My Life Part 2

The limiting factor on the quality of my breakfast is personal laziness. I could have coffee and tea with fresh fried bread accompanied by a smorgasbord of fruits every morning if I liked, but that would require me to bike all the way into Ranomafana town centre, way to much to ask just after I get up. Cat is also hungry having rejected the previous night’s meal and made a kitten deposit in someplace besides the litter tray. I check my food chest to see how many precious instant oatmeal packs I have left. There are 25. I take two minutes to calculate how much oatmeal I could eat everyday between now and December 30th to make it last the whole time. I can eat 7% of a packet. I need 3 packets to be full, that’s 43 days worth. Fail. I scrounge about the house for some change, its bolomboi again today.
Bolomboi is what happens when you take cassava root, peel it, send it through a cheese grater, mash it into pasty balls then fry it in oil. It tastes like an elastic French fry if you get them hot, like tire tread if cold. There is one lady who lives visual distance from my front door that makes them in the morning. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s fried. It’s like Malagasy McDonalds. I’m all over it. Striking out from the house I stroll over to the muddy hovel where my food is hopefully sizzling in a rusty can. Ignoring the cat calls from the scrawny two year old across the street, I collect an ample helping and hand over my fare. The cook asks if there is anything else I would like to buy. My options include heavily coagulated chicken blood, fried leaves, ‘fish biscuits,’ cow-foot soup, or three miserable bananas pregnant with fruit flies. I politely decline and return to culinary safety of my house.
There Sharbaraz is waiting for me demanding her portion of my breakfast before she ditches me for Rodrigue’s house. I toss a few in her direction and scarf the rest. I usually try to start things out with a run so once I allow things to digest I throw on a moldy t-shirt and my shoes and after some less-than-prodigious stretching I set out in the direction of town. My house sits exactly one kilometer east of Ranomafana and my run will take me directly past all of the village highlights.
As I enter town on the left I come upon the extensive Hotel Manja complex. It’s owned by a friendly Malagasy family that occasionally lets me use one of their hot showers so I do my best to direct the occasional lost tourist in their direction. The restaurant attached to the hotel is frequented heavily by passing tourists as well as the mayor, local guides, and the Queen of Ranomafana herself, Patricia Wright. Occasionally, when I bike by, I get invited to sit and have a drink with whosoever may be lounging out on the porch. Mostly though, I just get stared down by the painted French tour groups daintily eating their crayfish.
Just before I enter town I need to pass the police check-point. This consists of a small shack, wooden bench, and a spike strip stretched across half the road. The police are only interested in taxi-brousses and semi-trucks so they leave the sweaty white person on foot alone. There are always two policemen sitting on the bench looking bored and consuming serious number of cigarettes. The curious thing about police checkpoints in Madagascar is that the attending ‘national’ police wear faded uniforms that impeccably match each other, but do not match any other police anywhere else in Madagascar. The ones in Ranomafana are particularly fond of berets, sunglasses and trying to look intimidating.
Entering Ranomafana, I swing pass a series of mid-range riverside hotels diligently patrolled by some bad-tempered geese wandering about the middle of the road doing their utmost to be a public nuisance, honking at passing cars and intimidating schoolchildren. If tennis racquets existed in this country I would be sorely tempted to conduct an unsightly feathery massacre the likes of which would give the tourists something to write home about. Ranomafana’s central market consists of splotches of decaying asphalt surrounded by muddy ditches and potholes all seasoned with bits of garbage. The buildings surrounding this community space are almost entirely constructed out of molding uncured wood, perpetually filled with the smoke of interior cooking fires, and strung up so haphazardly with tangled electric lines that if the entire complex wasn’t doused in tropical rains every few hours it would probably burn down within a week.
Recently there has been a movement amongst those with connections to foreign money to construct buildings out of cement. The recently renovated covered market, mayor’s sprawling new general store and the ghastly post office (which recently received a new coat of Twinkie-colored paint) are included in this category. Cement is a huge sign of status in Madagascar, in particular in the regions off the plateau. Most villages and towns east of Ranomafana consist almost entirely of buildings constructed from the local indigenous palm tree, for example the entire coastal shack-city of Mananjary. Thus the little village of Ranomafana can adduce these buildings as signs of its recent ascendancy into the ‘modern.’
Opposite the market, just past the soccer field (also incidentally where the livestock is done in), sits the hulking ruin of the Station Thermale Hotel. Abandon since the mid 90’s, the Thermale dominates the town skyline with high pitched tile roofs sporting holes that look like they could have been made by a falling Ford Fiesta. The Thermale had its hay-day back in the French colonial period when it opened as a resort spa for ex-pat super wealthy looking to spend a weekend being pampered in the hot springs. Unfortunately, the departure of the French in 1960 also signaled a precipitous decline in demand for such epicurean activities such as soaking one’s bottom for hours in hot sulfur water. The Thermale limped along until the recent rainforest tourism boom when it received a thorough tongue lashing from the guide books for having a leaky roof, awful beds, foul service, and most ironically, no hot showers. Faced with competition from new hotels opening almost yearly and a plumbing system placed permanently on the mend, the Thermale folded. The abandon edifice was quickly re-occupied by a slew of Malagasy squatters, but not before the main entrance was transformed into the working space for a women’s weaving cooperative. The district government also acquired one of the powder rooms and began using it as the Clerk’s Office.