The drive from Tana to Tulear

We arrived in Tulear yesterday evening, having left Tana at noon Sunday. Before heading out of Tana, I ran 12 km departing from “Le Panoramique”, a soulless housing development with wonderful views of the city built for ex-pats and (maybe?) wealthy Malagasies. It didn’t look even 20% occupied, which added to the air of a college dorm complex during summer break. This week, I wasn’t the slowest and my body didn’t feel nearly as heavy or lungs as bursting as last week. Perhaps a week at altitude has helped my fitness. Maybe I will keep up the running regime.

Our 1000-kilometer epic drive from Tana to Tulear brought with it wonderful vistas and glimpses of rural Malagasy life. Departing Tana, we immediately entered the “Haute Plateau”, rich agricultural land dotted with red clay houses. The contrasting color of the houses against the green landscape is stunningly beautiful. Life is hard on the Haute Plateau. Black smoke from the indoor cooking fires billows from windows of the houses; I can only imagine the health impacts. We shared the road with endless pedestrians, zibus (cows), bicyclists, taxi-brousses (larger inter-city vans), carts, dogs, pigs, and other fixtures of rural life. The sound of the constant horn tooting is still echoing in my head. I bristled a bit at honking our way across the countryside (because we have a car we have right-of-way?), but maybe I have to accept the horn as a warning device to folks living within inches of the roadway not to be distracted at the moment we are passing by.

We passed through dozens of small villages. Along the roadside in every town, women and children sit beside tarps spread on the ground displaying items for sale: clementines, papayas, tomatoes, recycled plastic containers, old flip-flops, 2nd hand clothes, meat, rice (which you can buy by the ½ cup or so), beans, baguettes, very sweet cowboy coffee, fried dough balls called bokoboko (pronounced boo-ko-boo-ko) and a sort of thick rice cakes called mokary (moo-ka-ree). More formal stores (with some sort of physical structure around them) sell colorful cloth, plastic household items, and anything else you can imagine. We stopped to have coffee and fried dough for breakfast. I was a bit concerned that I might get an upset stomach, but I needn’t have worried. Frying things seems to kill everything.

We arrived after dark at Guest House Tsara in Fianar, a larger town on the edge of the rainforest. It is a lovely hotel with constantly hot, streaming showers (Al’s house had hot-alternating-with-cold, low-pressure showers). During daylight, the accidents-waiting-to-happen are visible and therefore somewhat avoidable, but nighttime driving was scary! Al had said, “We can’t drive at night – its too dangerous!” which I had interpreted as “There are nighttime bandits on the road!” In actuality, the danger is coming up suddenly on a cow-drawn cart or, worse, a child walking on the road. We were all relieved to arrive at the hotel and sit to a warm dinner of French-inspired food and Malagasy beer. The local beer is called “Three Horses Beer” (in English, oddly) and only comes in massive bottles about the size of a 40.

Unfortunately it was dark when we passed through the rainforest, so I don’t know what Malagasy rainforest looks like, yet. The following day we departed early and started descending from the Haute Plateau. We stopped at a private reserve called Anja run by a little village. Less than 50 meters from the car, ring-tailed lemurs greeted us from the trees. They were sunbathing, their arms tucked behind their heads, faces turned upwards, eating fruits, and chatting with one another. They are darling and very charismatic (no surprise that they are the symbol of the National Park Service). This group was unperturbed by our wandering amongst them. They lived in a small forest that extended back into crevasses between enormous granite boulders. For all you rock-climbers out there, this is unexplored, epic climbing territory! We went on a small hour-long hike that took us up to some wonderful vistas atop massive granite slabs deposited by some long-ago glaciers (I suppose). Our guide was a villager who had somehow learned quite a lot of English. As we drove out of the park, the entrepreneurial villagers were out in force to greet us (and accept our modest park fees). I was pleased to see this type of income-generating activity being fully run (if not conceived?) by local villagers.

The lemur-stop was our main out-of-car adventure for the day. We drove across hundreds of miles of landscape after that. The granite-dominated mountains gave way to prairie-like grasslands. Another landscape emerged that looks a lot like the American Southwest, with sandstone mesas and canyons. We dropped Tim (the brother of Tana-based friends of Al and Chris) at a national park called Isofy (unsure how to spell it). The treks in the park are rumored to be fantastic - you can float down the canyon rivers while watching lemurs jump from tree to tree, be massaged by waterfalls, and not see another person for days (aside from your guide and porter – mandatory for guests entering the park). Maybe Tom and I can get there this summer…or, if others visit next year (Cameron, this has your name all over it!). In fact, we passed at least a ½ dozen national parks on the drive, so there is lots to explore!

We left behind the mesa landscape and entered spiny desert forest, and I saw BAOBOBS! I had imagined them to be so incredibly fantastic (as in Dr. Seuss-like) that I was kind of disappointed. They are definitely cool, but they still look like trees. I’m not sure what I was expecting (the Lorax to peek out from behind one??). Speaking of the Lorax, the grassland was burning everywhere. Officially, it is against the law to burn the prairies, but the grass regrows faster (and the shoots are more nutritious for the cattle) after being burned, so there is no stopping it. The loss of vegetation causes erosion, the red clay is washed all the way to the coast where it smothers the coral reefs.

The other thing that changed when we left the rich agricultural land of the Haute Plateau are the houses – they changed from 2-story clay structures into lean-tos constructed of sticks and mud. Even though it might be hard to imagine, the level of poverty is worse than that suffered by the rice-patty farmers. Herding animals and subsistence agriculture doesn’t leave much expendable income for constructing your home. It is hard to imagine, but 100 Ariary (2500 Ariary = $1, so about 4 cents) makes a difference to people on the street here. I have a pocketful of 100- and 200-Ariary bills that I hand out to beggars. It is almost shameful, 4 cents. The fact that I don’t give more makes me cringe.

We arrived in Tulear last night. The city is very different than Tana (and WARM!). I’ll write tomorrow my impressions of this bicycle- and pousse-pousse (rickshaw)-dominated city. I posted photos of the trip on my Picasa Web Album.