Family Vacation Part 1

There is a point in every man’s life when he becomes the caretaker for his parents. As the inexorable tides of age begin to set in, the relationship begins to change. It may begin with an occasional drive to the grocery store to ease aging eyes, or a helping hand with household chores. Events generally climax with some medical misadventure and denouement occurs with a move to an assisted care facility. For me this journey began quite suddenly at the tender age of 22 when my parents passed through Malagasy customs and ostensibly lost their ability to function in society. Instead of coddling them into a comfortable facility to live out their days, I decided to take them 1,800 kilometers across a 3rd world country under the guise of looking for fuzzy primates and squatty trees.
I must admit our itinerary raised some eye brows, even amongst fellow Peace Corps volunteers.
“Oh that’s nice your parents are coming, how long are they staying?... Wow three weeks is a long time… and your sister is coming too?... and your aunt?... AND your grandma?!... both of them? And your taking them WHERE?”
Yes we certainly did not choose the most un-ambitious of plans, but no one was planning on returning to Madagascar and Lauren had an orchestra concert on Sunday, so there was no room for lollygagging.
I shied away from the prospect of stuffing my grandmothers in the back seat of the taxi brousses with the chickens, sick babies and non-existent posterior padding and instead opted for the ‘rent a van’ option. Our driver was Rahery. He had one front tooth, very few English skills, but proved himself to be very good at navigating the temperamental RN7 whilst his passengers gazed out at the endless valleys of green rice and rust hued houses. He also came in handy when the less than reputable Ilakaka Police Department attempted to shake us down for 40,000 Ariary.
I had not anticipated the extent to which my services as a translator/tour guide/banker/navigator/price-negotiator would be required until we reached the first lunch stop in Ambositra and no one could read the menu or ask where to find the toilet. At first I found the task of doing everything a bit overwhelming, but I quickly came to relish my position as master and commander of our little grey van. After 16 months alone I finally was getting to show nearly my whole family this life I had built for myself here.
The job also came with some nice perks, namely getting to spend a few weeks in the alternate universe known to Peace Corps volunteers as ‘Vahaza World.’ In this world silly things like air conditioning, complementary soaps, courses to meals, fudge dip granola bars, drivers on call, and flush toilets are commonplace. We could select hotels not in the ‘penny pincher’ section of the guide book. Chickens were on the table to eat and not running around under it. Once, we even had a friendly waitress at a restaurant.
We made four major stops on our road trip extravaganza. First and foremost was of course my humble little burg of Ranomafana. I made the family ‘rough it’ for a few days, putting them up in a spacious house with running hot water, toilets, solid walls, no rodents, and NO ELECTRICTY. Lauren, however, got the Peace Corps experience and got to sleep in my house which included none of the above amenities in addition to lacking power. She fortified herself inside my mosquito net with a flashlight and had the courtesy to wake me up in the other room whenever she spotted something crawling on the floor. (This from the girl who would later wake her entire hotel room at 2:30 AM because of a menacing looking towel) During daylight hours, we visited the waterfall and had a splendid day in the forest combining the forces of five digital cameras in mostly fruitless attempts to get good pictures of lemurs perched up in the forest canopy. Though the trails were muddy, steep, and coated with treacherous leeches, the grandmas endured valiantly, although we did end up with one very muddy sneaker.
Stop #2 was Isalo National Park. Already the subject of much praise in earlier an earlier blog, Isalo retains its status as my favorite place to visit in Madagascar. We stayed at “The Isalo Rock Lodge,” an expansive modern resort set back in some very attractive looking rocks. We thought it interesting that dinner at the resort was ‘obligatory’ until we discovered that we were the only guests at the whole place and the requirement was probably an attempt to give the bored staff something to do. Thus each night at precisely 7:15 we were paraded through the eerily quiet dining area where a sumptuous three course dinner awaited us. It was one of those deals where the food was sculpted into fancy little structures resembling fashionable ladies hats. Certainly a departure from the greasy pork fat and plain rice I had forced the family to ingest for lunch at a bustling Hotely near the bus station in Ambalavao.
Continuing on to Tulear, we disembarked for a short visit to the city’s artisan market where I acted as frantic intermediary for all purchases large and small.

“Grandma, How much would you pay for that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, $20?”
(In Malagasy)
“Excuse me miss, how much is this?”
“$10”
“Are you kidding? That’s too expensive”
“Fine you can have this shell necklace and a wooden pot as a gift”
“No, we don’t like shells”
“Alright how about this carved mask instead for your gift?”
“It’s still to expensive, I’ll give you $6 for all of it”
“Make it $8 and I’ll thrown in this candle stick”

This sort of banter continued until the smiling sellers relieved us of a mountain of worthless bills and we walked away wondering how we would ever fit everything into suitcases.
Our hotel that night lie some undetermined distance up the RN 9, a road which amounted to little more than a ribbon of cleared mud/sand punctuated by bits of asphalt. Mother’s unquestioning reliance on Google translate burned us when we came to realize that our hotel was not 12k north of Tulear but 12k north of Mangily, which itself was 26k north of Tulear. However, in typical Malagasy fashion, the destination was spectacular, the road was just atrocious. Our hotel was a splendid beach resort with bungalows opening up right on the Mozambique Channel. The hotel was run by an extremely amicable French couple who tried their very best to talk to make us feel welcome, without speaking a word of English. We found some fun activities to keep us occupied during our three days on the beach. Aunt Mary developed a hankering for chasing Radiated Tortoises through the bush whilst the rest of us hugged baobabs and snorkeled after brightly colored aquatic life.
Our last obstacle of the trip was driving 930k back up the RN7 to the capital, a two day drive in good conditions barring police interference. Thus I took the bus over to the Sahambavy Tea Estate, because grandmas love tea right? The tea plantation was a hit, I learned never to order head cheese, and our hotel gave the parents one of their luxury lake bungalows due to a minor booking snafu.
Returning to Tana the following morning, I couldn’t help but notice that each member of our trip had made a marked recovery in their ability to function in society. Grandma W had learned not to keep pens on the outside of her purse, Lauren went an entire week without waking her roommates up, and Dad had nearly learned how to correctly pronounce thank-you in Malagasy. Moral of the story: When your family members get old and dysfunctional, send them to Madagascar.