Fort-Dauphin. Friday, 8 p.m.
We have found a bashie, of course by chance. This afternoon, miles from the market-place, I noticed a newly painted red and white minibus parked outside a row of shanty-shops. It somehow had the air of a vehicle gathering itself together for a long journey. The cab doors were open, one man lay asleep across the front seats and another lay under the chassis doing mechanical things. I tried to waken the sleeper but he was in an alcoholic stupor. I bent to make enquiries of the mechanic but he merely jerked his legs convulsively in reply. I consulted the watching shopkeepers, who thought it quite likely the bus might leave for Fianar within the next few days. If I returned at sunset, they said, tickets might be on sale. A locked hut, between two of the shops, was the ticket-office.
At 5.15 all four of us peered through the broken rear door and shuddered in unison. The interior looks a veritable torture-chamber; that new paint is deceptive. Some of the warped metal seats face each other, windows are broken, floor-boards missing. ‘Think of the dust!’ said Rachel. ‘My buttocks!’ said Jamie. ‘But we’ve no choice,’ said Adrian. ‘Let’s get our tickets,’ said I. ‘And book window-seats,’ added Rachel. Departure time is alleged to be 3 a.m. tomorrow. The bent and palsied ticket-seller, father of the driver, thinks we may get to Fianar in two days – more or less …
Andalatanosy. Saturday, 6 p.m.
I’m against starting a journey in the small hours. Midnight is OK – you don’t go to bed. Dawn is OK – a reasonable time to rise. But 2 or 3 a.m. is inhuman. As we walked to Minnie by the light of the waning moon I felt like a disinterred razana. And the others looked like three disinterred razana.
It was raining lightly when we got to the ticket-office. Several lamba-wrapped passengers were huddled under the tin eaves. Seeing three men asleep in Minnie, the boys wrenched open the door, further damaging its hinges, and ruthlessly roused them. The driver moved under the eaves and went to sleep again. (His name is Andafiavaratra: we call him Andy.) The mechanic/co-driver began to load luggage on the roof. (His name is Ran-driamaromanana: we call him Randy.) There was very little luggage; the Malagasy are people of few possessions. The third man remained asleep, tightly curled like a cat on the front passenger seat with his hands over his face.
Nothing happened for the next hour apart from a slow accumulation of passengers. We each secured a window-seat and settled down in Minnie.
At 4.15 we thought we were off; instead we toured Fort-Dauphin to pick up three sealed mail-sacks, all of which looked empty, from dwellings that seemed to have nothing to do with the Post Office. Then we returned to base to collect more passengers. When every seat was taken we really were off – at 5 a.m. Beside me sat an unwashed youngish grandma; her three-year-old grandson has a pathetically misshapen head and a bladder problem. Beyond her sat grandpa, who sucks snuff, having poured the powder into the space between lower teeth and lower lip.
At 5.20 we stopped because one of the four hens under Jamie’s seat had escaped and was trying to fly through a broken window. By then we knew what a manic driver Andy is. In the dawn half-light we took the tricky Ranopiso col road much too fast in a deluge of blinding rain: and Minnie has no windscreen-wipers. I untensed only when we had crossed the watershed and were descending to the rainless lands.
Soon came the regimented dreariness of a sisal plantation, this one still owned by a Frenchman living in Fort-Dauphin who employs 3,000 workers. Breakfast (coffee and buns) happened in Amboasary on the Mandara river. The coffee-stall was cat-dominated; two were tail-less, whether by accident or design (as it were) I couldn’t work out. The next twenty-one flat miles to Ambovombe were poorly farmed; maize, millet and sorgho are the meagre crops. A few distant wind-bowed trees proved the strength of the south-easterlies; a few zebu and mohair goats enjoyed dew-watered grass; only one hamlet was visible.
At Ambovombe we acquired three seatless comrades, a young man and his sisters. Their two turkey-hens were tethered to the luggage-rack; this left them free to move to the edge of the roof and deposit excretia on anyone rash enough to lean out to admire the view.
Beyond Ambovombe we were back in the Spiny South, on a track so deeply fissured that even Andy had to slow down, though not enough for my ribs. On such a surface Fotsy never took Merk above ten mph but Minnie averaged twenty mph to Antanimora. Even our map, so keen on upgrading three huts to a village, acknowledges that this forty-mile stretch is uninhabited. There are no hamlets, no tombs. Not a solitary spear glinted among the grey-green expanses of didierea, cacti, aloes and baobabs.
Antanimora must once have been a French administrative centre; it has colonial offices, a large school, balconied villas in decline and about 2,000 inhabitants. Those we saw were strikingly handsome though rather aloof. A wide selection of fly-ridden meats was on offer, set out on little tables under a big kily tree. Chunks of stewed kidney and grilled liver, rounds of fried steak, lengths of tripe, huge boiled bones with lots of marrow and little meat, and local versions of hamburgers and sausages. ‘They all look like turds,’ said Jamie, turning his back on the luncheon possibilities of Antanimora. Adrian – braver – ate rice and zebu-stew in a dark shack reeking of rancid fat. Rachel and I roved further afield on a hopeless bun-hunt. Why bake when you can fill up on first-class protein?
Over the next ten miles the bush thinned and low blue hills, quite close on both sides, broke the flatness. The track improved slightly and we zoomed along at about thirty mph. Then suddenly Minnie was swerving from verge to verge, apparently out of control. When she jolted to a stop in the middle of the track Andy and several male passengers began to argue excitedly while Randy scrambled out and dived under the chassis. He emerged five minutes later brandishing a length of Minnie’s guts. The steering had gone – he would have to return to Fort-Dauphin for a spare ‘piece’. We vazaha looked round in wild surmise. How did he propose covering those 120 miles? Since Ambovombe we had had the track to ourselves. No problem – a truck from Ihosy would appear because today is Saturday. But, persisted Jamie, how and when would Randy get back from Fort-Dauphin? Naturally nobody had thought that far ahead. Jamie I fear hasn’t yet brought his sense of time into alignment with Madagascar.
The next town was said to be close (three miles) and I went on alone, glad of this chance to walk. The noon sun was not too hot, the light breeze felt almost cool. This is a strange, strange place: not only the vegetation but the stones, the soil, the harsh bright light. Flacourt mentioned, among the riches of Madagascar, jasper, agate, bloodstone, garnet, chalcedony, topaz, amethyst. Around here you feel you are in the midst of them all as the sun draws nameless transient colours – not really colours, but flashes and glitters and sparkles – from rock and sand and pebbles and flints.
I can’t help selfishly rejoicing at being stranded here in an isolated Antandroy community, though I hid my delight while overtaking forlorn groups of fellow-passengers. For those without spare cash to buy food, this is a real calamity.
Andalatanosy isn’t of course a town – there’s no such thing within 150 miles, going north. It’s a friendly small village of wooden shacks and mud huts lining the track for a quarter of a mile. As I arrived Minnie arrived too, with our luggage, having been driven very slowly by a subdued-looking Andy. Had the steering gone a few hundred yards further on we would have crashed into a gully by the verge. Soon the expected truck came from Ihosy, stopped for lunch and didn’t leave until 2.45 p.m., taking both Andy and Randy. Who knows when we’ll see them again?
We lunched quickly – rice and zebu-stew – in the only eating-house. Then Rachel and I hastened to the weekly cattle-market on a eucalyptus-bordered expanse of sloping wasteland – though ‘wasteland’ is a silly word to use when ninety-five per cent of the land for hundreds of miles around is barren. Vazaha visitors can’t be too frequent but we at once felt welcome. The main business was already over; only a few score zebu and goats remained, and a few dozen people. Good-looking folk, lean and graceful, with quick smiles and strong faces. But reserved – their friendliness polite, not chummy, yet with a readiness (depending on the vazaha) to develop the relationship. When we drooled over a lordly white billy-goat, his wool destined for the Ampanihy rug-makers, a young man – bare to the waist, using his blanket as a skirt – tried to do a deal and we entered into pretend sign-language negotiations which greatly diverted both children and adults. Here shorts have not yet replaced loin-cloths, though during this ‘cold’ season most men also wear long woollen or cotton blankets. Some women were smoking cigarettes as they stood around waiting for their husbands to join them on the homeward trek. All over Madagascar women smoke in public.
The atmosphere was not entirely unfamiliar; Antandroy tribesmen and Irish farmers have something in common – a certain look in the eye – as they consider the buying or selling of a beast. Most of these zebu seem in poor condition and many are plagued by bots, which evidently doesn’t bother their owners. Now of course they are at their worst, as Irish cattle used to be in February. But I’m told they are in any case much inferior to African zebu because of their diet: the fact that millions of them can survive hereabouts – in any condition – is astonishing. The calf mortality rate – mainly from worms and scour – is about fifty per cent, though Madagascar is free of foot-and-mouth, rinderpest, brucellosis, tuberculosis and most of the African tick-borne fevers.
The southern Malagasy tribes are not ‘professional’ cattle people like Africa’s Fulani or Masai. Here the herds’ religious and social significance is far more important than their economic value. Many herds are half-wild, not part of their owners’ domestic routine. They must be guarded only against rustlers, since there have never been any four-footed predators in Madagascar to necessitate the building of defensive corrals. At this season thousands of zebu are taken far from home, to be within reach of some big river that does not dry up completely during winter. Yet these tribes are neither pastoralists nor nomads; their way of life, like their vegetation, is peculiar to Madagascar.
We spent the rest of the afternoon walking for miles to the east of the village. The stony redness is flecked with evergreen scrub, or clumps of wild sisal or raketa, or spreading plants, close to the ground, their large leaves doggedly green amidst sharp grey gravel. High white clouds stood still in a violently blue sky: over this red land it can look even bluer than at great altitudes. Figures occasionally appeared in the distance, following faint footpaths into the folds of low smooth hills.
Tombs are more numerous than dwellings but only a few are affluently white-washed – making them the most conspicuous features of this landscape – and none has the elaborate paintings we’ve seen elsewhere in the south. From a distance most look like Connemara fields, surrounded by low drystone walls. But each covers a bigger area than a Connemara field and the whole enclosure contains hundreds and hundreds of zebu horns, relics of gargantuan funeral feasts. There are too a few ancient, neglected tombs – perhaps belonging to a different tradition? – as big as a two-storeyed cottage, skilfully constructed of small boulders with an echo of Inca cut-stone. These are beginning to disintegrate under the assaults of tree-roots and could easily be mistaken for piles of rock; suddenly to recognise them as man-made is quite startling.
Fertility and circumcision stones are also numerous: vaguely phallic slabs of rough-hewn granite standing alone. Again, if one didn’t know their significance they might seem just another of this region’s natural curiosities. In this area mass-circumcisions take place every seven years, when all the boys between seven and fourteen are done together. Merina boys are done soon after their third birthday – usually in hospital, nowadays, if the family can afford it. This ceremony is a private affair, like baptism – but much more important, even among practising Christians, because an uncircumcised male cannot be buried in the family tomb.
We had our map with us: I wanted to prove a theory about French cartographers. And sure enough, the ‘villages’ of Bekapitsa and Ikoroma consist, respectively, of four and five minute mud huts. These low thatched ochre oblongs, squatting on the ochre earth, remain invisible until one is almost beside them. Maize cobs lie on roofs, poultry scratch, goats are tethered to tree-trunk roof supports. Outside Bekapitsa’s biggest hut stands a tar barrel converted to a stove – the ultimate in sophisticated mod cons. This, we found, was the chief’s hut. As we approached both ‘villages’ the few inhabitants scuttled indoors, but Bekapitsa’s chief felt it his duty to investigate us – a splendid character in a loin-cloth, aged about fifty with a shaven head and the muscles of a weight-lifter. (‘All that beef!’ murmured Rachel.) As we called a greeting he shouted to his daughter to bring his blanket and draped it ceremoniously around his shoulders before advancing to shake hands. He evidently assumed us to be lost and laughed kindly – he had a marvellous twinkle in slanting eyes. (A lot of Polynesian blood there.) He beckoned us to follow him through a carefully planned raketa maze; the prickly pear has survived the beetle quite well in this area. Then he had to dismantle a formidable raketa barrier to allow us from his territory onto a wide path. We shook hands over the fearsome thorns and I valued, not for the first time, this revered Malagasy custom. When there are no words in common a handshake can be an important method of communication – something much more than a formality. Once out of sight of Bekapitsa we left the path again to wander over a few more miles of undulating aridity.
In this climate shelter and clothing are not problems. Nor is food, in zebuland, though a balanced diet may be. Always the problem is water – but especially now, towards the end of the dry season. Twice we watched women filling buckets from depressions in the sand, patiently pressing their gourds to the dampness for long, long minutes – and chatting cheerfully while slowly the murky liquid oozed into the containers. The right to use a certain well – if well be the name for these reluctant puddles – is strictly confined to certain families. So the apparently haphazard scattering of villages we passed this afternoon is directly related to the availability of wells. When drought comes – but that doesn’t bear thinking of … I’ve read descriptions of such paths as we walked on today littered with the desiccated corpses of those who had been trying to get to the nearest big town, where water flows. Yet these puddles prove the existence of ample water deep down, accessible to modern technology though not to the gourds of the Mahafaly and the Antandroy.
No wonder these people are what we condescendingly call ‘feckless’. They cannot, by planning, safeguard their own or their children’s futures. Everything depends on the weather. No amount of prudent forethought ensures survival when no rain falls. So they might as well enjoy the present – which they do, with zest.
Although this is not true desert, it has much the same effect on the Man/Nature relationship – here based not on co-operation but on conflict. There is little cultivation: just the occasional small patch of puny maize and millet. Only special people could thrive in this environment: brave, spirited, patient people. Yet one doesn’t think of the Antandroy as impoverished. It seems the wrong word for the local condition. Being permanently threatened by drought is not at all the same thing as being poor; it is more like leading a dangerous life, as soldiers do in wartime. ‘Poverty’ refers to physical and emotional weakness, found in communities deprived not only of material essentials but of hope and self-respect, of any just share in what others around them have and they would like to have. But these Antandroy – with only their zebu, a mud shack, a woollen lamba – these are a people with enough. Poverty extinguishes a fire that should burn within man; you can see its darkness in the eyes of the urban poor. But a challenging environment such as this keeps the fire burning bright. They are proud, the Antandroy; and dignified, assured – free spirits. If it rains they know they can be happy. If there is drought, they know they must accept extreme hardship, and perhaps death. Yet survivors are never without hope for next year.
The series of major famines and droughts that began in 1931, after the beetles’ destruction of the raketa, established a tradition of Antandroy migration to other areas of Madagascar where there is – or was – a demand for extra labour on sugar, coffee and sisal plantations, or logging concessions. Their physical strength and stamina was appreciated and they proved more reliable workers than might have been expected; always they wanted to save money to buy more zebu when they returned home. Not many settled for life in another region.
Back on a wide path, we overtook a laughing group dressed in bright new garments. (If a garment is clean hereabouts, it has to be new.) They were an elegant lot: two young men and two young women all wearing gay sarongs and blouses and wide-brimmed straw hats. A boy of about Rachel’s age was bare-headed and wore his pink, white and gold blanket like an Ethiopian shamma, revealing strong slender legs. His handsome features were a good advertisement for the Bantu/Polynesian mix and he carried an extraordinary stringed instrument – a wooden box four feet long, two feet wide and one foot deep, its strings arranged in a series of ten ‘M’ shapes on either side. After much hand-shaking and many expressions of good-will and welcome (these we do understand by now, having heard them so often), we all walked on together – until joined by an ombiasa, apparently going to the same ceremony. (Probably a wedding.) He suddenly appeared out of a raketa thicket, a grotesque figure with a bearded face under an enormous wig or headpiece of black goats’ hair and laden with necklaces of charms. He too shook hands, but unenthusiastically; his presence seemed to cause the temperature to drop several degrees. We said goodbye then to the elegant ones and hurried on, passing a larger group – also dressed up – sitting by the side of the path drinking hooch and obviously waiting for our group.
Andalatanosy has a hotely: our eating-house. Behind the ‘restaurant’ a row of mud cells, each with two pallets, faces a line of eucalyptus and a distant earth-closet hut – which, according to the fastidious Jamie, isn’t half distant enough. (I have to admit I only got as far as the door, then retreated behind a tree instead.) The boys have one room, other affluent passengers fill the rest – sleeping, it seems, three to a bed. The less affluent are sleeping in Minnie and Rachel and I have been given someone’s bed in the hotely-owner’s residence. It is in one corner of the living-room, which also acts as an extension of the restaurant, and a cotton sheet has been hung from the ceiling to give it a third wall. This is being written by the light of a smoking oil-lamp as I sit on the edge of the straw mattress feeling exhausted – but sleep is impossible with so many noises off. (Not so, happily, for Rachel: she sank into a coma of fatigue at 7.) Our long walk did no rib-damage but my left hand is now in rather an alarming and very puzzling state: swollen, extremely painful, yet the cut looks clean and seems to be closing up rapidly. Rachel has been scratching a lot this past half-hour – bedbugs?
Andalatanosy. Sunday, 1 p.m.
Yes, our first Malagasy bedbugs, looking (and feeling) the same as any others. Also lots of hen-fleas. But even without parasites it would not have been possible to sleep until after midnight. Relays of people were being fed; members of a very extended family, plus friends. The hotely-owner is Merina, like many of southern Madagascar’s small business people, and his wife is a Betsileo. There was much laughter – incessant clattering of plates – loud chomping as people got through their hunks of zebu – some amiable drunkenness as the evening wore on. All the time I was within an inch of sleep but never allowed to get there. By 11 an odd frantic desperation was welling up inside me; sleep-deprivation is after all one of the most effective methods of mental torture. Then I noticed that things were sidling out of my pillow, which was stuffed with the dry flower heads of the mattress mint. I can’t imagine what they were – mites of some sort – but they had an instinctive urge to lodge in my ears. However, this involuntary eavesdropping on Malagasy life was fascinating. The prevailing courtesy proved that the ‘graciousness’ I have so often remarked on has nothing to do with ‘party manners’ in honour of the vazaha; it’s how the Malagasy are. Also, their language is soothingly musical to listen to, despite its ugly appearance in Roman script, and those family voices were full of affection. The frequent laughter was so infectious that often I found myself smiling – though what between bedbugs, fleas, mites, exhaustion and a wildly throbbing hand my personal situation wasn’t all that funny.
Nine of us slept in that small room, which needed an open door by 5.45 a.m. when Father began to rouse his grown-up son and two adolescent daughters, the chef and waitresses. They weren’t easily roused but Father worked on them persistently though gently. And he made sympathetic encouraging noises when at last they staggered off, shaking themselves and scratching, towards the kitchen shed at the back.
At 6.15 we (also scratching) set off to explore the area west of the ‘road’, beyond an abrupt 1500-foot ridge some five miles long. A cloudy sky then: perfect walking weather. This ridge is covered with round red boulders and bizarre vegetation – bushes, cacti, small twisted trees – none of which we’ve seen elsewhere. A narrow path took us over a low col onto a wide flat plain carpeted with glittering little stones. Here there was a wondrously tranquil, hidden feeling. Turning south, we walked parallel to the ridge, passing several tombs. Zebu grazed in the distance on nothing that was visible while egrets de-botted them; one boy-herd stood on a high rock, studying us from afar, leaning on his spear; a giant buzzard perched on a massive boulder poised on a solitary round hill. High on the side of the ridge, other flat boulders were surmounted by inexplicable constructions of stone – possibly more old tombs? But more likely altars; cocks and goats are still regularly sacrificed around here, as indeed they are in Imerina. Towards the end of the ridge, near three huts, we crossed tiny paddy-fields by a tree-shaded water-course: dry now, but it must fill up in summer. From another grass-thatched hut – isolated, raketa-hedged – came music and singing at 8 a.m. Not the end of an all-night party, just a family of five enjoying themselves. As we stood listening to a soft, plaintive solo, one daughter noticed us – a lovely girl, apparently pure Merina. Her father was the soloist, playing the valiha, another of Madagascar’s many stringed instruments. This one is a five-foot length of bamboo, with fifteen wire strings stretched between two metal bands. Everyone came out to shake hands before we went on our way.
The cloud had become thin silvery layers, with growing patches of blue. We returned by a different route, meeting three zebu-carts slowly crossing the gravelly plain. As we approached, three little boys shrieked with terror, jumped to the ground and fled – leaving their zebu to continue alone and unperturbed towards (we supposed) the village of Ambatamainty.
On the outskirts of Andalatanosy we crossed a dried-up river bed where a mother and her two small daughters were filling buckets from another ‘well’, this one a pool some six inches deep so their task was comparatively easy. But the water looked feculent beyond belief – really it was thin mud. One hopes the sediment is allowed to settle before use, since this is our hotely’s well. Watching the little girls dipping their gourds I thought how miraculous, to them, would seem the taps we so casually turn on twenty times a day. We say ‘flowing like water’ to convey an extravagant or careless use of something. It’s a phrase I dislike. Anyone who has ever suffered – even once, even a long time ago – from real tongue-swelling thirst can never again take water for granted.
Back at base we found Jamie looking like an ancient Greek. After a night of shivering misery he had just bought a pallium-like blanket. (But striped brown, white and blue, which I don’t think pallia were.) A handsome lad, even at the worst of times, he now cuts a positively dashing figure.
It was 10.30 but nobody had news of Andy and Randy. Hymn-singing floated faintly from a few transistor radios up and down the street. There are two mini-churches here but no clergymen anywhere around. Lay readers take services occasionally but were not in action today.
The turkey-hens’ male escort was squatting on Minnie’s roof trying to coax his feathered friends to eat boiled rice. He looked several degrees more anguished each time they turned up their beaks at it. ‘Would you blame them?’ said Jamie – a bit of a gourmet, on whom the strain of the Malagasy diet is beginning to tell. Most of our fellow passengers were sitting in the sun holding animated converse. Adrian has decided that Madagascar’s roads are what they are because the Malagasy enjoy this sort of thing – as do I. Who would ever have thought motor-journeys could be such fun?
I bought another bottle of stiffener for the upper lip – if possible more gruesome than the Tsihombe distillation – because the swelling had spread from my hand to my wrist and was bewilderingly painful. The boys then insisted on my stuping the cut to avoid general septicaemia. Having seen the source of our water, it seemed essential that it should be boiled for this purpose – not merely heated. Jamie accompanied me to the kitchen (a dark filthy shed) and emphasised ‘boiled’ in French – not that anyone there spoke any, but we felt we’d done the responsible thing. We watched a wood-fire being lit in a tar-barrel and about a litre of brownish-green water being poured into a dirty coffee saucepan. Jamie longed to demand a clean saucepan but I restrained him; that would be an unreasonable request. A daughter then began last night’s wash-up in a small basin of what looked like thick vegetable soup. Jamie broke into a cold sweat and went out for air. When Adrian arrived to give moral support he peered into two giant iron cauldrons, half full of cooked rice and zebu-stew – ready to be re-heated at lunch-time. Lunch-time has now passed; even Adrian didn’t have any.
Fifteen minutes stuping helped but I’m more and more baffled; the cut itself looks perfectly clean and healthy. I hope it stays that way, after immersion in Andalatanosy’s water.
At noon someone saw dust rising in the distance, away to the south. We gathered in the middle of the street and watched. It was another minibus, much more battered-looking than Minnie – but on this scene looks don’t count. Randy leaped out, waving The Piece. Andy followed, shakily. He is an elderly man, with close-cropped grey hair, very small and slight and black-skinned and visibly ravaged by years of hooch. (I feel ravaged enough after only ten days of it.) He wears faded, ragged, filthy jeans and a torn blue lamba and his eyes have no whites – permanently bloodshot. As he stumbled onto the road he looked like a caricature of someone with a hangover. At once he disappeared behind the shack where I bought my bottle and we haven’t seen him since. I hope Randy drives this afternoon. He has now been under Minnie for almost two hours; it seems the ‘piece’ isn’t quite right … The other vehicle is very decently waiting for us.
As I was writing the above, sitting in the sun near Minnie, a deputation of under-tens crowded around to beg for another eye-rolling display – one of my few party tricks, and really only suited to company such as the present. In the middle of my performance a young man of about twenty came to sit beside me; I have adult spectators, too, though they pretend to be less interested. He’s been around since we arrived, often staring at me intently; obviously dim-witted, but genial. Now I discovered his worry: he’d been told I was a woman but couldn’t believe it. He spoke a few words of French, one of which was lait. Tapping my bosom, he enquired, ‘Lait?’ ‘Oui! Oui!’ I assured him, ‘but a long time ago.’ Unfortunately the top pockets of my bush-shirt are full of passports, note-books, maps, sun-glasses and other solid objects which strengthened his suspicion that I was lying, that no lait-producing facility lay within. He shook his head and repeated, ‘L’homme!’, at the same time unbuttoning my shirt. There was nothing at all offensive about this action; he was merely conducting a scientific investigation while incidentally causing paroxysms of hilarity among the population, young and old. But as he discovered ‘Une femme!’ poor Rachel could take no more and fled the scene. Fourteen is a sensitive age in those areas. I, being at the other end of the spectrum, could afford to remain unmoved. At fifty-one it is quite safe to let puzzled young tribesmen peer down one’s shirt-front; they are unlikely to be inflamed by what they see.
Now things are happening – Minnie’s engine has growled – Andy has emerged – looks like we’re off!
Isoanala. Monday, 4.15 a.m.
The events of the past thirteen hours have diminished my enthusiasm for Malagasy motor journeys.
We set off just before 3 p.m., the other minibus leading. Incredibly, Andy was driving – which put Randy in an understandably bad temper. Yet it took us three hours to cover the thirty-four miles to Beraketa; even Andy couldn’t speed over such a surface. We stopped only once, for a few moments, near a minuscule settlement. Two little girls were selling revolting lumps of bone, fat and gristle, dripping grease from a steaming cauldron. (How did they know we were coming? By the distant dust?) These horrors were purchased with yelps of joy by most of our comrades who spent the next hour working on them, creating a remarkable concatenation of squelching, crunching, grinding, sucking and rending noises. My immediate neighbours were among the hardest workers.
This was the most truly desert-like stretch we’ve seen, a level stony plain for mile after flat mile with very little vegetation yet hundreds of grazing zebu. Rather dull yet reassuring in the circumstances; here it wouldn’t matter if Minnie went wild again. Then dullness was banished as a saffron and scarlet sunset suddenly ignited over this immensity of blue-shadowed plain, its horizons seeming infinitely remote, as from a ship on the high seas. As the magical afterglow came – orange, brown, copper – lines of eucalyptus were silhouetted, marking Beraketa.
I know nothing about Beraketa, except that the name means ‘Many Raquet Cactuses’, raquet cactus being another name for the prickly pear. In total darkness we tripped several times over God-knows-what on our way to a dimly-lit eating-house. (‘This is what happens when there’s no moon!’ said Rachel.) Unfortunately the eating-house was also a drinking-house and Andy and Randy settled down in opposite corners with a bottle each; they’d been bickering all afternoon. Already the air was very cold. We attempted congealed rice-mountains and tepid zebu-stew, then frantically went on a chocolate-hunt. The shop had a tame baby lemur on the counter and not much else. We left empty-handed and returned empty-bellied to Minnie.
Beyond Beraketa dense bush replaces bare desert and the terrain seems much more broken – as is the track. It’s hard to write convincingly about Madagascar’s Route Nationales. Minnie couldn’t go above twelve mph between Andalatanosy and Beraketa, yet that stretch was like the M4 compared to what now confronted her. Since sunset Minnie II had been following us closely; her waiting at Andalatanosy was not altruistic. Only one of her headlights remained and that was askew, illuminating not the track but the weirdies in the bush on our left.
The quarrel between Andy and Randy had gone out of control; four times in an hour we stopped to change drivers. Now both were drunk, their behaviour at the wheel was equally manic and I was losing my nerve. (Something that happens to me much more quickly in a motor-vehicle than anywhere else.) Twice Minnie struck boulders – or something – that seemed to tear at her guts and certainly did my ribs no good. We wondered how many more such impacts the new steering ‘piece’ could survive. Twice we left the cratered track to force our way through heavily armed towering vegetation like savage giants determined to block our way. Here I longed for Fotsy with a deep and passionate longing; when we had to bush-bash he stayed in command as we weaved slowly through the opposing forces. Andy however favoured the direct approach and put Minnie to various obstacles as though she were competing for the Aga Khan Trophy. She reared and lurched as we bulldozed skyscraper termite-hills, and swayed and skidded as we pushed and scraped through thorns which made hideous noises (like forks on plates) along her sides. The turkeys’ owners were in a frenzy; the young man shouted heartening remarks through a broken window and the two young women looked close to tears. Yet these detours were almost relaxing in contrast to our road-work; at least the bush to some extent reduced speed.
Back on the track, Randy insisted on taking over again. Then he trod hard on the accelerator and I began to sweat with fear and wish I’d sent Rachel off to Kerry for her summer holidays. When Minnie struck an oblong boulder in the centre of the track we all literally hit the roof: the top of my head is still swelling to prove it. (I’d seen that boulder coming but Randy simply didn’t notice it.) Again we stopped – frightened angry mutterings among the passengers – more incoherent arguing in the cab – somewhere along the way we’d lost Minnie II.
Andy repossessed the wheel and we rattled perilously on, poor Minnie now sounding as though she might at any moment finally fall apart. Then again she was being noisily grabbed by dense bush, but only on one side – we hadn’t turned off the track. Quickly we swerved to the other side – and back again. This however was not unusual enough to cause extra alarm; we just held tight, exchanging strained smiles. Nobody realised that Minnie was totally out of control until the grinding smash came.
Thus far we’d all been admirably restrained, our protests never exceeding muted exclamations of terror or condemnation. But now we’d had it. Everyone tumbled out, shouting and screaming and abusing the drivers. We were badly shaken, in more senses than one; that crescendo jolt had unmended my ribs. Torches were produced and when we saw what had happened we were even more shaken. Curiously, a sudden silence fell. Minnie’s right wheels were suspended in the air over a gully – the drop scarcely nine feet, but onto sharp rocks. She was jammed on the concrete parapet of a bridge – a typical French parapet, just high enough for us to have sliced off the top six inches (as we saw later) by the force of the impact.
The eruption of fury that followed our odd little silence quickly became an argument about how best to rescue Minnie. The Malagasy are not a contentious people, whatever the provocation. And though famous for words rather than deeds they do appreciate that words don’t lift buses off parapets.
Meanwhile I was standing by the bridge trembling with a mixture of shock, rage and cold – the wind was icy. In my view the time had come to abandon Minnie and either camp where we stood or walk back to Beraketa; I fancied a starlight walk, to calm my nerves. It seemed to me, and still does, utterly suicidal to try to get to Fianar on a road like Route Nationale No. 13 in a vehicle like Minnie with two dipsomaniac drivers. But the younger generation thought I was just having middle-aged heebie-jeebies and spoke to me soothingly, which I found intensely irritating. You don’t need to be an elderly neurotic to see this Minnie enterprise as plain crazy.
But every Malagasy situation is saved, sooner rather than later, by pure comedy. My rage evaporated when Minnie II emerged out of the night at walking speed, for the very good reason that instead of headlights she had two men with small torches walking half-backwards some fifteen paces ahead of her. ‘Half-backwards’ may seem not to make sense but it precisely describes their method of progress.
During Minnie’s rescue we vazaha stood around shivering – all except Jamie, cosy in his new blanket. When he nobly offered to share its warmth with Rachel the women passengers deduced them to be a young married couple and we went along with this to avoid giving an impression of vazaha lewdness. Our warm clothing was with the turkeys, still in situ and looking quite composed by starlight. Perhaps they are much-travelled.
Within less than an hour Minnie had been half-lifted, half-towed to safety by the combined brute force of Minnie II and the male passengers from both buses, plus the brainpower of one passenger from Minnie II who directed operations. Much deference was shown to this gentleman, evidently a person of authority.
I was praying Minnie wouldn’t start – indeed, to expect her to seemed wildly unreasonable. But she did, though now she can move only very, very slowly, all the time in low gear. Given the state of the track, this is a most fortunate disability. We left Minnie II behind, waiting for the rising of the moon. Andy and Randy, though sobered by the shock, were quarrelling more abusively than ever, blaming each other for the collision. But the duel about who should drive was over; Randy stayed behind the wheel. Twice Minnie stalled on long gradual slopes and everyone had to get out to push her to the top. On the second of these occasions, at 11 p.m., I rejoiced on Minnie II’s behalf: the waning moon lay like a golden melon-section above a jumble of black hills on our right. Minnie took more than three hours to cover the twenty miles from the bridge to this town. I suppose it is a town; we arrived at 12.15 a.m. and haven’t gone exploring. The sixty-four miles from Andalatanosy took nine and a half hours.
For four of our passengers Isoanala is home; beaming with relief they melted away into the shadows carrying suitcases on their heads. ‘Lucky devils!’ exclaimed Jamie. The rest of us were told this was to be a half-hour stop and we crowded into a dark, draughty eating-house. Isoanala occupies the highest point in southern Madagascar and during winter nights is piercingly cold. Most people ate rigid rice and cool zebu-stew by oil-wick light, sitting on wobbly benches at three trestle tables. Jamie, Rachel and I abstained. There was no coffee but, ominously, lots of hooch. Andy and Randy began to drink again. Both produced driving-licences, apparently relevant to their furious argument. Randy – a tallish young man, much lighter-skinned than Andy – became so enraged he seemed about to strike Andy, though the Malagasy are not prone to violence. He then went from table to table, seeking passenger witnesses to his innocence – begging us all to support his guilt-free claim. Why is he so steamed up about this when Andy drove us onto the bridge? Through the language barrier we can see only an outline of what’s going on; the Andy–Randy conflict is obviously old, bitter and complex.
Rachel and I drifted back to Minnie and failed to get at our rucksacks. Adrian had got his down when the luggage was unroped for the departing passengers; I’m never very keen-witted at midnight and missed that chance. Others followed us out but nobody could open Minnie’s jammed rear-door. We stood disconsolate, with chattering teeth, till Jamie arrived to tell us departure had been postponed to 4.30 – which no one believed. We reckoned 6.30 soonest. My relief was great. Apart from their latest drinking-bout, Andy and Randy needed sleep: a thought prompted solely by the instinct of self-preservation. I’m long past worrying about those two on humanitarian grounds.
Adrian disappeared with his flea-bag to sleep under the stars – the reward of forethought! I looked for Randy to unrope the luggage and found him and Andy in a lean-to shed, sitting around a charcoal-stove drinking from bottles. They were still arguing, each presenting his case to the ancient little hotely-owner, whose private quarters these are. He is a mildly disquieting character who never smiles, shuffles instead of walking and wears a misshapen Homburg as old as himself pulled far down over his eyes. Randy ignored my desperate pleas; he was in any case much too far gone to untie knots by moonlight. Back in the ‘restaurant’ Jamie had on his ‘El Greco’ expression, accentuated by a raised anorak hood looking like a monk’s cowl. He drew his blanket tightly around him and laid his head on a table, having first half-heartedly cleared a space of spilled rice grains and chips of zebu bone. Just behind him two gargantuan cockroaches paced slowly up the mud wall, rhythmically waving their antennae. We didn’t tell him; his cross was already heavy enough. But we ourselves sat on a bench well away from the walls. By then the women, children and older men had formed one huddled blanketed mass outside, on the bleak mud-floored verandah. The eight men who stayed here in the restaurant finished all the hooch in sight before settling to sleep.
One of the pair sitting opposite Rachel and me looked not only booze-befuddled but furrowed and haggard with worry. Twice he produced from under his blanket a packet of nine grimy envelopes addressed to various small towns en route, including those behind us. The letters were not stamped so he must be a self-employed courier. Apparently he’d just realised that in several cases he’d overshot the mark. Repeatedly he thumbed through the envelopes, mumbling the names and addresses to himself and lamenting his error. His guilt was rather touching and I feel they may yet be delivered.
By now all around us are asleep; three make eerie bundles on a table, looking under their brown blankets like corpses hastily covered after an accident. Two more are lumped together in the middle of the floor; they kick spasmodically – creepy-crawlies or hooch-nightmares? Rachel and I have just Scrabbled for two hours, our numb and purple fingers scarcely able to manage the letters. The unglazed shuttered window and rough-hewn door are ill-fitting and we sit between door and doorless kitchen entrance. The courier woke once and stared at our Scrabble-board with a kind of terror; perhaps he thought we were doing vintana calculations, vazaha-style. The man beside him cherishes a large spanner, a priceless object in modern Madagascar, which he keeps close to his heart under his blanket. But now and then as he shifts in his sleep it clatters to the earth floor and without quite waking he gropes for it under the table. This routine triggered off the giggles which repeatedly afflicted Rachel and me until at last she slept. Jamie, on being disturbed yet again, accused us – not unreasonably – of being like Fourth Formers at St Trinians.
Early on I requisitioned the three flickering oil-wick tins so the room beyond our pool of light is all restless shadows, recalling a shot from the Dracula vault scene in a silent movie. Over the years I’ve written my travel-diary in some odd circumstances, but none odder than these. As I wrote the last paragraph a figure appeared in the kitchen entrance – a youngish bony woman, naked as the hour she was born, with long tangled hair hanging about her shoulders and a questioning expression. She stood for a moment in the faint oil-wick glow, leaning forward, her hands clasped under her chin, viewing this scene of misery and squalor. Then she vanished. I’m wondering now if I really saw her, or if Travels With Minnie have completely unhinged me.
Betroka. Monday, 7.30 p.m.
Travels With Minnie got off to a slow start this morning – and continued slow. We covered forty-eight miles today.
At 5.30 I decided to rouse Andy and Randy and found the latter sharing a blanket with one of the women passengers. No scandal: she’s his wife – poor girl! A superbly tinted dawn – pale green, primrose, pale pink – but icy. Finding Adrian under a kily in the middle of a vast square (Isoanala is mainly that square), I dutifully shook him, announcing our imminent departure. But he, doubtless remembering another episode under a kily in Ampanihy, very sensibly ignored me and burrowed deeper into his flea-bag.
I roamed in search of something that wasn’t reheated rice and zebu-stew. The population was still abed, apart from six hens, one bitch being pursued by seven dogs, and two small boys on zebu-carts going to fill tar-barrels from the distant Isoanala river. Minnie II wasn’t visible (I worried vaguely about her) but a large empty truck had been abandoned outside another hotely. Three of its tyres were flat. That hotely was run by a family of dwarves. This wasn’t a hunger hallucination: the others saw them later. They were welcoming and kindly; mother, father and two adolescent children, none above three and a half feet in height. Their fried pastries were not made today or yesterday, but perhaps some time last week. I bought the entire stock (fifteen) and ate five standing on the edge of the town, looking south. The rising sun glowed pink-purple on fissured mountain ridges and I could see Route Nationale No. 13 looking like a perfect reproduction of a dried-up mountain torrent. The nearby clusters of two-storeyed red-mud houses were reed thatched, their shutters just opening. By then I’d rather lost my grip on the tribal situation but Isoanala is, I think, in or close to Bara territory.
Back at the shack, the turkeys’ escort was trying to tempt them to breakfast. Adrian was packing his flea-bag. Jamie was pale and moving stiffly, like one with a neck-cramp. Our fellow-passengers were happily chewing old bones, chatting and laughing as though they’d spent the night in Claridges. Andy was sitting on the verandah looking perfectly sober but very diseased. Randy was missing. Still there was no coffee. When I offered Jamie a fried pastry he turned a shade paler, shook his head wordlessly and moved away. Then Randy and his wife appeared, arguing; he wanted to drive, she was insisting that Andy must. When I approached them I realised why. In lieu of coffee Randy had been at it again. The fumes were almost visible and his speech was slurred; it was 7.10 a.m. Wife appealed to Andy, who nodded morosely and got behind the wheel. As we all took our seats Randy rushed round the corner of the hotely to be sick. Then he stretched out on the ledge behind the seats in the cab and went to sleep. His wife sat beside Andy. Jamie – in a front passenger seat, inches from Randy’s calloused feet – noted, ‘He has great chasms in his soles with bits of wood sticking out of them.’
The next two and a half hours were spent trying to start Minnie. Isoanala is on a hill-top and the drill was to push her down the slope, hoping the engine would do whatever engines should do before she stopped. When it didn’t, everyone – except Randy (being asleep) and me (being disabled) – had to push her backwards to the top of the hill to try again. Where she habitually stopped I sat beneath a magnificent unknown tree and admired the road. Suddenly Route Nationale No. 13 was a reformed character, a wide smooth red-earth highway. When/if Minnie started, I reckoned we’d have no more problems. But the likelihood of her starting seemed increasingly remote; the engine’s occasional weak strangled noises sounded more like a death-rattle than anything else. Watching her being pushed backwards for the fifth time, I marvelled at our fellow-passengers’ good-humour. For three nights and two days they had had little sleep or food; they had escaped injury or death by a parapet’s breadth; they had often been required to contribute man-power (and now woman-power as well) to assist Minnie – in our effete society people win medals for enduring much less. Yet they remained cheerful and relaxed. Perhaps Adrian is right and they actually enjoy journeys like this – or do they not realise that journeys can in fact be quite different?
Across the road two tame ring-tail lemurs were playing in the garden of a new government building apparently never used. An elderly exhausted passenger opted out of the sixth uphill push and came to sit beside me. This building is unused, he explained, because all the allocated funding went into the construction, leaving nothing for staff wages. And at Isoanala the road improves abruptly because the road-maintenance fund ran out here. He looked anxiously at my left hand, which I had just unbandaged to see what was going wrong. Today it is not only grossly swollen but badly burned; great blisters have risen all around the thumb. My stuping, it seems, was too thorough. Yet the cut continues to heal cleanly while the pain grows all the time worse. Last night however I discovered something helpful. Often I write leaning my head on my left hand and this position – hand held up – to some extent reduces the pain. Meanwhile my ribs are in a far worse state, post-parapet, than after the original break.
When Minnie’s engine roared – she was half-way down the slope – a wild cheer rang out and five minutes later we were on our way. Andy was no longer sober; his morale had needed boosting after each abortive push. But the nature of the terrain, and Minnie’s inability to go above fifteen mph – even on this comparatively good road – meant that we were quite safe.
By now we have given several nicknames, fortunately unintelligible to their recipients. Opposite Jamie sit two obese teenage sisters – so tall they must be Bara – who titter and whisper and nudge non-stop. The fatter and more irritating was soon named Heffalump by Jamie. I named the other Aphrodite though Jamie says she has quite the opposite effect. Heffalump suffers from car-sickness, which in no way diminishes her appetite. At each hotely she fills up with rice and zebu-stew, to be disposed of in due course through the window while Jamie shields himself from the spume with a sheet of plastic borrowed from Adrian. (Adrian is a practical lad; he travels very light, yet can produce all sorts of helpful objects.) The natty supercilious young man who never leaves a mysteriously precious bottle out of his hands is known as Smarty-pants. Of all the passengers, only he has been consistently petulant about poor Minnie’s little mishaps. The baby beside Rachel on its mother’s knee is – prosaically – Green-hat. ‘Damp-end’ would have been more appropriate; it is afflicted by unnatural thirst, catered for from a barrel-sized Thermos of rice-water, and its kidneys are in perfect working order. The plump nine-year-old boy who sits directly in front of me eats pocketsful of rotten dried fish the way other small boys eat toffees. We call him Fishy Fartz. He has digestive problems. ‘Wouldn’t you’, said Rachel, when I complained of their effects, ‘if you lived on decayed sardines?’ As Jamie observed, ‘Other people’s internal organs become awfully important on a trip like this.’ At Isoanala two bulky sacks had been stuffed under his seat – most unfairly, as he is by far the longest-legged passenger. These caused him acute problems (by now his buttocks are vying with my left hand) and he was soon reporting, ‘I have my knee in Aphrodite’s crotch, but she doesn’t seem to mind.’
We crossed many miles of flat red grassland, then many more miles of stony, scrubby, broken country where gnarled trees marked three river courses – all dry. There were no bridges and Minnie stalled at each attempt to escape from the rough riverbeds. Everyone out, much pushing – off again. In the middle of a parched uninhabited plain we stopped to release the turkeys and their owners. The moment the birds touched solid ground they began ravenously to eat the rice produced from one of the girl’s shoulder bags.
Minnie’s fourth stall was in a deep dip in the track. This time no amount of pushing, backwards or forwards, did any good. Randy, refreshed by his slumbers, went under and diagnosed a need for two new ‘pieces’. So Minnie II, who had caught up with us during the first stall, went ahead to summon aid from this small town of Betroka.
For a couple of hours we all sat or lay around in that hot shadeless hollow. Quite a few, not surprisingly, slept. Heffalump and Aphrodite, still tittering and nudging, collected the pale gold feathery tips of seven-foot reeds growing in a dense mass by the track. We were now in slightly less barren country and a few stands of cane and bedraggled banana plants also grew nearby. When Smarty-pants helped himself to a stick of cane all who noticed looked disapproving. Even as he picked the cane he kept his bottle between his knees.
The relief vehicle, Minnie III, brought two spare pieces but only on loan. Eventually we set off in convoy: passengers in Minnie III, Andy, Randy and luggage in Minnie I – who, whether because of her replacements or her light load, kept up with us as we scorched along at forty mph! Our new driver wore a brightly patterned frilly shirt and did not at first sight inspire confidence. He was very young, very short, with long arms, virtually no forehead, yellow skin and buck teeth. ‘Peking Man!’ muttered Adrian. He was certainly more Chinese than Malagasy. But he was sober. And Minnie III was sound of wind and limb. Nothing else mattered. He was also, we soon realised, an excellent driver. For some reason the tittering sisters found him irresistible; they moved their seats to get closer and serenaded him as we sped along. Other passengers leant out of the windows waving their clumps of feathery reeds and chanting triumphantly, like so many football fans returning from a victory. Only then did we realise how the tension had built up with Andy and Randy as a constant threat to our lives and general well-being. Even the laid-back Malagasy must have felt the strain more than they betrayed.
Near Betroka something has been done about reforestation, though much more is needed. We passed many eucalyptus plantations, not too severely ‘raided’, before coming to the edge of the high Isoanala plateau. Far below lay tin-roofed Betroka in a flat grey saucer-valley, semi-encircled by rough blue mountains. We expected only to pause here, for a late lunch. Instead, Peking Man instructed us to report to the bus-office at 7 a.m. tomorrow, when he will drive us to Fianar in a repaired (allegedly) Minnie I. Good news! Since rising in Fort-Dauphin at 2 a.m. on Saturday morning I’ve had almost no sleep and last night Rachel only dozed for an hour. In all her fourteen years I’ve never seen her look so exhausted. And poor Jamie looks little better.
This dismal town – population about 5,000 – is another French imposition with no soul of its own. Wide, dusty, too-hot streets of decrepit European buildings – mostly 1950s – are redeemed only by a row of handsome Merina-style mansions, their balconies, shutters and eaves intricately carved. In the enormous market many stalls are as poorly stocked as the local shops. Inexplicably, the vazaha are creating a sensation like nowhere else in Madagascar. Scores of excited youngsters and quite a few adults followed us all over the Zoma, shouting, laughing and occasionally jeering. Atmosphere not as friendly as usual in this Bara territory. Most people are conspicuously darker and taller than the average, yet if you saw them among a crowd of Africans you’d know they didn’t belong.
Like the town, this hotel feels left over: a place that no longer has a purpose. But by the standards to which we have become accustomed it is rather superior. The owner’s relatives seem to have settled permanently into most of the rooms, all leading off a long, high concrete verandah. The one vacant guest-room has a double-bed; another was moved in for Rachel and me. The concrete floor is disintegrating; Jamie says it reminds him of Route Nationale No. 13. At sunset we were startled when electricity came on. Twenty minutes later it went off and a smiling youth arrived with candles. The ‘toilet equipments’ are a tap in the compound from which sludge trickles and a rusty tin screen round a hole in the ground. As I write a gale-force wind is clattering non-stop at a loose sheet of iron directly overhead but this evening an earthquake couldn’t rouse the younger generation. An ability to survive longer without sleep is one of the advantages of middle-age.
On arrival we enjoyed an astonishingly good three-course meal. In restaurant kitchens, if nowhere else, the French influence endures. The bar stocks Fianar rosé wine (only); after hooch it tastes like St Emilion and a half-litre gave me courage for this evening’s ordeal.
My sticking-plaster rib-strapping had to come off. Ever since the bridge incident it had been making things far worse and I couldn’t face another night of it. Rachel was deeply asleep when the boys went off to dine at 7.30 but I tried to waken her: I couldn’t unstrap myself. What followed was rather uncanny, like watching someone sleep-walking. Although it was impossible to rouse her I got through to her unconscious. She stood up – her eyes half-open, but like a blind person’s not seeing – and exactly followed my instructions. I put the end of the plaster in her hand and said, ‘Pull – pull hard!’ She did so, and as she pulled I turned round and round and round, all the time repeating ‘Pull hard!’ It was very, very sticky sticking-plaster and an amount of force had to be exerted. I expected Rachel to wake at any moment and wonder what was happening: but she never did. This was fortunate because she’s a tenderhearted creature and a few inches of skin came off too, leaving long raw stripes. I never before understood how flaying worked: now I know. One doesn’t bleed because it’s just the top layer of skin which presumably soon heals. This must have been one of the more effective forms of mediaeval torture and being partially flayed seemed a fitting end to today’s instalment of Travels With Minnie.
Antsirabe. Wednesday, 4 p.m.
Last night in Fianar I was too pain-exhausted to diary-write so this is a double entry. Incredibly, we covered the 500 miles from Betroka to here in twenty-seven hours.
We started at 8.15 a.m. yesterday morning, with Peking Man in sole control of a cured Minnie, and by 1 p.m. had joined Route Nationale No. 7 at Ihosy. Over that last seventy-five miles of Route Nationale No. 13 the surface was again atrocious and we saw not one other vehicle. From Betroka we were climbing back into the highlands through the unexpected Massif d’Antaivondro, a desolation of vast brown sweeps below gaunt grey rock summits. Unexpected because recalling the Highlands of Scotland – so close to the Spiny South!
Ihosy looked attractive: tall nineteenth-century brick houses with much fine wood-carving. But it is low-lying and too hot and anyway my various pains left me interested only in finding more hooch. Which I did (twenty-five pence for a litre) in one of the many stalls surrounding the sandy square of the bus station. I drank while the younger generation ate and was in no condition, for the next few hours, to observe topographical details. Luckily I came to at about 4, just north of Zazafotsy. Here Erosion experiments with curves and the track climbs between scores of half-comical, half-awesome peaks – gigantic bulges of rock parodying monstrous rugger balls, cauldrons, hats, cakes, or domes. On the red-gold grass carpet below these mountains lie what look like fallen summits – barn-sized boulders, silver-grey and time-smoothed. During the sunset conflagration this landscape became utterly unreal, a world flooded and throbbing with shifting lights and colours – amber and ochre, vermilion and russet, bronze and purple. ‘It’s psychedelic!’ said Rachel. And it was.
In Ambalavao–in darkness – we paused briefly to deliver a thin sack of mail to the Post Office. The zebu tribes of the south bring their animals to this famous cattle-mart for sale to their main customers, Merina and Betsileo dealers.
Fianar’s bus station was surprisingly lively at 8.40 p.m. and we heard rumours of a taxi-departure for Antsirabe at 4.30 a.m. ‘Early to bed!’ said Jamie. We all shared a room in a rambling wooden-chalet-type hotel, pleasing to the eye but not to the nose. ‘It’s not just the loos,’ Adrian noted. ‘This whole place is saturated in piss.’ Jamie retired at once (more Mally-belly) but the rest of us banqueted in what is said to be Madagascar’s best restaurant, the Chez Papillon. This was Adrian’s extravagant idea, vigorously supported by Rachel, and I was too pain-racked to fight for frugality. The manager hesitated to admit us: when we saw ourselves in a mirror we realised why. I think it was Rachel’s piteously pleading expression – like a famished spaniel puppy – that caused him to change his mind.
Jamie had insisted on setting his Hi-Tek alarm for 3 a.m. – a minority decision. But events at the bus station proved him right. We were just in time to book the last four seats in a ten-seater Peugeot taxi (£20 each) which departed at 5.15 and arrived here in Antsirabe six and a half hours later–a journey I prefer to forget. But our friends’ welcome made this arrival in Antsirabe feel like a home-coming.
My hand/wrist is now so painful that my ribs can’t compete. Possibly it was sprained badly during one of the Merk melees? Anything could have happened in that truck while we were all climbing over each other; there were so many hurtful incidents one didn’t pay any attention to exactly which bit of one’s anatomy was being damaged by whom. In our guest-hut I unbandaged and gave serious thought to what Rachel, with deplorable facetiousness, called ‘the matter not in hand’. The burn blisters have burst – so that side-issue, though still sore, may be disregarded. The cut had closed completely and showed no sign of ‘matter in hand’, yet the swelling was far worse. Studying it, Rachel repented of her frivolity and said, ‘You must go to a doctor!’ So I did, with a Malagasy interpreter and private misgivings. Why should one expect Malagasy hospitals to be any more efficient than Madagascar’s other post-colonial institutions? But at least I might be able to get hold of some pain-killer less deleterious than hooch.
The doctor sat white-coated behind a fine wide desk – a self-important young man, slim and trim and dictatorial. My interpreter pointed out that the cut had healed well and never been infected, that the burns were to be regarded as an irrelevant ancillary misfortune, but that the pain was severe, persistent and might have been caused by a sprain. The doctor examined the cut, felt my wrist, nodded knowingly and wrote out a prescription for antibiotics. He then summoned a nurse, gave her instructions and despatched me to have the wound ‘dressed’.
My interpreter was not allowed into the small cramped untidy treatment-room where another nurse was sitting cross-legged on a stool eating a sticky bun. The waste bins were over-flowing and a Geiger-counter for calculating bacteria would have gone off the scale. After a moment’s consultation the bun-eater wiped her hands down the sides of her uniform, picked a sharp instrument out of a bowl of cold water and before I had registered her purpose was reopening the closed wound. I began to protest – then gave up. Fatalism took over; it is one of my strongest characteristics. The bun-eater was very gentle and, surgically speaking, skilful; the pain she caused was nothing to what I’m now used to. She made soothing noises as she worked away, while her colleague stood by me patting my shoulder. Then the bun-eater stood back and surveyed her achievement, looking puzzled. I gazed gloomily at that bone which I hadn’t expected ever to see again. There was of course no trace of pus or any foreign matter. The bun-eater shook her head, laughed, dabbed some purple lotion on the new wound and rebandaged it. I thanked her, went to the office to pay the bill, refused to use the prescription for antibiotics and tried unsuccessfully to buy pain-killers – the supply had run out five months ago.
Back in our room I lay down, with my left hand up on the bed-head, and gave my ribs a chance to begin their remending before we take the train to Tana tomorrow morning. I’m sorry if this sounds racist, but in Tana I’m looking for a French doctor. Madagascar may have no man-eating beasts or poisonous snakes, but judging by results it’s the most dangerous country I’ve ever travelled in.
Tana. Thursday, 9.30 p.m.
By this morning the swelling had spread to my elbow and Rachel had to do all our packing before Zanoa put us on the 1 p.m. train, laden with another of her haute cuisine picnics. Malagasy rail transport (what there is of it) is cheaper than road transport – only £2 each for our second-class tickets. And the train, though full, was not overcrowded with adults. There were however a prodigious number of small children and uncooped poultry; whenever possible, the travelling Malagasy seem to like their poultry to feel free. Rachel found the journey tedious, after the stimulating unpredictability of Merk and Minnie. I think she is missing the boys, with whom we had a farewell dinner last evening in a Vietnamese restaurant. We hope to see them again in England; they were the best sort of travelling companions.
We arrived at sunset and went straight to the bar of a big hotel near the railway station, most suitably named – given my condition – the Terminus Hotel. There Tana’s vazaha residents tend to gather and my medical luck changed abruptly when a French resident entered our lives – one of those fairy-tale people who enjoy helping total strangers whom they may never see again. In response to my enquiry about European doctors our saviour downed his Antsirabe orange, fetched his car and within ten minutes was escorting me into a consulting room near the Lido Hotel.
I never discovered this physician’s name though I would like to engrave it in gold somewhere. He merely glanced at my afflicted limb before reaching back to a shelf and handing me twelve capsules imported from France. ‘Three a day,’ he said. ‘You’ll feel much better by tomorrow morning. But no more illegal spirits. You’re lucky you only have gout. You’ve been to the South?’ I nodded, speechless. ‘Then you’ve been drinking the sap of the Cycas thouarsii–the Malagasy call it “the Man-eating Tree”. For years it’s been killing Frenchmen – Europeans seem to have no resistance to it. Gout is the best thing it does to you. No, thank you, I don’t require a fee from a foolish Irishwoman.’