Canoe Trip to Morandava

Mark and I decided we needed a vacation. I had yet to use any of my 49 vacation days from Peace Corps and Mark had just finished a major project. We heard about a trip in the West that visited some of the major sites for a reasonable price. A canoe was apparently involved. I got a phone number, made some calls, and here is what transpired.
The trip began less than gloriously. We spent 14 hours in three different taxi vans only to arrive in Miandravazo, a town notable only as the hottest place in Madagascar. After passing the first of many nights drenched in my own epidermal excrement, our tour group coalesced next to the Tsiribina River.
Mark and I, as it turns out, were not alone on our trip, joining us would be an unlikely motley of interesting people of European origin. Our group included four Italian-speaking middle aged Swiss tri-athletes, two friends from Spain, and a Polish man married to a Slovak living in Belfast. Four Malagasy men joined to row the boats. Serious linguistic Olympics ensued. The Pole and the Slovak spoke decent English, but talked to each other in an unorthodox Slavic mélange that was neither Polish nor Slovak. The Swiss were wonderfully chatty and their brazen Italian, but only one of the Swiss and the Spanish woman spoke English. Even my Malagasy was slightly handicapped as I speak Betsileo dialect and our rowers were Sakalava. In the end, although none of us hailed from the former colonial power, French became our main mode of communication.
The Tsiribina (means “Don’t Dive” in Malagasy) is much less a river in the conventional sense than an organized flow of dissolved red clay particulates. The water smelled mildly of cow manure. Bubbles on the surface would combine with one another to form foamy hunks of scum that floated by like a rancid sponge. Five or six naked women bathed next to our boats. The question on everyone’s mind was whether they would be cleaner before or after going into the water. Presently I dipped a foot in. The temperature was an un-refreshing 85 degrees, providing no relief from the unforgiving sun. Accordingly I would never go more than knee deep into this stale water for the next three days.
As we all clamored into our boats, we were each issued a cheap plastic parasol. Mine was pink with purple flowers and baby blue designs that suggested Asian calligraphy. Though I shunned this hideous present at first, I came to my senses fast after we pushed away from shore into the open river. My cheap parasol was the only thing between me and the African sun for the next 6-8 hours. Even the constant application of prodigious amounts of SPF 45 could prevent my pasty knees from turning the color of raw meat.
Once I got past the heat and the state of the river, the trip turned into a spectacular adventure. Far from any passable road, we were in the real wilderness of Western Madagascar. The scenery looked like what I imagined Africa would be like. Tall reeds hiding endless plains of grass and scattered trees dominated our world for all of day one. On the second day we paddled though a string of tall hills blanketed with pristine dry deciduous forest. White Sifaka lemurs leaped between trees and herons prowled the water for a meal. Large bats huddled under the high red cliffs as the loud songs of black Vaza Parrots reverberated off the rocks. Consistently, at about 4 pm the heat of the day would break and self destruct into incredible sunsets.
With daylight failing our entourage would disembark on an undisturbed sandbar, and busy ourselves setting up tents on the soft ground. With nothing but loose sand to stake the tents, wind was an issue. Food prep was handled by the Malagasy rowers, except for day two when they allowed Mark and I were each allowed to kill and denude the hens that had been heretofore keeping us company in the back of the Spanish canoe. One of our lunches took place at a waterfall oasis a few meters off the river in the forest, this stop was also notable because it provided a chance to wash off the layers of muck, sweat, sand, and oily sunscreen that had been festering on our skin for two days.
Our trip happened to coincide with the beginning of mango season in Western Madagascar. A few notes on these fruits before we move any further. This entire land is rife with these juicy fruits. Monumental and fecund trees are commonplace, but some abhorrent percentage of useful fruit is wasted because there are not enough people to eat them, equipment to harvest them, or infrastructure to transport them. Selling these fruits in Madagascar is like selling sand on the beach. Instead children toss them in the river to watch them splash. On the two occasions for which we sought the shade of a mango tree for a tent site, only to be startled awake by these large fruits crashing onto our thin nylon roof at unpleasant hours of the morning. Second, there is no polite way to eat a fresh mango. The flesh, unlike a peach for example, is bonded to the pit so after the fruit is peeled the edible portion has to cut or eaten away from the center creating a sticky mango mess. Also they are wildly stringy so one is liable to get half the fruit gracefully wedged between one’s incisors. Stabbing away at the offending orange stringys with a toothpick
After three days on the river, we were driven some distance north to Tsingy Bemahera National Park. If you have access to a November 2009 issue of National Geographic, locate it and observe closely the cover art. This is where I went. This place is completely beyond words to accurately describe, but I shall do my best. A “Tsingy” formation is a maze of thousands of tiny deep valleys cut sharply into hard limestone. The effect is other worldly. The tops of the rocks are a dark grey color, razor sharp, and tough as nails. Climbing up the valleys requires harnesses and cables as a safety precaution. One misstep climbing around here and you would be facing multiple broken limbs if you were lucky. Squeezing through tiny crevices no more than a foot wide to the valley bottoms, the rocks become a marble white sporting crystallized stylites and cool dark caves that connect the valleys in an endless web of confusing splendor. Somehow, life manages to thrive here and green trees canopies poke out of the tops of the valley providing a pleasant leafy contrast to the sea of black spires. Entire ecosystems of weird bats, spiders, snails, and caterpillars thrive on sandy valley floors. Tsingy truly deserves its status as a UNESCO world heritage site: there is no place like it anywhere else in the world.
After a full day of Tsingy exploration, we crammed into the 4x4s for a 180k drive to Morandava. A thorny task without considering the road had more craters than Ypres in 1918 and that our driver was trying earnestly to end our lives. Wearing tinted aviators and an outdated professional basketball jersey he very clearly considered himself and his elderly Toyota Landcruiser too cool for school and he wasn’t going to let his paying clients interrupt his flow. Horrified we watched on as he nearly turned a joyful family of lemurs into fuzzy white road kill and when one of the Italians shrieked at him to slow down as we approached a mother cow nursing her infant calf on the side of the road, he merely laid on the horn startling the poor beasts into the brush as he blazed past. Emerging finally on the sandy riverbed approaching the ferry, he revved the engine, accelerating to the edge of the water before skidding to a stop at the waters edge, slamming his passengers against whatever was immediately in front of them. Emerging dazed and sore, he had the gal to smile at me and say “Ca va?” Unfriendly glances and a mild tongue lashing we directed his way.
As the sun sank low we arrived at the famous Avenue de Baobabs. This cluster of trees near on the dusty highway north is, perhaps, the single most picturesque location in the whole of Madagascar. I dare say that a mature Baobab is the most beautiful, stately, and sublime tree anywhere in the world. Solid monoliths of grey and maroon soaring over the dusty flat earth cresting with a collection of craggy branches dusted with green spring leaves. The effect was stunning. The trees also happened to be in fruit and one of the Spaniards was gracious enough to buy us one of the brown fuzzy fruits. Ranging in size from a softball to as large as my head, Baobab fruit is dry, foamy, tasteless, but mildly sweet. It was the perfect little snack as we struggled to squeeze that last bits of life from Mark’s camera to capture the wonderful spectacle.
As night fell, we finally arrived in Morandava, a sweltering costal city with a heavy, dazed, relaxed, and overwhelmingly Rastafarian atmosphere. Mark and I tented in the front yard of a new volunteer and had a day to wander the sand-paved streets of the hot city. We ducked the noon heat in a ice cream shop in the center of town and dined on fresh seafood in a breezy beachside bistro before our car back to the capital, and an exciting political crisis and attempted coup d’etat awaited.