlands, the rice fields and prosperity and fecundity stay behind. Madagascar has been stripped, losing much of its great forests, many of the plants, and animals, that existed nowhere else. The marriage of vast deforestation and tropical rains produces a landscape of hideous beauty. With gentle rains the stripped hills sprout the rubbable green fuzz of renewal. They’re beautiful. The heavier rains scratch and gouge the hills with deep gullies, and because the soil is iron-rich, they are red and lurid. Bottom-seeking water, with no trees to hold it close, defaces the hills and washes Madagascar into the sea.

Later we pass a spot overlooking a river. With pick axes, men, women, and children are attacking a huge boulder, chipping off slivers, washing them, fingering them. They are mining for gold. 'We do all work by hand. We have no money for machines.'

Here people walk. Way away from a town or sign of habitation, a string of cars pops out of the landscape. It’s leading…a line of marathon bicycle riders???? On high-tech bikes, helmeted, lycra-ed, spandex-ed. Even we stare.

The landscape changes, and we are crossing wooded savannah. The clawed mountains are way behind us. But not the clawing water. We cross many rivers, all red with mud, washing Madagascar into the sea.

More water is on tap. We can see three large rain squalls to the west. One is mumbling. It does not sound friendly. And it isn’t. The windshield blurs into translucency.

And then…plop, plop, PLOP.

We have a flat tire.

2016-12-18- SUNDAY-MADAGASCAR-DAY 3- MORONDAVA-LEMURS

It stares at us from a tree hole, 30 feet overhead.

There’s a hint of big ears, and a furry flat face, but they’re just stage setting for the huge eyes, the dead giveaway. We’re being scoped at 3pm in the afternoon by a 'night lemur', one of the rarest animals in the world. Our guide, 24-year old Nambin, tells us its name, which I forget, and its vitae, which I do not. At 900 grams, about 2 pounds, it’s a small lemur, but the giant of the many tiny night lemurs. (The smallest is the mouse lemur. It weighs a few ounces, fits easily into a human palm, and is the smallest primate and, thus, of our distant relatives on the family tree, the anti-gorilla.) Either we disturbed its daytime siesta or it’s just curious about the 5 big hairless lemurs wandering in its basement. He sinks back into his hole, drowsy, or satisfied.

Other cousins, the lovely Sifakas, silken in fur and movement, drape across their leafy aerie, pale as moonlight. One sails to another tree, a blurred shaft of ephemera, too far and too fast to be earthbound. I understand now their name. Lemur was the name Romans gave to the spirits of the dead, ghostly, fleeting, almost perceived, of the air. As they must be.

Evolution has given the 80 species of lemurs entry to all parts of the paradise of Madagascar. They share it with the island’s only carnivore. There’s only one.  But the fossa has a voracious appetite for lemur sashimi. One ignores us as we watch it drink from a puddle. It’s catlike (though no climbing in its family tree will take it near a branch labelled 'Feline'), low-slung, and with two feet of sleek muscle and three of twitching tail. It’s that tail that gives it balance and safe leaps in the trees. Lemurs have no defense other than speed, agility, and the ability to leap tall trees in a single bound. And to disappear, evaporate, like their namesakes.

We leave the lemurs and fossa to the heat and humidity in Krindy Forest. We’ll see more lemurs further south.

For the next few days we’re on the beach-strewn west coast of Madagascar. Mozambique and the rest of Africa are only 300 miles across the Mozambique Channel. Africa’s contribution is obvious in the skin, faces, hair of these beautiful people.

Our bungalow is right on the beach. At 6am I watch the men haul in their heavy nets by hand. They are broad-shouldered and lithe, their muscles and six packs, toned in the gym of life and layered with lapidary elegance under skin from darkly sun- burnished bronze to deepest, light-lapping black. The women, similarly pigment-blessed, sort the catch. All are beautiful. 

I think of the horrors spawned by humankind's self-satisfied smug, delusional, social fiction of 'race' based on skin color, as if one version of the packaging of human creativity, intelligence, kindness, genius, empathy is better than any other. Maybe one day we will grow up. Or maybe this silly notion will stay with us, shadowy, and dangerous, like the lemurs of Rome.

2016-12-19- MONDAY-MADAGASCAR-DAY 4- BAOBABS AND FISH

It’s 4 am. Even now, in high summer, and just a few days shy of the shortest night of the year, it’s thoroughly dark. Starlight is behind rainy season clouds. The surf is loud. Our ears find west. Ruth joins us from her bungalow and we find the guys. We are off on another quest for some of Madagascar’s magic: baobabs at sunrise.

Lemurs are fleeting ephemera, but linked as primates to us. Baobabs are anchored solidities, related to nothing else on the planet, except to one of the other 7 species in baobabdom. Though they look like trees stuck in the middle of an unsuccessful somersault, head in the ground and roots protesting in the air, they aren’t trees at all, or gymnastic flops. They are succulents, and very successful ones. They can live for 3500 years. Woodless, inside there are no rings, just stringy fiber. The 'roots' at the top are branches with leaves and big fruit, mouth puckering and delicious. Next to lemurs they are Madagascar's big draw. It worked on us.

No other place on earth has as many baobabs as Madagascar, and no place in Madagascar has as many as the unremarkable flatlands east and north of Morondawa. Unremarkable. Except for the baobabs. As Madagascar’s quarries are unremarkable except for the blue fire of the sapphires they contain.

We passed twice yesterday through Baobab Alley, at noon on our way to lemurs, and again later, timed to see them against one of the island’s raucous sunsets. The clouds had other plans. This morning we’re here for the rubies and garnets of sunrise. Once again, the clouds have other plans, marvelous ones. The skies are bands of white pearl and silver opal. The baobab are jet, obsidian, onyx silhouettes holding onto the sky. Is there a legend that the ancients planted baobabs to tie the sky to the earth lest it fly away? There should be.

Roosters and a few dogs barking “I'm here, I'm here” are the only sounds until some lay-a-bed late risers descend. One guy, dressed in shorts and tank top to show off his muscles and tattoos soon finds out why Madagascar's mosquitoes are semi-legendary. His variations on 'God damn it', and 'Go the f##k away' don’t add much to the atmosphere. His girlfriend has exposed neck, shoulders and arms. I hope they’re up on their malaria meds. My guess is they’re clueless, malaria-wise. The gene pool is relieved.

The baobabs ignore them, us, everything but the sky.

By ten we’re skimming over the water in the trunk of a tree. Joce's buddy Morgan, is taking us on a mangrove tour by outrigger canoe. It morphs into an all-day visit to a fishing village on a spit of white powder that keeps the river from the sea.

‘Thud’. 'Thud'. 'Thud' and the third coconut drops from the sloping palm. The barefoot boy follows, more gracefully. Coconut Guy sports surfer shorts and a bleached almost-mohawk.  'Chop'. The fresh coconuts lose their tops to the etched muscles of shirtless Machete Guy. The cool liquid slips down easily. 'Chop'.  And the coconuts are halved into bowls lined with soft coconut, spoon-ready. Photos and smiles leap across the language gulf. Machete Guy calls his wife and she joins us, nursing their baby, for a photo.

Lunch is spectacular. Morgan and our canoe paddlers grill thick fresh caught tuna steaks and monstrous prawns over a wood fire. Brushed with a spicy sauce, then slightly charred, they are beyond perfection. Rice, cabbage salad, then ripe pineapple are delicious courtiers to this gastronomic royalty. The guidebook raves about the cuisine of Madagascar, and especially about the seafood. Now, we get it.

We chill on the veranda overlooking the wood fire where the Canoe Guys are channeling the food gods, guests of Mama and her two sons.

Older Brother poses serious-faced. It’s the classic ID photo, thoroughly subverted by the floppy handknit cloche hat. Younger Brother tries to break him up…and succeeds. The grin is delicious. When it’s his turn, Younger Brother has a different agenda entirely. Shirtless, pumped, dark sunglasses, ¾ profile, staring off into space…and with a touch of Michael Jackson action on the crotch of his white trousers, this is classic Stud Muffin pose for Someone Special. The kid pulls it off. I’d drop the slight crotch action if he goes for wider distribution, but, hey, what do I know about Stud Muffinery in Madagascar?

They ask for photos, shirtless, with their mother, then one of just the two of them, shirted. Younger Brother is still in Stud Muffin mode. Older Brother is holding the Catholic Image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the one where Jesus is blond, blue-eyed, vapid, and simpering.  This is called 'dramatic contrast'.

This is all why we travel.

2016-12-20- TUESDAY-MADAGASCAR-DAY 5- MORONDAVA-ANTSIRABE

We don’t find any lug nuts.

We’re passing back over the same route where we lost our lug nuts in the Great Lug Nut Event and then had the  Great Flat Tire in the Rain Event. Madagascar's road system doesn’t offer many options. There IS another road, but it’s 'dotted’ on the map, translation: red dust, potholes and boulders. Madagascar’s red dust makes wonderful super glue and quicksand when mixed with water.  Right now, the sky is blue and dotted with innocent looking white clouds, but in the rainy season those pretty white puffs can be traitorous, making tire-sucking, car-swallowing muck out of the red dust. Following the dots could be iffy. There’s no clearinghouse for road conditions other than word of mouth. It’s not good. We opt for retracing our trip westward on the tarmac.

The road rises from the coast, out of the heat and humidity. Africa’s genes are rarer here, the faces brown and of the islands of Southeast Asia. Rice replaces fish. Labor remains intense. The rice tenders are bent over in the sun, feet in mud, hands in green. Some fields are raw chartreusey green, almost luridly synthetic. These are the seedlings, ready to be transplanted and earn their deep green. Later, nurtured by muscle and sweat, the ripe rice will turn golden. For now, I let the green seep in, carrying deep respect for the bent backs and sun-aged faces along the road. I’ve done that work, during my two years living in a rice-growing village in Taiwan.

On the hills above the soft flat rice fields, villages of beautifully proportioned two story brick houses are crenellations against the sky. Do the people in the fields see them as beautiful, or simply as a long slog up a steep hill?

Lunch is deep-fried fresh tilapia, tangy cabbage salad, fresh tamarind juice…and rice. We try a Malagasy specialty.  Take rice, cook it until some of it browns and sticks to the pot. Empty the rice, add water, boil, strain, and serve warm. No, it does not sound promising, but it is good, and safe because the water has been boiled. Nothing of rice is wasted, even the flavor.

 Five of us eat for $9, cheap for us, but many times the daily wage of a worker.

2016-12-21 – WEDNESDAY -  MADAGASCAR DAY 6 – ANTSIRABE TO VILLAGE

“No, we do not eat cat”.

The we is ever so delicately underlined. There’s a message in it.

I wait.

It comes.

”But in some places…..”

I’m hoping this is not one of those places. But there is a kitten mewing against the string that ties it to the kitchen of the farmhouse.  We have travelled into the hills for a village homestay. I have not included Kitten Kroquettes in my list of 'Must Dos' in Madagascar, or anywhere else.

The village homestay welcome committee calls a meeting around the long table in the narrow room off the kitchen. 6 foot Dennis scrapes the ceiling. The rest of us scrape the walls. All their pictures are on the wall, labelled with their functions. They apologize that the community and association president can’t be there. She is off in another village.  'La Cuisiniere' has a big smile, and a non-nonsense pork pie hat that suggest she is very much in charge of the wood fire and black pots that are her kitchen. The committee assigns 24 year old Haja to be my guide. He’s bouncy, ever-smiling and, English at the ready, a fun, knowledgeable companion.

Dennis and Ruth opt out of the overnight.  Sweet, caring Joce stays on with me. This is my adventure, not his. I doubt Joce will be sending postcards, and certainly none claiming A Good Time Was Had By All. He's a good sport.

Joce, Haza, and I share dinner by candlelight. It’s a Malagasy specialité: chicken in ginger broth. The broth is better than that we had in a restaurant, both chickeny and gingery. The chicken is served separately with sautéed onions and tomatoes. It would be fine fare anywhere. Here? It is spiced with surprise…and relief, and is delicious. The kitten mews out in the dark.

Bedtime comes at dark, very soon. The electric line stops at a pole several miles away. A few solar panels bring pale recycled sunlight to our table, and an occasional charge to Haja’s cellphone. Outside is pitch. We’re sent off with an enthusiastic soliloquy of French and English words strained around the 10 or 12 randomly placed teeth of the village 'alcohol enthusiast'. Some of them make sense.  Haja's cellphone leads us and several committee members through the dark farmyard, across a gulley, left across the dusty road, up some uneven stone steps to another house. They light two candles, show us how to drape an ax across the door to bolt it, unbolt us, and leave. Joce bolts us into the dark.

Bed is a thick foam cushion on top of a wooden frame, wooden slats between me and the floor. It looks sturdy to me. But Joce laughs that he’ll be in the floor by morning. Wood is expensive. There aren’t enough slats to make a continuous surface for the mattress and me to flatten on. We maintain altitude, but undulate across an Alpine topography. I sink into a comfy combo of hill and dale. I rub my face with Deet. Joce hangs and crawls under his mosquito net, a dim fog six feet away in the light from the one candle. Outside even the roosters are silent.

2016-12-22 - THURSDAY– MADAGASCAR DAY 7 - VILLAGE TO AMBOSITRA

By 4 I have slept solidly and comfortably for 8 hours. The roosters are tuning their croaky reveille for the sun. It always works, but not quite yet. It is deep coal-mine black. I feel along the stalagmite of light from my headlamp to a place I can reprocess last night's soup. The air is cool and dry. Our room is windowless, the air heavy from the long-evaporated candle. Joce stirs and asks me to leave the door unbolted and open to the night.  Inside and outside blacks are a pair.

But not for long

Reveille is working. The morning music of songbirds leaves no room for the dark. A cart rattle-clumps on the road just below our room, then another, then another. By 5, the new day sky is all baby colored, pink and blue through the gauze of the door curtain. Someone laughs.

The village owns its peak, its fields spilling down to the lowlands in a jumble of green. Fog wraps the lowest fields. Distant villages float above the mists, their bricks now burnished sunlight. This is as beautiful a landscape as Tuscany.

Haza waves and I join him on a walk down the slope to the terraced fields. A deep gouge separates the ridge-riding houses from the fields. We cross it on narrow planks nailed to a mismatched pair of tree trunks, stepping over the dark drop between planks. The association built the bridge with income from the homestays.

The corn is still young, but spikey heads taller than the dense mats of potatoes, peas, beans, cassava, soy and otherwise, the waving ribbons of onions leaves, the lace of carrots. The squash is in bloom, huge yellow flowers served up on foot wide platters. There are other crops, but Haza's impressive vocabulary does not stretch quite far enough to give them names in English and my French repertoire of veggie names runs to only a few crops beyond obvious cognates. (I’m better with fruits, and add 'grapefruit', and 'papaya' to Haza's English cornucopia.)

We share the path and morning “Salaams” with kids heading down to fetch water from the village spring, then back up balancing filled 20-liter jerry cans on their heads. The jerries weigh 20 kilos…44 pounds. The village’s other water source is a well donated by South Korea. It’s on the top of the hill, but has run dry, so every morning the kids fetch water from the spring before going to school. It’s not yet 7am.

Later, some of the same kids are bumping down the road to their school on bikes. Most walk. All greet us. It’s the next to last day of school before Christmas break.  Some of Haza's younger students carry leafy branches to sweep the school classrooms and grounds.

Joce and I share breakfast with Haja before he heads off to school. The soft rice cakes are tasty, the rice gruel (think thin oatmeal but with rice instead of oats) reminds me of breakfasts in Taiwan. There is also meat, a generous offering for the foreign guest. I stick to my 'no red meat rule' and pass on the meat. Joce and Haja do not mind.

The association expected five of us for the night, dinner and breakfast. Only 2 of us stayed. We are happy the village accepted our donation for all five of us, a total of about $48. The bridge could use a few more planks.

There are no other entries of guests from the United States in the guest book. I carefully print my name and greeting, and thanks.

Victor, Dennis, and Ruth drive up at 9:30, breakfast croissants in hand. The photo printer does its magic. Haza and I said our goodbyes before he left for school. The other association members gather and sing us a welcome/farewell song.  It sounds Hawaiian.

We will drive off for more adventure. They will walk down the hill, and cross the bridge to the fields. The kitten? I think I hear it mewing.

2016-12-23 – FRIDAY MADAGASCAR DAY 8 - AMBOSITRA

“How much money to fly to.Madagascar?”

I tell.him.

Silence.

His arms sculpt largeness in the air.

“That money. You build a big house, very big house here.”

Silence.

I’ve lied about the amount, rounded it down. A lot.

I suspect he has done the same. Still…

David Andonniaina and his buddy, Otto, guide 3 of us around Ambositra for 3 hours for 35,000 Malagasy Ariary, a little over $11. It’s an inflated price for vazza tourists. Most people earn less than $2-a day, says our guidebook. That figure probably takes gross national product (small) and divides it by population (large), ignoring the rural economy of many million farmers and fisherfolk who raise or catch their food and participate only tangentially as wage earners.  Madagascar is a painfully poor country. Even if our measures are off a few factors, David and I have got it right.  Something like our airfare to get here is probably more cash than most people will ever see in their lifetimes, a very big something…always in the air.

Ambositra is a vertical place. Streets are ramps, some matured into stairways. Open sewers run down the sides. People crowd the middle. Many are walking with toddlers in fancy dress, prancing in paper crowns and clothes 'to grow into' to or from party day at school. Daddies carry many who have had too much party. Malagasy fathers are strong arm, soft shoulder refuges, and walk relaxed, cuddling children.

We pass older children carrying loads of bricks on their heads up the steep slope. There is no party for them perhaps no shoulder to rest on.

Can’t we make the world a better place for children?

Silence.

2016-12-24 – SATURDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 9 - AMBOSITRA-FIANARATSOA-AMBALAVAO

The Malagasy are mad about hats.

And the maddest Malagasy milliners are here, in Ambositra, Hat Central for raffia hats, mild to mad.

Today is market day, and Saturday, and Christmas Eve, and the rainy season has gifted the city with a cool, sunny, and dry day.

It’s Millinery Mayhem.

The Hat Ladies have taken over whole streets spreading their millinery masterpieces in great heaps, raffia seduced by artistry to suit every color, size, head shape, complexion, style, fantasy in confections from stylishly subtle to deliciously garish. My favorites are the semi-sombreros, their brims wide landing places for wild invention. My own is solid green, a captured rice field, pure and undecorated.

Ambositra is our last big city overnight before we descend from the highlands. On our first night here, the Eve of Millinery Mayhem Eve, we 'prend le diner' at The Grand Hotel, the oldest hotel in town, a semi-grande dame left behind by the French. The meal is long in coming, demi-semi-grand at best, not distinguished, nor worthy of the setting, which is. There are dark corners, refusing candle light. Stories lurk, but the walls are too tired to release them. Ghosts sit at the other tables. We can almost hear them, but choose not to. A lady needs her secrets.

There are no secrets, no stories at Chez Violette, a soubrette cum restaurant for lunch the next day. It has marginally better food, quickly served in a prettier setting, all light, the walls and corners silent. It will be generations before they have anything interesting to say.

We leave grande dames and soubrettes behind as we head for their country cousins to the south and west. We'll be with them for the next two weeks.

We’ll not starve. In hilly Fianaratsoa we pass a place that looks pseudo-Chinese, bad panda logo and all, and pull in at Hotel Victoria. Vicky’s delivers. We have chicken cooked to delectation in julienned strips of ginger. Afterwards we street shop for a kilo of fresh lychees, then munch on a snack of pieces of dough glued with honey.

On the road to Ambalavao, I see scorched woodlands and smoke, black and grey smudges of destruction, pornographic in a landscape of such beauty. Madagascar is incinerating itself. Good land is limited. The population grows. Forests and their inhabitants disappear. Forever. Madagascar and its wildlife is a once in a hundred million years’ evolutionary marvel. When it’s gone….

The Malagasy fill their island. For the time being they also add beauty. Here, in the last villages of the highlands, small scalloped tiles, lovely with the repeated rhythm of fish scales, cover the roofs. Some fields are rice-less and filled with water, great mirrors reflecting the sky.

And the people working the fields, walking the roads, and burning the fields wear hats.

2016-12-25 -SUNDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 10 – AMBAVALAO – PARC NATIONAL d'ANDRINGITRA

There are lemurs on the roof.

In the forest this morning, the lemurs are ghostly, almost-developed photographs of something more substantial, though perhaps less beautiful. Like Alice's Cheshires they materialize and evaporate piecemeal. That black and silver feather boa of a tail always appears first. Then, aware and wary, they melt away.

Here, flying through the mango trees, tumbling over the roofs, and munching their pillaged mango-loot just a few feet away, they are solid, rulers of those tails. And seriously cute. A pair of babies, rare lemur twins perhaps, wrestle and grab at each other’s tails, irresistible, furry Slinkies. Adults stare at us, their pink, hairless, and tailless relatives from abroad. Our cameras make us cyclopes. No wonder they stare.

We are at Camp Cotta, a two-hour Malagasy Massage off a paved road into Parc National d'Andringitra.

The Parc is an immense valley, high in the mountains and dominated by a monolith as large as El Capitan in Yosemite. It is striped with green, layered by lichen, and drips wisps of waterfalls into tinsel streams that fill a natural pool a thousand feet below their source. We float in waters washed from heaven This is paradise. With lemurs.

Only about a thousand or so travelers a year manage the trip.  Half a dozen are here, with us and the lemurs, spread among a dozen brick bungalows and tents under the trees. By dinner time we’re alone in the wall-less dining house. I think it’s only us, and the small staff at the camp. In between bringing out our meals, and cold beers, they scoot behind the huge Christmas tree to watch a bang-bang, slam fest kung fu movie. Electricity works only between 11 and 1 at noon, and between 6:30 and 10 in the evening. They’re getting their adrenaline fix, and we’re charging our cell phones and cameras.

Outside, the Furry Ones, real owners of the place, are asleep in the trees.

Our Christmas Day began in Ambalavao with Swiss chocolates from Ruth, our fourth year of licking melted heaven off our fingers on Christmas. The, first was with the sand of Sudan, followed the next year by the dust of Cameroon, and then by sand in Chad, and now, in the Tsienemparihy Hotel and Bakery, in Ambalavao, Madagascar, by pain au (more) chocolat, fresh yoghurt, papaya juice, and café au lait.

Outside, the town is walking to or from church. Today is Sunday and Christmas, a double Dress Up Day. And dress up means westernized clothes, head to crimped toes. High heels aren’t made for roads like these, but, in the battle between This Year’s Look and last years’ experience, Fashion wins. The ladies wobble on, elegant leaning towers of pizzazz.

Pink, and white, are big sellers this year, jumbled over ages and genders. A lady in shiny chartreuse knows how to get attention in this pastel bouquet, and gets it. Teenagers strut and preen. The little kids are irresistible fashionistas/os, the boys in ties, the girls in shrunk down prom dresses.

Around the edges of the holiday crowd, people in much used bits and pieces of faded clothing have just another day.

We are very lucky.

2016-12-26 - MONDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 11 – PARC NATIONAL d'ANDRINGITRA

Afessa.

Let’s go

Muramura.

Slowly

It’s 9am on a luminous morning in paradise and we’ve been walking for two hours through the forest and across the valley. Muramura is no problem. For us.

The Ringtail Gang don’t get the concept. In great bouncy Olympian broad jumps, a dozen cascade down the slope, furry blurs airborne over a boulder the size of Rhode Island, and up, up, up into the trees. I don’t know where Lots of Lemurs Leaping fit into the 'Twelve Days of Christmas', (Madagascar version, copyright pending), but their leaps make this day after Christmas for us, carry us upwards.

Lemurs are primates. They don’t have four legs. They have two legs and two feet-like hands and two arms and two real hands (with thumbs, thank you very much). Plus, their evolutionary gift, that tail. They jump only from their two legs, standing almost straight up, arms raised to throw themselves forward and to balance the front, 3 feet of ringtail streaming out the back to balance that part. And they fly in great arcs... eight, ten, twelve, fourteen feet, maybe more, bounce, again…then straight up into the trees. Applause is insufficient.

Our guide, Arson (that's ArSON, not the pyromaniac's fetish), springs 'la piscine' on us. The water has fallen hundreds of feet, maybe a thousand, in thin sheets down the monoliths in front of us. Now flattened and resting, scrubbed by stone and oxygen, it is still. Perfect. And too cold for the crocodiles Arson claims sit waiting for a taste of tourist.

From him we hear, and forget the names of plants used for diabetes, gangrene, stomach ache diarrhea, and another that explodes like dynamite.

We walk on, drying in the sun, vertical specks, along the narrow bunds separating the great platters of the terraced rice fields. A kestrel squawks at us from its tree, flies off. In the forest lemurs argue, move on. That leaves our footsteps and the soft sound of narrow chutes of water tumbling from field to field.

The two villages we pass through are empty of adults, off tending the rice. There are kids, always kids. They laugh at their images on the phone, finger snapping through the two-dimensional versions of their very three dimensional selves. The photo printer works its magic. We walk on.

The pool at Camp Cotta is of a piece with this place, is mountain run off captured and held by stone to warm in the sun. Late in the afternoon it duplicates the view of the valley and massif to the east, adding shimmers and ripples. We get paradise twice, once by Mother Nature, and once by Monet.

By six, the cloudbank flowing westward slides over the peaks, too low. Ripped, the clouds shed sheets of rain, up high and far away. Above me, the sky is blue.

Tomorrow we leave, Paradise Lost.

2016-12-27 - TUESDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 12 – PARC NATIONAL d'ANDRINGITRA-ISALO NATIONAL PARK

I eat my first Eskimo…sorry, Esquimau…today.

It is on the menu in one of the few restaurants in tiny Ifosy, just below 'soupe', and ‘glâce' and right above 'pizza', so I am not sure of the food group or place in the meal (appetizer? entrée? dessert?).  Or flavor (Aleutian? Greenland? Baffin Island?).

I go for dessert, after I fill up on spring rolls, in case…well, you know.

Eskimaux come well camouflaged, are a bit dark, sweet/salty crunchy on the outside, white, and a bit squishy, on the inside. We’d call them chocolate covered, coconut ice cream popsicles and delicious in any language. I prefer them to Kitty Kroquettes, even imagined ones.

I wash it all down with corissol juice. I haven’t a clue.  Later, Google isn’t much help: It’s also called soursop and guanabana. Riiiight. It’s delicious, no matter what it calls itself. Like Esquimau.

Earlier, the waters of paradise wash over us one last time in the pool at Andringitra, adding skin’s memory to the others. High up, on the face of the monoliths, water tinsel falls. It is captured, distilled clouds, beauty to us, life for the rice fields.

The Ringtail Gang hangs out at Ruth’s, break dancing a goodbye on her roof.

We settle into our Morning Madagascar Massage on the pock-marked road back to the tarmac of Route 7.  Some of Ringtail Gang's Homo Sapiens cousins jive by in their universal Teen Guy Dude Duds. The baseball caps point left, right, back, but never forward. The soccer shirts have names in Spanish or Portuguese. Stovepipe pants, belted (velcroed? glued? stapled?) against the tyranny of gravity on their tubular physiques, hold steady at one or two degrees of latitude above the Torrid Zone. Only in Africa and in Madagascar do Teen Guys raid every part of the color wheel for their Dude Duds. Those stovepipes are red, yellow, lurid chartreuse, pink, squeezing fabulous tubes of color across the green canvas of the rice fields. Performance Art. Stupendous. They 'Salaam',' Bonjour', and wave us out of paradise.

We head southwest for two hours, on the only tarmac road in this part of Madagascar, to my lunch date with an Esquimau in Ihosy. Then, the landscape heats, dries, flattens out to the horizon. Far, far away is the edge of highlands my guidebook says have never been surveyed for flora and fauna. I hope researchers get there before the fires do.

In tiny Ranohira we pull into Hotel Orchidée. Electricity is on for 24 hours, internet for most of those, hot water for none. Two out of three ain’t bad. (Stay tuned for an update on that equation.) Three Horse Beer, potage de legumes (cream of something green, and delicious), riz cantonnais (fried rice), salade de tomates (not red cardboard), and decent French baguettes make a good supper. It may not be paradise, but it will do.

We are in Madagascar! Everything will do!

2016-12-28 - WEDNESDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 13 –ISALO NATIONAL PARK

YODELING???

Surely not, but…Yes, tonsil-wrenching Swiss (sort of) yodeling. It erupts from loudspeakers in the restaurant across the road. The air curdles with hysterical double-time Alpine arpeggios from an enthusiastic coloratura soprano gargling her way out of a wayward cadenza side-tracked by a bout of hiccups. I imagine Heidi running for cover. Two minutes into this Concerto for Uvula and Glottal Stops, the loudspeakers groan, switch channels, and continents, and altitudes. It sweeps down the playlist from Matterhorn to…Mexico. It’s mariachi time.

Tiny Ranohira not a likely venue for this sort of musical ecumenism. The town is a way station, just a gate way to Isalo National Park. Most travelers stop here briefly then clump off on long treks into the spectacular park. Some are gone for weeks. They’re an earnest sort, thinnish, and generally humorless, deadly serious….mostly, just deadly. We opt for a mini-clump of three hours, a swim in a cold rocky pool, colder beers, and lunch laughing with the guys. Mariachi suits our mood.

The hike is easy, an undulating ascent up the gorge, with boulders, and an occasional leap across the stream. Joce---who knows everybody, everywhere---has hooked us up with lanky Ferdinand, one of 80 guides hurting for work during the very slow summer season. The cost is low to us, the income substantial for him, perhaps all he will see for days.

The gorge is offspring of clouds captured by the peaks high on the plateau. We ascend through a great negative space, stone licked away by water seeking the ocean. The gorge narrows as we rise and tightens its grip on the stream until our trail is just wall and water. Then, wall becomes water. A waterfall blocks the trail, curling into deep pools, our reward.

On the trail back down, lemurs lounge in trees, ignore us.

The afternoon is lazy. There’s not much to explore in Ranohira, but there is color. Next to the hotel a hedge of bougainvillea, white, yellow, purple, pink, red, spills over a white building with red doors, all luscious, even in harsh noon sunlight. A man in a red tee-shirt pedals past the bright blue wall of the local 'hotely' (that's small roadside restaurant in Malagasy ).

Across the dust from the stone walls of our Hotel Orchidée is a string of shops, each advertising a specialty, from right to left: PIZZA (apparently the one truly universal food), SNACKS (also toothpaste and underwear, not the edible kind),  then a parade of ,’Xeries’ (shops that sell whatever 'X' is),VIENNOISERIE (calorific pastries, not deeds to the capital of Austria), PATISSERIE (ditto, perhaps less gooey, wise in a hot climate without refrigeration), BOULANGERIE (bakery, good crusty French loaves, maybe some sausages, and always pain au chocolat), and my favorite, TEE-SHIRTERIE (Duh!). We cruise several 'eries'. Our stacks of Malagasy Ariary survive unscathed.

There is always cold (ish) beer. Ruth, our favorite product of Switzerland, breaks out a daily dole of our second favorite product of Switzerland, Swiss chocolate. The day began with yodels, so, why not end it with Swiss yummies, Alpine bookends to a day in Madagascar?

And, people ask us why we travel!

2016-12-29 - THURSDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 14 –ISALO NATIONAL PARK-TULEAR

The tree is sprouting hubcaps…

Victor brakes, spins, stops. Alas, the roadside Arboreal AutoMart has no lugs or a hub cap hanging around that will cover our naked new ones. It does have a friendly family who want photos. Slightly punk son poses. The bleached top curls are a giveaway but I gotta be sure. To my question… 'musicien?', he air strums an air guitar and points topside. In Ambositra, our street’guide told us blond curls means ‘break dancer'. Guitar player works.

We continue southwest towards the coast. This is dry land, seared brown, not peopled. No water means no rice. No rice…no people. The earth gives back, but grudgingly. This is sapphire country. The unforgettable blue stones are gold, no platinum. Men, women, children mine for the stones, hot and wet in sun struck rivers, troglodytes in black, dank cylinders, death traps. The profits go to Sri Lankan and Indian jewel dealers. We don’t stop.

We do stop for roadside munchies, cakes, puffy donuts on Botox. Two vendors vie for the sale. We take 5 for 5,000 Ariary ($1.50). They split the sale.  Cake Lady on Right hands us 3 from her stack, grabs two from Lefty's pile, leans in against her friend, then both gift us with smiles We vote them delicious, both cakes and coquettes.

“I don’t know how many degrees" and a shrug from Joce warn us off popping in for a rum chaser in the South's bootleg booze capital. We are not even tempted.  Front yard hootch stored in and served out of hollowed out tree trunks is too rich with unpleasant possibilities.

Off to the west the sky is brighter, light captured then given back by the sea. Once again, we’ve reached the edge of Madagascar. 300 miles across the water thataway is Mozambique and all of Africa.  Thisaway is Tulear town. It is a hoot, crowded, noisy, brilliant in all that light. Africa’s genes and style are here, too.

But not in Le Jardin de Gian Carlo. The restaurant

  is encrusted, walls and ceilings, with huge canvasses sacrificed to terrifyingly terrible paintings, definitive examples of the Tourist Awful School, Eye-Curdling Period. 

Sculpture is represented by a large probiscoidally gifted Pinocchio paired with a small-beaked but huge titted Pinocchia, her pointy pulchritude of the Himalaya meets Alps variety matching his nose. Tit for tat.

 All is forgiven when the food arrives. It makes the gods weep. We simply drool. The huge grilled 'shrimp' are oxymoronic heaven. I refrain from licking the plate, though I am tempted to never wash my hands again.

Our bungalows are in a garden presided over by an expatriate Frenchman way, way, way too tippled with roadside rum. French consonants and vowels, tricky at best, slide about a bit in all that hootch, but he greets Joce with warmth and fumes, and gets us sorted out.  I’m a sucker for bougainvillea, mosquito nets, and the tropics. The place is beautiful.

Joce has done it again. Over dinner he caps his coup with a spot-on performance as Pickled Frenchman. Then he giggles.

2016-12-30- FRIDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 15 –TULEAR-ANAKAO

We are hauled to our date with the Tropic of Capricorn and Peter Pan by a pair of unhappy aquatic cows.

The tide is out. Between us and the speedboat south to Anakao is a lot of water too shallow for the speedboat's double outboards. Enter the cows, a very uncomfortable wooden cart, and a cowherd with a switch. Cows are not aficionados of things aquatic, nor adventurous. Bovine philosophy rarely goes beyond 'the grass is always greener on this side of the fence' and a slow munch thereof. The gorgeous waters of the Mozambique Channel offer no inducements that challenge the appeal of that munch. They lap at bovine bottoms.  Bossie and Elsie are not amused. Utterly. By the time we get to the boat, moos of open rebellion are in the air. Our ascent from rumbling cows and cart into the bouncing boat is their revenge.

Our boat mates are several French travelers, a few cases of 'Chateau Carton de Cardboard box wine, a Malagasy matron of traditional build, turban, and large hoop earrings. She's wrapped in a sarong sprayed with Lots of Lemurs Leaping. They have plenty of room. Somewhere in these waves we cross the Tropic of Capricorn and are almost as far south of the Equator here as we are north of it in Florida

Two hours later, captain threads through the shallows to the beach at Anakao. Word has gone out on the Bovine Bullhorn. There are no cows waiting. We’re on our own. Liquid emeralds lap our knees and we enter paradise on our own two feet.

 Peter Pan is waiting on the beach.

It is a collection of wildly inventive bungalows ringed with fringy palapas, stringy hammocks, and a fence of Crayola Crayon pickets in the ROYGBIV colors of the rainbow.  On the beach.

It’s run by two young and fey Italian guys of the yellow hair, purple nail polish and psychedelic harem pants variety. These guys can cook. The food is of the 'Mamma mia, how can anything be this good' variety. A magic wand is clearly involved.  Wi-fi and rolling papers are free.

Dario and Valerio have found Neverland.

May they never grow up.

May we never leave.

2016-12-31- SATURDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 16 –ANAKAO-DAY 1

Bobby Balena….

I’m upside down, hanging off the side of a hollowed-out tree trunk, a mile from land.

Waves lap at my head, my knees at the sky.

Snorkeling off the outrigger canoe seemed like a good idea on the way down and in. Now, I’m not so sure. Four brawny arms grab and pull, and yank. Gado and his rower partner have done this before. “Balena!", one yells. “Pull"' I think. Then my spotty Italian rises to the surface. “Balena” means whale. They’re not talking about the spouting kind. Beached in the pirogue, I go with the flow, now 'Bobby Balena' for the rest of the day. It has a ring to it. And I can leave it behind when we leave 2016 at midnight

We travel on.

Behind us the white caps swallow the sand grain specks of Peter Pan and the coast of Madagascar. In front Gado's muscled back and arms pull us towards a still smaller speck, the only landfall between us and Mozambique, 300 miles below the horizon. Our narrow pirogue has a sail, but the wind is spent on whipping the sea and has little to offer.

The five of us haul up out of sapphire and turquoise onto a pristine beach. There are no footprints but ours on the island. Robinson Crusoe and Friday are long gone. It’s only Ruth, Michael, a birder from Germany, and Gado, his assistant…and Bobby Balena. (Dennis nurses a sore foot back in Neverland.) Ruth takes to the shade. Michael and I walk the beach, circumambulating paradise. It takes less than an hour.

The wind sends us back to Peter Pan, the sail bulging landward. The sleek prow of the pirogue slices the whitecaps, rousing roller coaster tamed by the outriggers.  We cross shallows reflecting sunlight, capturing turquoise, then a chasm giving back only lapis lazuli, then shallows again, and wade shore. Onto Madagascar. Into Neverland.

Our last night of 2016 unrolls. There are a dozen of us around the 3 tables of Peter Pan.  Most are two generations younger than us, and one generation younger than Michael, and than the Top Hits of the 80’s, loud background to moans of pleasure in Italian, French, English, Dutch, Malagasy over tonight's gastronomic magic: fillet of wing of stingray, lightly battered, in butter, capers, and parsley. 

Dress is Wrinkled Rucksack for today's newbies, Beach Whatever for the rest of us, already dipped in sea water, salted, bleached, and sanded in one day. Dario presides, in shorts, suntan, and spectacular eye make-up. He knows how to dress up a party.

I say goodbye to 16 early. Ruth, a bit later. Dennis joins the fire on the beach. The music is still going when the sun rises on 2017.

This is the fifth year in a row we have abandoned an old year for a new one in or near Africa, starting with Sudan on the cusp of 2012 and 2013, then Cameroon, Chad, Oman, and now Madagascar. Four of them have been with Ruth. This could become a habit.

Why grow up, indeed!

2017-01-01-SUNDAY – MADAGASCAR DAY 17 –ANAKAO-DAY 2

Loud remnants of 2016 drip note by note into the first morning of 2017.

The music has been on all night. I’ve been oblivious. Not so Ruth. Or Dennis. Or Michael. They’re foggy, but we go on with the day.

Our unspoken (and therefore, not binding) New Year's Resolutions include 'More Beer' and 'Another Excursion on Pirogue’. We get to the Beer. Often. Success with Number One and Paralysis de Paradise trip us on the way to Number Two. We spend the day anchored to the table inside Peter Pan, trading travel stories. Michael has been everywhere. He makes a good case for Berlin, cheap, artsy, and open carry is approved…for beer.

Dario joins us and for two hours takes us into his world. Under that glamorous exterior is a deep, thoughtful, skillful, but above all, fair and kind and idealistic businessman. He left Italy with Valerio to find a place they could be wholly themselves. The Caribbean was taken and, fake, mainland Africa and the Muslim world too homophobic. A blind stab at the map landed in the southwest coast of Madagascar seven years ago. Eyeshadow followed fingers soon after.  Peter Pan grew.

They are fluent in Malagasy now, Italian and French and English before they arrived. They have trained local Malagasy to create food the guidebook calls 'the best south of Tana'...essentially most of the country.  They’ve built comfortable, wavy-walled, Hobbitty bungalows, all different, using local materials. Bungalows are under $30 a night. Meals are all the same price: 20,000 Ariary, or $6.50. Appetizers and desserts are half that. The ocean determines the menu. Dario spells it out 'in Italiano' on a chalkboard, translations happily offered.

South of here they built, furnished and supplied a grade school. Castro and Che Guevara are their models for social justice, without the khaki, and with eye shadow

Dario and Valerio are not yet 40, or even 35. They are the generous, gentle, blessed children of the Hippies. Peter Pan is the natural, pure grandchild. It feels like coming home.

We email Joce that we’ll be here two more days.

'Why not?' he replies. I can almost hear him laugh. He wants us to be happy.

Boy, are we….

2017-01-02-MONDAY– MADAGASCAR DAY 18 –ANAKAO-DAY 3

Wind and recycled rice bags drive us southward.

The island of Nosy S$$$$ is the last on this coast before Madagascar tapers to a point aimed at the next landfall: Antarctica. We do not pack parkas, counting on the aim of our three piroguistes to beach us on sand, not ice.

Hand sewn from salvaged rice bags, the sail is patchwork and strong. The winds are in our favor, feeding the sails from the north. The sails gobble it and bulge southward. We fly, on top of, then faster than, the swells. They rush past the hull and over the outriggers, the sibilants of speed.

In vessels much larger, but not too unlike our pirogue, the ancestors of the Malagasy sailed here over thousands of miles of ocean from Southeast Asia while their cousins sailed eastward to people Polynesia and New Zealand. I trust these guys to find Nosy Zzx. Besides, we can see it filling more and more of the horizon just downwind, and fast, Pirogue Guys lead us across the island through the trees and scrub. There are goats, high on my list of favorite animals. They cock their heads as we walk by. Otherwise, the living have given this lovely island over to the white tombs of their much-revered dead. The necropolis sits high, its crosses great 'plus signs', silhouettes announcing yet another inevitable addition to the must-be-remembered. 

The ancestors have a great view. I doubt they give much attention to the three vazzas swimming in the cove at their feet.

Sailors' wizardry turns the wind. It blows us north back to Anakao.  Antarctica will have to wait.

Back at Peter Pan we hear that a few years ago minions of Captain Hook invaded Neverland and stole Dario's stash of cash (there is no bank). Ever resourceful, Dario enlisted the help of the local military. Two totally unobtrusive commando types are now part of the staff. Guests have no idea. Hook, Smee, and the crocodile do. End of issue.

With a clap of his hands, Dario sends all the tables out onto the beach. “Tonight, we eat outside. It’s too hot inside.” In English, French, Italian, Malagasy, and Spanish. The sunset stops conversation…in all 5 languages. Dark, and then raindrops, descend. Dinner is a moveable feast, now inside. The dog grunts, waddles in, then sings a duet with Dario.

It will be very hard to leave.

2017-01-03-TUESDAY– MADAGASCAR DAY 19 –ANAKAO-DAY 4

Now we see the guns.

They’re huge, slung, at the ready, on shoulders brawnier than most. Dario’s guards move silently on bare feet past us in the dark. Neverland is safe

The sun has long set leaving the sky to Sister Moon, a growing sliver, and Her and planet courtiers, high above the dark sea.  A dozen Italians from a hotel down the beach are a covey of gesticulations in a heap on the sand, eloquently multi-tasking with voices, hands, arms, shoulders, eyes-----but never ears---comfortable, as my people are, with conversation as crescendo. 'Signor', the singing dog, and a soprano from the look of things, name be damned, dozes, dreaming of dinner scraps falling her way. Dream on, Signor. Dinner is pasta with fresh sea crab for me and Ruth, fried calamari for Dennis. Not a scrap will fall.

We settle our bill with Valerio. Paradise does not come free. Five days and nights, two private bungalows, on a perfect beach, spectacular meals, lots of cold beer, less water, two half day pirogue trips come to a smidge under 2,000,000 Ariary, or $600. Total. For all 3 of us. For 5 days. It’s our splurge for paradise.

I grab this last day early, beating the sun to the beach, but not the fisherman. Some are already on the swells, calling to one another across the blue. The low sun is at my back. I cast a long shadow lopped and scattered, swallowed in the tiny waves tasting the shore. 

The sand fills with morning 'Salaamas'.  The women, rounded, full undulations of color, balance their day on their heads, hands free to greet and wave. Their children tumble and bounce in the waves, ebony cabuchons set in aquamarine.

The men, lithe, etched, sculptures, whiplash silhouettes against the surf and blue, are at their pirogues, hauling them to the sea and raising the sails. Baggy shorts, bright to faded, drip low on their hipless frames. One pair, blue swirls on white, is the beach itself, a perfect capture of this place. I resist the temptation of an offer. No matter my intentions, I’m afraid my French will produce some version of “How much would it cost me to get into your pants"? Waaaay too rich with unfortunate possibilities, no matter the language. The shorts stay where they belong…and look best. Not on Bobby Balena.

The wind is up. The pirogues fly.  The patchwork sails, brilliant, mobile Mondrians, drive the point nosed pirogues out then southward, stitching the sea to the sky.

Salvaged rice bags are the preferred medium of necessity for the sails but any strong salvaged cloth will do. Hands sew the pieces, guided by eyes, practical, but tuned to a rightness of design. Beautiful now in the morning, later, backlit by the late afternoon sun, they are shards of stained glass suspended in the sky above the sea.

We walk up the beach past beached pirogues, return to the shade under the straw palapas. And sit facing the sea.

We spend our last day dyeing our memory with these colors.

2017-01-04-WEDNESDAY- MADAGASCAR DAY 20–ANAKAO-AMBALAVAO

If you ever fall overboard don’t expect that orange life vest to make it easy to find you…but that’s another story….

We leave Peter Pan a little after 7am. Five days in Neverland aren’t enough, but more of Madagascar waits. Dario waves us onto the boat. Signor doesn’t even notice. “Balena!” and Gado grabs my hand. We’re not even a ripple in life here. Their stories won’t include us, though Boating Bobby Balena might just get a few laughs for a while.

Then, we’re off. There’s no wind. Muscles, not sails pull the pirogues past our bobbing Anakao Express outboard.

The boat stops at a wave from shore to pick up a single envelope, mail for the post office in Tuléar. Then, Neverland fades behind us. My seatmate is Sara, from Barcelona. We trade travel fantasies. On a speedboat racing up the coast of Madagascar….

An hour later, the Zebu cows at Tuléar port are no closer to their Scuba Zebu and Aqua Cow Certificate (First class) than when they carted us through the surf to the boat 5 days ago.

Today they are considerably less happy and way moooore verbal about carting us vazzas from the boat back to shore.

My spoken Cattleano, nurtured among my water buffalo friends in Taiwan, coagulates on my tongue after almost 50 years, but my ears still work. Water buffalo, Taiwan Dialect, is a bit more melodic, sing-songy. The Madagascar Zebuano dialect adds vowels at the end, usually oo ooo, or oooo. I get the gist. Mooooostly. I prefer to leave it at that…in the interest of possible future inter-specific rapprochement.

The guys wrap us in smiles and arms. They’ve had a five-day vacation. Joce is ready for “discussions" over breakfast. We’ll follow Route7 back north all the way to Tana, stopping in a few new places and making a big detour way over to Manakara on the east coast.  So far, TNR7 is the only road in Madagascar worth its solid line on the map, solid being a synonym for thoroughly, as in solidly pocked with potholes. There is a train to Manakara. To go 90 miles, it takes 13 hours on a good trip. Most trips are not good. We'll drive it in 4.

The route back up into the highlands is the same, the views different in reverse. The rains have arrived. The sky is grey, flattening the light, which is kinder, softening sharp edges. Thunder clouds pile up behind the mountains, puffy avalanches, soft white against grey stone. Under these grey skies, we drive through an almost black and white photo of the colorful landscape of our trip south. The green fields and red-brown houses are the only color. And what color. The rice fields are more intensely green, the houses rusty, the colors saturated, without the competition of blue sky. Northward is not the reverse of the trip south. It’s a revelation of Madagascar's beauty, in a new light. 

We pass through Ilakaka. Sapphire Town is grey in the mists, smokey topaz replacing blue sapphires. Today, Boomtown is a bust for most. The streets are empty in the drizzle. A dog chases the car. There are kids playing soccer in the drizzle, dust calmed and bedded by droplets, their feet black on red in the almost mud.

Ambalavao, the town where we spent part of Christmas Day, has retained its color, if not the elegance of the parade of Christmas Day ladies and swells we watched 10 days ago. Our room, and its bizarre toilet seat, are ready for us. We’re not ready for the toilet seat. It has attitude, a fundamentally challenging attitude. Hint: Madagascar western style toilets have a tilt, providing a new slant on toilet activities. In short: get a grip! Hot water is a fiction, except in Ruth's sink, where it boils. The bakery cum restaurant serves good food. We settle in.

2017-01-05-THURSDAY-- MADAGASCAR DAY 21- AMBALAVAO-RANOMAFANA

The little boy jumps and twists, landing on one foot in the right square, mud squishing up between his toes, a fudgy tsunami blurring the lines in the mud.  Buddies redraw the hopscotch lines around him. He jumps and squishes again, We three vazzas mud-slosh by. I try to retrieve the rules of hopscotch, get only so far as ‘land here, don’t land there', but mud-sloshing requires full attention to be successful and sabotages the memory.

We’re on a quest in Ambalavao market. For a week, I have been looking for (obsessed by, says Ruth) sarong material printed with palm trees, pirogues, and thatched houses, first---and last--- seen as a tablecloth and distraction under a platter of prawns in Tuléar. I'll be happy with a solar recharger for our phones like Joce's spiffy little number. Ruth finds a trio of hand-woven raffia hats for a dollar each. I get muddy shoes.

High in the hills, a tea plantation is dense green and plush corduroy. Snipped by hand, the tips of the branches supply the 2 or 3 leaves that become green (2 leaves, unheated) or black (3 leaves, and slightly roasted, or 'oxidized') tea for 60 years. The song got it right. It IS 'two for tea', at least for green tea.

The road to Ranomafana shows us what Madagascar has lost. The hills are not burned, and scalped and red gullied. Yet.  They are soaring primary growth tropical forest, oxygen generators, storehouses, beautiful. Over 90 percent of the plants and animals in there are found nowhere else on our planet. Two of us, a silent guide, and Joce are alone, climbing the paths of the Ranomafana Arboretum. Sometime in the 1990’s a conscientious botanist wrote now worn plaques attached to each plant describing how each is used…for roofs, flooring, twine, cloth, baskets, pirogues, paper, headache, nausea, dysentery, blood sugar, pain, burns, wounds, menstrual cramps…Then we look at the denuded, empty hills. Is one of the ten poorest nations on Earth. Its great green storehouse will soon be gone.

 Our hopskotcher has 4 or 5 siblings and they have to eat.

At the Hotel du Lac the bungalows hang over a river, not a lac. There's no bridge nearby, and it’s not deep. A woman crosses, wet to the hips, her head basket, and back-packed baby, dry. Above her is the forest. 

Sometimes we can smell smoke

2017-01-06- FRIDAY - MADAGASCAR DAY 22 RANOMAFANA-MANAKARA

We’re right on the Indian Ocean

Thataway straight east is Australia.

Thataway straight north is Somalia

Thataway straight south is Antarctica.

Thisaway right behind me is Chez Zizou. The look is Faded Bayou, on the surface William Faulkner/Tennessee Williams territory.  Beyond the wide, covered porch I expect dark, tight places, slow ceiling fans, dead-eyed stares, and desiccated, faded ladies, aspirations to gentility long ago sapped by heat, humidity, too many mint juleps, and the secrets in the attic.

But…looks deceive. This is Manakara, Madagascar. That’s bright, crisp, Cinemascope, beach out there. There are no attics, no ceiling fans. Only the paint is faded at Zizou's. The ladies are round, full, carrying their lives on their heads and hips. Manager and minion, Jean-Charles and Rick, smile and Salaama/Bonjour/Songa sua us onto the porch. We drink beer. And eat.

We’re far from everywhere…except heaven, because that’s where the huge prawns we are eating come from.

It has taken all day to get here. It’s a new landscape as we turn west out of the highlands and slowly drop to the coast through forests of Traveler Palms and bamboo. Traveler Palms are the peacocks of the family, strutting their broad, flat, fans over their stodgier round-topped cousins. We see them in Florida as exotic specimen plants, solitary and lonely, rarely tall. Here they flow in great flocks over the hillsides, stories tall, brushing the sky. They’re called Traveler’s Palms because their stems contain pure water, a living well for thirsty travelers. They are also genteel wavers of welcome, great friendly fans pushing the breeze towards hot guests on the slopes.

The branch roads that sprout off the trunk of RN7 really do deserve their solid lines on the map. Cured of potholes, they welcome us smoothly. Even at 50 kilometers (33 miles) an hour our fillings stay in place. For the villages, the road is a tool. It is mid rice harvest, the green fields ripened to golden. The harvested crop spreads over the flat, smooth road, the alchemy of sunlight drying it and creating real gold: food.

Each village announces its claim to the road, naming itself on wide signs generous enough to contain Malagasy's exuberantly multi-poly-syllabic words. All words end in vowels, those final AEIOUs, and step-sibling Ys, propelled to end of their long orthographic road by a brigade of alphas, betas, and their relatives, clustered and duplicated and tricky to traverse. Look no further than the capital city, Antananarivo. There’s a fudgy stickiness in the middle that grabs my tongue every time. Even the Malagasy give up and just call it 'Tana'.

We’ve stumbled over the serpentine orthographies of Fianaratsoa, Ramonafana, and the astringent Ambositra, none of which sound exactly as they are spelled, final vowels and their wedded consonants getting misplaced between eye and tongue.

We pass through Kianjarot, Marofarihy, Ambahatrozo, then come to Filadelfia, an improvement on the English version, and hit orthographic pay dirt in Ankhazohoraka.

In blessedly syllable challenged Irondro, Pineapple Lady sections a just-picked pineapple and delivers a platter of dripping spears. Total cost: 1500 Ariary, about 49 cents. The rice cake/pudding/soufflé thingies hot out of the pan are 100, about 3 cents. Mangoes, sticky, gooey sweet, ripe perfection, are about 6 cents each. Coffee Lady pours water over our mango struck hands. We buy a bag. Roadside grazing pays off in Madagascar.

Hours later, we walk the stalls of Manakara searching for 'my' lamba. Apparently, that design is “so last year", and me a Philistine Muggle for not knowing.  Defeated, we sip beer on the side of the road, hapless voyeurs staring at women's skirts. Ruth gifts me with a delicious lamba, close enough to short circuit my skirt obsession. It has a map, pictures of the currency, and Malagasy words. The lady knows her way around a market. Joce approves. “Very endemic", says Joce, local, real, very of Madagascar.

Back at Chez Zizou, Jean-Charles and buddies toss balls at other balls in the sand. It’s Madagascar's national game, pétain (sp?) in which Madagascar is world champion, giving this lovely country recognition as something other than 10^th poorest country, economic basket case, and ecological disaster.

I will remember it not for what it doesn’t have but for what it does.

2017-01-07 – SATURDAY – DAY  23 - MANAKARA

There are no mobile Mondrians or flapping patchworks brilliant as stained glass driving the pirogues on Madagascar's east coast.

The sails are ripped, slashed, ancient fabric, decayed by sun and salt. Fisherfolk here are hard-driven to capture the wind. One uses a tree as sail. The work is hard. The men fish, the women sell.

 There are a lot of fishermen, a dwindling supply of fish, the fish are small, customers few.

We’re customers this morning, though our guide is doing the negotiating, just below us on the beach.

Angelico Randriambololonirina comes from line of 'angels' as long as his name. His grandmother is Angela, his father Angelo.  He’s our guide for the day on a slow pirogue row along Madagascar's east coast through the Panganales Canal. And he’s buying the fish and langoustines to grill later. We wait and peel back the banana leaves wrapping a steamed rice and mashed banana delectable. Under the palms women sit in pairs and braid each other's hair.

The fish and crustaceans grilled over a wood fire in the sand and under palm trees leave our taste buds gaping. The fresh pineapple juice and roadside rum chaser just might be a factor, but taste-wise, Madagascar is miles away from our eating experiences in carbo-heavy Africa, where only Ethiopia has discovered spices.

Off to the west, the village is rumpled thatch under coconut palms. Every part of the houses comes from Traveler Palms. Leaves make the rasta roofs, leaf stalks make the walls, trunks, the floor. The houses are lightweight, quickly built, quickly exploded by the inevitable cyclones, quickly rebuilt. Permanence makes little sense in a world that rejects it.

Life in town is faster. We people watch, Joce and I as we slurp ‘boules' of ice cream, scoop to soup fast in the heat, Victor through his glass of Tonic, and Den and Ruth over beer. More women wrap in lambas than do in the highlands. Heads topped with hats or parcels, they are long sweeps of grace. None is wearing 'my' lamba. And if one were? 'Madame, please remove your skirt…' contains enough unpleasant implications in English to short circuit any attempt in Madagascar French. Who knows… It could be interpreted as an offer of marriage.

The women of Madagascar are saved embarrassment by a restaurant. 'My' lamba and its twins festoon the place. I pay a ransom to the robber baron restauranteur and his waitress/cook/ wife. For $7.70 I pay off my obsession. Delicious dinner, beer, tonic, for 5 costs $21. Obsession, indeed.

Back at Chez Zizou, balls roll in the dust. Bare torsoed and crisped by the sun, teen-age Rick watches. He’s wraith thin and like so many of his age mates sprouts an equally wispy crop of hairs from the very tip of his chin, maybe one per birthday. The sprouts make him look younger, not older. Kittens consider chasing the balls, chase one another instead, then roll into their own ball. Only one likes her neck scratched. Off in the dark, the Indian Ocean whispers at the shore.

Inside, the light is dim, the toilet lid won’t stay up, the water in the shower is luke-warm, and on the far side of brackish. Who cares?

2017-01-08 – SUNDAY– MADAGASCAR-DAY 24 -  MANAKARA-ANTSIRABE

 “Tonight, I at home”, and Joce smiles his 'the world is wonderful and I am having a very good time' smile. He'll need all the wattage he can muster. Two days ago, he forgot his wife’s birthday. Ruth has suggested something finger-sparkly. Joce is going for something squishier…a cake, already ordered. Then he hefts a huge tribe-sized papaya, and stops a guy on the road to buy all his bananas. The two stalks weigh at least 30 kilos, almost 70 pounds and cost about $2. Thus fortified against forgetfulness with fruit, he’s sure Mrs. Joce will welcome him with open arms. Ruth is not so sure.

That’s ten hours away.  We’ll go west from the coast, then north into the highlands and up to Antsirabe. I’m well awake, listening to the surf, when the alarm rings at 04:45. After two hours on the road, in the kind light of breaking day, we stop again at the crossroads blip of Irondo.  7 coffee and Victor's rice are 5500 Ariary, about $1.70. Mangoes are 6 cents apiece. I may never leave Madagascar.

It’s market day in Kianzafato. Lamba radar is on full power and works. I buy two for what I paid for one last night, whittling down my average cost. Another ten thousand and they’ll be free, right? The hand-woven satchel for my lamba loot, and raffia hat ($2.50) complete the look, Vazza Tourist in Buying Frenzy, possibly a new one for this town. Ruth is holding her own exhibit up the road.

The hills are still pure, virgin, for miles, our road sometimes a tunnel through the green. Traveler palms wave. We smell smoke. The transition to desolation is sudden, a knife cut down a slope.  Nothing survives on one side taller than stubbles except browning traveler palms, naturally reseeded, I guess, but unhealthy, doomed. Much of the deforestation is to make charcoal for cooking and warming fires. It’s for sale along the road and in the market in great bags, body bags, each a measure of the death of Madagascar.

We’re in the highlands now. It’s rice country, the crop short of harvest up here and still brilliant green below the desolation on the highest slopes. Between, the two-story brick and tile houses gobble up the crests of lower hills. They are beautiful, their corners and angles sharp against the soft rice in the crisp air, more defined than the palm and thatch coastal villages, smudgy, fuzzy in the thick, humid air of the seacoast.  

The colorful lambas of the lowlands move upward from hips to shoulders, promoted from skirts to capes. Roadside silhouettes lose the languid sway of lamba to the assertive stride of legs.

Rn7 is a work always almost in progress, patchwork, like the sails of Anakao, but less pleasing to the butt than the sails to the eyes, a butt bruising collage of gnawed potholes.

Nine hours in we stop for lunch in Ambositra. Daylight has robbed Madame, Le Grand Hotel, of her ghosts and stories. Victor is hungry and abandons us to Madame's arthritic kitchen-puttering for a place likely to serve his lunch sometime this month. Our potage de legumes comes semi-quickly. Les pommes frites will take another half hour. We pass.  Really good food awaits at Green Park and Chez Jenny in Antsirabe. It’s our third stay in 25 days. And a big letdown. Jenny is on vacation. Ditto our back-up, Café Pousse-Pousse. Victor is never without a second back-up. It’s a good one.

Green Park has filled. Ruth's Rapunzel aerie is occupied. Our bungalows are deep in the garden, across two small footbridges, around the pond, further into Hobbitt-ville.

2017-01-09– MONDAY– MADAGASCAR-DAY  25 -  ANTSIRABE-ANDASIBE

Who knew Madagascar produces foie gras? Not me.

Joce surprises us with a lunch stop at a foiegraserie (and that is almost certainly not a word, even in French, though it ought to be) along a busy road still way south of the big city, Antananarivo. The outside doesn’t promise much. The inside delivers Taste Bud Divinity under long lists of options for foie gras and their other specialty, rabbit. We opt for the 'foie gras à cinq saveurs'. All five samples are, in truth, divine: plain (as Mother Goose made it), with vanilla, with raisins, with black pepper corns, and, my favorite, with green pepper corns. That platter cost 20,000 Ariary, a bump just over $6. Rabbit Madagascar Style did wonderful things to onions, a bit of garlic, and tomatoes. The rabbit probably had another opinion. Dennis duck breast in honey and ginger was even better. Our lunch: 2 rabbit dishes, 1 duck, 1 shrimp. 3 beers, 2 tonics, and five sauveurs of foie gras cost $20. My sympathies are with the geese and rabbits, ducks, and shrimp, but…they taste so good!

Divinity, make that divinities, of another kind assault our visual senses all along the road. This is Tacky Pseudo-Religious Pseudo-Art Central for Madagascar. The ugliness is inclusive, ecumenical. Jesus, his mother (in head scarf), and his bearded step-papa rub uglinesses with Buddha, Goddess of Mercy, and various Indian deities from Mother Cow downwards, all vapid, white-faced plaster of Paris trumped up as 'marble', fakery in any medium.  Is it to religion or art as the trump person is to class, integrity, honesty, intelligence, kindness…Only this hollow stuff isn’t dangerous. They also have better hairdos.

While we pass up adding any of these to our loot, most everything else goes into our bags. Ruth finds hats (note the 's'), shoes, bags (ditto). Joce finds two of Madagascar's cheap Chinese solar powered chargers for me and Dennis. Another lamba turns up, red this time. Bagged it!

By dark we pull into Andasibe National Park and Madagascar's road company version of the Bates Motel. My cucumber chowder is delicious. All the food is. The rest? Well, I’ve seen 'Psycho'. I am relieved there is no shower curtain.

2017-01-10– TUESDAY– MADAGASCAR-DAY  26 -  ANDASIBE

If pandas were ballerinas with long legs they would look like Indris.

Our guide, Evariste Desire (now, that’s a name!), leads us through the forest in Andasibe National Park. Small Brown Lemurs bubble along the high branches. We’re here for the Indris. They oblige.

Nothing on this planet dances through the trees like Madagascar's biggest lemurs. Stumpy-tailed, and without the long steadying rudder of their ring-tailed cousins, they broad jump sideways, thirty feet, up, down, left, right. On the ground, they walk on those long legs. They sing a song that sounds a bit like whale songs, the males tenors, the females, rulers of Indri-dom, down an octave. It carries almost 2 miles through the jungle. We hear it. It silences us.  

Their eyes are bright blue, by the way, gilding on one of nature’s most glorious lilies. Nature has been kind to these gorgeous creatures. And kind to us because we can be with them. We have not returned the favor. We have not been kind to the Indri, or Madagascar. 

“It’s sad”, and Evariste stops to make sure we get it. Only 15 percent of Madagascar’s forests are left. We used to be 'the Green Island', now we’re 'the Red Island'.

There are three to four hundred Indris here in Andasibe. There are no others in Madagascar. No others anywhere else in the world. They die in zoos. This is it for Indris.

Sad? That doesn’t come close.

Evariste Desire

+261 34 76 32 90

2017-01-11– WEDESDAY-  MADAGASCAR-DAY  27 -  ANDASIBE-ANTANANARIVO-AIRPORT

The Indri sing across the forest.

It’s 2am. They’re diurnal, should be asleep, says the guidebook. But, it’s mating season. Hormones: 10. Guidebook: 0. Females have one fuzzy ballerina/no every two to three years. In their 40 to 60 years, one might produce up to 9. Eagles and the voracious fussa, and we insatiable humans, make survival a game of chance.

They sing anyway.

Our last day in Madagascar starts at 6am. Tana is less than 80 miles west. The trip will take 5 hours. Joce, Le Président, and Victor, Le Ministre de Transportation, have arranged the day to end at the airport by 3pm check-in. Moi, Le Minstre de Finance, Ruth, Madame Le Ministre de la Mode et Couture, and Dennis, Le Ministre d'Everything Else are half in the car, half already gone, but Madagascar insists on memories.

The road is a slinky up and down and around the mountains past rice fields and villages, more tightly strung the closer we get to Tana.

On a steep down slope, and approaching a curve at Mach One, a bike rider presses his shoe hard against the tarmac to slow down. A shoe brake is not a brake shoe, but gets the job done. As do traveler palm leaves as roofing, muddy powders as sun screen, rice bags as sails, and muscles and ingenuity for just about everything else.

The day brings us coffee on the roadside with a side of yodelled mariachi music, a severe challenge to my belief that cultures benefit when they talk to one another. A sign offering 'bulgogi burgers' suggests the Koreans have also joined the conversation. No comment.

Victor unravels the tangle of Tana traffic to deliver us to our last lemurs...at a crocodile farm. The sifakas, yet more charmers of the lemur clan, broad jump through trees, then come close and pose. The crocs give that a pass, clump as a scaly logjam in their lake.

A photo of glowing scarves woven from wild silk has sent an old friend into Lustre Lust. Our expedition to a huge crafts market is our final attempt to assuage. It comes up empty. But, Ruth, Madame, Le Ministre de la Mode et Couture, approves of a raffia hat for me, suggesting that she never again has to look at my utilitarian floppy cotton headpiece.

Hugs aren’t enough when the guys leave us at the airport.

We wilt in the semi steam, baffled hostages to heavy snow and deep freeze in Istanbul thousands of miles to the north. Turkish flight 161 to Istanbul will depart 3 hours late. Many flights in Europe are still igloo-ed. We’re about fifth in our line of passengers, all but us needing to make tight connections to onward travel from Istanbul. The young Swedes behind us, the German woman, and Ukrainian guy in the other line shrug. We trade travel stories. We ooze towards the counter. It takes about 2 hours for four solutions to auto-magically appear for the people in front of us. Ruth, and her luggage, are confirmed on to Zurich. She’s luckier than many, but she’ll miss her hot lentil soup in Istanbul.

Along the road to the airport, women and children sit in the sun banging boulders with heavy hammers. They’re making gravel. By hand. They don’t sing.

2017-01-12– THURSDAY -  MADAGASCAR-ISTANBUL

“Good morning ladies, gentlemen, and dear children.” Turkish Airlines never forgets the kiddies. The flock on Flight 161 barely stirs.

It’s 07:29.

They and I have slept as Flight 161 crossed the Equator, left summer in the southern hemisphere. In the dark and above the clouds we flew over Lake Tana in Ethiopia and the source of the Blue Nile, then over Khartoum, Sudan, where the Blue Nile meets the White Nile, then down the Nile and up the map, crossing the Tropic of Cancer, then all of Egypt.

Africa is now behind us. We fly on, deeper into winter. 

The seat back display shows us flying over Crete. My window shows clouds below, a razor-sharp sunrise, mango pushing into the blue above. 

Twelve hours after leaving summer in the southern hemisphere we land in Istanbul, say bon voyage to Ruth, our marvelous travel companion, and walk into winter in the north. It’s zero degrees, 32 degrees F., cold no matter the number, and nasty in both systems.