Monique and Alex to Africa April 2018: Chapter 3. In Madagascar

I had chosen to visit Madagascar with Monique as I had found this island country one of the most fascinating place I had ever visited. Located off the east coast of Africa across from Mozambique and South Africa, it is located well below the equator. The official language of the country Malagasy. French is widely used in the cities as it was a French colony. Cut off from the mainland,this 1000 mile long island houses a vast collection of unique flora and wildlife. It is said that 90% of all the plants and wildlife one sees here are native only to Madagascar. The original inhabitants were people who migrated for unknown reasons all the way from Bali in Indonesia. For centuries the country was ruled by a strong monarchy including a number of Queens. English missionaries were the first whites to come here. They converted many locals until the queen banished Christianity and had the missionaries thrown off a cliff in Tana Along the coasts, most people are black from Africa. Malagasy is spoken throughout the island which makes Madagascar one of the few African countries with one common language.

Thus, these people in the upper reaches of the country are more Asian than African and their faces show that clearly. Also the traditions and habits of these people are more pacific ocean than continental African. Their language uses words similar to Tagalog of the Philippines. They have the ritual of digging up their ancestors every 5 or 10 years to give them fresh burials as a way of keeping in touch with them. They grow rice in vast irrigated rice paddies and have one of the highest per capita rice consumption in the world. They use terracing to grow crops on mountain sides like one sees in China and other Asian countries. They have all sorts animals like lemurs which are only found here. The population of Madagascar, referred to as Mada is now 24 million with 5 million living in the capital called Antananarivo, referred to as Tana. The annual per capita income of Mada is about US $1600 compared to say that the USA of US$52,000 making Madagascar one of the poorest countries in the world.

I had last been in Madagascar some 20 years earlier and based on my few days I have been here, it is almost as if I had never left. There is little positive progress to report as the place looks as poor if not poorer. The big difference is that the population has exploded and Tana is basically one huge parking lot. To go from North Tana to South Tana requires 2 hours of huge car cues crawling along roads built on dikes along rice paddies. Main roads are clogged with thousands of mini-buses crammed with people and providing the only public transport. Along the roads, one sees hundreds of two wheel carts carrying all sorts of goods pushed and pulled by humans. The level of poverty can be seen by the number of these people who are walking barefoot unable even to buy flip-flops. Other carts are being pulled by one or two oxen plodding along at their typical snail pace.

Car pollution is murderous as cars spew dark clouds of exhaust into the air. Pot holes are so big one needs to almost stop to go through them to avoid tearing out the bottom of the cars. For me, it is so depressing to see this beautiful country suffering still while the rest of the world has moved on to improve the lives of its citizens. In the time I was last here, I have spent much time watching China pull vast millions of its population out of poverty by investing in the people's education, increasing food production, investing in modern infrastructure of road, hospitals, airports, trains and ports. In this period, it would seem the leaders of this country have been so ineffective in moving the country into the 21 st century, that the people here must live in such abject poverty. It is criminal and so sad to see.

I like this country for its wonderful people, for its beauty and for its potential but I return to find this depressing situation. One can only hope one day, the country will get people in power who will do what can and needs to be done to improve life here as otherwise the next generations will end up having ever decreasing living conditions. To see the shacks and hovels in which people in the city live, is not only depressing it is actually scary to think what could happen if these people ever started to really protest against their authorities. They have nothing to loose and it could be a sad day. Enough of this rather morose description, I must underline that for my wife Monique this is her first real exposure to poverty. I have seen poverty over the years but I know what a shock it is for her to see this level of poverty.

Corinne and Monique at lunch

Ricardo is a Quebequois who sells recipe magazines which sell in Madagascar

The USA embassy in Tana, way out in the sticks.

I had arranged with a local travel firm to make a tour of a few days so Monique could see the country and some of its wild life. We headed out of Mada with a driver on Tuesday in a minivan to a Hotel called Eulaphiella at some 125 km from Mada in Andasibe. It took us almost 5 hours to reach the hotel which was located on a 5 km private road off the main highway. The access road was a rough drive but it led to a beautiful site in the mountain area. The hotel consisted of a main building housing the reception and dining facilities and some 15 houses built on the hill with beautiful views. When we arrived, I asked Caro who received us whether this a government owned hotel. She only said it was owned by a private company. We settled into our nice house but were told that electric power was generated by the hotel and only provided between 6pm and 10 pm. Of course, there were no phones and no internet.. After a simple dinner, we headed home and were in bed by 10, in time for lights out.

The next day, I found Caro working in the garden and asked her again about the hotel and then she came out with a beautiful story which I will summarize as it is unique. She said that she and her husband who also managed the hotel were in fact the owners of this facility. They had worked 20 years putting all their money and effort in opening up the land and building the facilities which were opened only in in 2005. She told of how every piece of furniture and building material had been brought from Tana as there was no other town or industry in the area. They had planted every tree and flower on this beautiful place themselves. She told me that not only were they proud of their work to create this place but that their greatest satisfaction was that they were able to give work to some 30 people from this isolated area who would otherwise not have any means of earning a living. The workers around the hotel were a happy bunch who greeted one cordially. Not one of them spoke any French. The story is one of dedication and private initiative which should be celebrated and I congratulated Caro and her husband for the work they had done and were still doing. Bear in mind, that all the food and other supplies are brought in by car by Caro and her husband by up to 3 trips a week to Tana. The road to Tana is hilly and only 2 lanes and is the main connection between the main port Toasimina on the Indian ocean and Tana. We drove that road twice and it is a hard drive with huge trucks plodding up endless hills. In addition to having completed and managing the hotel, Caro and her husband have managed to see their 3 children though their university studies abroad, including a son who is completing his engineering studies in Chicoutimi, in Quebec. Their fervent hope is that one or all of the kids will come back to Madagascar to help run the hotel. I can only wish them luck as this hotel is a jewel.

The hotel sits facing a huge mountain face where many lemurs live. From our balcony, we could hear the singing of the lemurs day and night. They make a high pitch sound which is almost eerie but sounds like children singing. The forest belongs to the hotel and has been maintained as a primitive forest with no logging. This has been the scourge of Mada where vast tracts of land have been deforested for their noble trees of palisander, teak, ebony and rosewood. The hotel has developed a trail around the mountain about 2 miles long where they offer night walks with a guide to look for night lemurs and other night creatures. I went on such a walk having been told it would take 45 minutes. I met the guide one evening at the reception and found that the driver would also come with us. As Monique was not feeling well, she did not join us. As the guide spoke no french, the drive served as my interpreter. The tour last 2 hours but it was not a hard walk as the trail was well built. Monique and I had done a day walk in the Andasibe national part which had been really no fun. It was raining and the trail was badly built with tree roots everywhere making walking a hazard. The evening walk was productive as we saw both the smallest and largest lemur types in our walk. As we used powerful flashlights, and the guide had very good vision, once the light was on the animals they did not move. We also so various chameleons and even a small boa snake. The nice thing about the forests of Madagascar is that there is nothing in them which is poisonous, neither animals nor plants. Otherwise you would not have seen this city boy ambling through the forest in pitch darkness. I actually even surprised myself...

School kid returning home with baby sister after walking 3 miles to school.

Pathway to our cabin on the right at Hotel Eulophilia

The flower bush is common in Madagascar and we have one in Florida.

More school kids returning home after a long walk to school

Our cabin at Hotel Eulophilia.

Covered bridge to our cabin.

Walking with difficulty in Andasibe national park looking for lemurs.

Monique in Eulophilia gardens

Guinea pigs of Madagascar

Chameleon, check out the color.

An other chameleon

an other chameleon,

When we discussed the next leg of our trip, our driver told us that the next hotel was located 3 hours away on a terrible road followed by a boat trip of an other hour. This would have meant that to get back to Tana two days later, it would have taken us 7 to 9 hours. Monique and I decided that that would be too much and we headed back to Tana a day earlier. This gave us a nice day of rest in our apartment and time to visit the local handicraft market and have a nice lunch with Corinne at a restaurant near their house. This evening we will have a little dinner at home with Corinne and Henri and tomorrow early in the morning we will take a flight out of Tana and head up north to Nossy Be, an island off the coast of Mada. We will be there for 5 days before heading back to Tana for couple of days.

Henri and Corinne Rabarijohn, our great hosts

Henri leaving for a drive in his 1955 Citroen which he rebuilt.

an other chameleon

On Sunday last, my cousin Hanna Keyserlingk,who is one of the more important lawyers in this country invited us all out to her country estate for a lunch. The estate is a huge development outside the city which used to be a prosperous riding club which is now in a state of disrepair. Hanna, who is German, was married to a Frenchman whom she divorced while living here in Mada. She then went back to France and she took up her law studies. She returned to Mada and set up a successful law firm which represents a number of international companies. I had not seen Hanna in many years and it was fun to catch up with her.

Lunch a club of my cousin Hanna Keyserlingk, a lawyer in Tana, with baseball cap. He daughter on the right who lives in la Reunion. She came just to meet us. She is a medical doctor,