Lost in Madagascar
Matt Fletcher
After leaving art college with a degree in ceramics, Matt traded a damp flat in England for camp sites under African skies. The northern coast of Mozambique and the Maralal International Camel Derby provided inspiration for a writing career which started at Outdoors Illustrated. Now a freelancer, Matt’s travel and trekking articles have appeared in a wide range of newspapers and magazines. When not in distant mountains or down at the pub, Matt plays football, tries to improve his languages and sleeps.
MADAGASCAR, a place where ‘adventure travel’ could easily describe a taxi journey across town. A place where things are done differently.
This realisation hit me as soon as I arrived at the swirling chaos of Ivato International Airport, where smiling hustlers, money changers and taxi drivers mixed with customs officials, immigration officials and incoming passengers. The gentle anarchy of Madagascar will either fill your heart with joy or leave you with a nervous twitch that requires two weeks in a darkened room to overcome.
It was March when I arrived. My fellow passengers included a diminutive old man, who carried a Scottish terrier in a hold-all; hundreds of over-laden returning Malagasy, who begged other passengers to carry on a piece of their hand luggage; and a handful of eco-tourists, the great hope of Madagascar’s woeful economy. It’s the amazing weirdness and diversity of the country’s fauna and flora that attracts eco-tourists. Much of the wildlife is endemic, a consequence of the island’s 160 million years of isolation when its unique plants and animals had the place to themselves, happily evolving until man (probably arriving from Indonesia and Malaysia) gate-crashed the party and began to screw things up some 2000 years ago. The wildlife that remains, some of the most amazing in the world, is showcased in a network of national parks, Madagascar’s trump tourist cards.
I was in the country looking for some of the aces, on assignment for an adventure travel magazine. I’d planned a five-day trek along the freshwater Pangalanes Canal, which stretches some 650 kilometres down the east coast from the major port of Toamasina. Often separated from the sea by only a few hundred metres, the canal links a network of beautiful lakes in its northern section and is lined by huge swathes of littoral forest. I wanted to walk through this dense and humid rainforest before widespread logging and slash-and-burn agriculture reduced the whole lot to a charcoal-littered sandpit. But first I had the urban jungle of Antananarivo (Tana for short) to contend with.
Tana is one of the world’s shabbier capitals. It’s predominantly low-rise, poor and in an advanced stage of post-colonial decay. The French-style boulevards may be wide and airy, but rubbish is piled high and broken sewers lie in wait for the unwary traveller. After a while, however, the city develops a certain gritty charm, and for one reason or another I spent some considerable time there. It may not be a pleasant sight in the rainy season or smell too sweet at the height of summer, but the flood plain surrounding the city is beautiful after the rains and the downtown area around the Zoma market has a vibrant (if a little seedy) street life. Behind its grubby façade the city is full of interest and intrigue. Spend any time in the bars and restaurants of Tana and your head will fill with stories of dodgy logging concessions, mysterious airstrips cut into the heart of the rainforest, sapphire mining and gold smuggling on a grand scale. It’s also the best place to organise adventure travel excursions.
Our trekking party consisted of three locals and three ‘tourists’ – myself and two travel agents. Nancy was from Paris and Nivo was from Tana. We spoke French, though by the end of the first day shrugs and strained expressions were the common language. Vivi was our English-speaking guide, entertainer and source of intelligent information about the forest and the country. He had a radiant face that let everyone who came into contact with him know what a happy, friendly and contented kind of guy he was. People were his strong point, and though he wasn’t a guide in the truest sense of the word, he was the perfect person to look after hapless tourists. But Maminty and Nary were the ones who really led the way. Both were strong and incredibly lean, managing to glide effortlessly through the forest while the rest of us struggled constantly with the undergrowth. Maminty, his face as wrinkled as elephant hide, played the old and wise character whilst Nary, his young apprentice, got to carry the daily provisions and all the heavy gear. Maminty carried a short pole with what looked like a machete attached to the end of it, which as time wore on and the vegetation grew thicker he used rather a lot.
Getting lost was not supposed to be on the agenda. Ours was a well-organised trip, more organised, in fact, than I initially realised. We were transferred from Tana by four-wheel drive and speed boat, and each night a support crew would sail on ahead to a pre-arranged spot, set up camp and wait to feed us. Cool drinks were always on hand for the weary travellers and we even had a packed lunch each day (which Nary carried). Although I had brought my usual camping and trekking gear, I might as well have left it all in England. On this trip I was going to get spoilt, which was rather a novel experience, and as we drove out of the Central Highlands surrounding Tana I relaxed and stared out of the window dreamily, content to people-watch all the way to the east coast.
On the first night we established a base camp beside a wide section of canal south of Ambila-Lemaitso and drank (too many) cold beers sitting on the shore of the Indian Ocean. I remember thinking that the sky that evening was the most amazing I’d ever seen and fell asleep to the sound of a million romantic frogs and endless crashing waves.
We had breakfast at first light and caught a lift up the canal to the trailhead at Ambila-Lemaitso. According to Vivi, the village was once hailed as ‘Madagascar’s San Tropez’, filled with fun-seeking French officials, managers and service people posted thousands of miles from the French Riviera. Now only the Hôtel Relais Malaky, with its neglected tennis court, remained to remind Ambila-Lemaitso’s handful of visitors of a different age. A railway line still ran through the village, which had a station of sorts, but the timetable might as well have been written in invisible ink. Once I heard the sound of a train drifting through the forest, but I never saw one.
Across the river from the Relais Malaky, past the collapsed bridge and abandoned (and never used) World Bank-sponsored river port, a trail ran into the forest. It was wide enough for a four-wheel drive and looked well used. For a good half-hour I was lulled into thinking that all the trails in the forest were going to be as easy to walk, but sure enough the track soon narrowed. Away from the village and lands cleared for cultivation the landscape alternated between open scrubland, secondary degraded forest and primary littoral forest. Walking through the primary forest was the most comfortable, despite the immediate rise in humidity that made the sweat sting my eyes. I was thankful for the protection the vast canopy provided against the sun, which shone with such force it caused Nancy’s unprotected face to swell up like a balloon.
Every now and then the land dipped down into thigh-deep swamps surrounded by traveller’s palms, the symbol of Madagascar. Within the hollow stems of these fan-like trees was a reservoir of cool, clean drinking water, and Maminty showed us how to tap them successfully. Occasionally we’d catch a glimpse of the grand canal, completed thanks to much Malagasy labour in 1904 and opened with great fanfare. Today only the first 450 kilometres are navigable, but the northernmost section remains alive with pirogues (dugout canoes) and taxi-boats ferrying goods, people and produce to and from Toamasina.
We walked on into late morning, and Vivi kept a steady stream of information coming, frequently pointing out such natural wonders as the crab spider, the fast-disappearing ‘for the ants’ snake (which burrows into ant’s nests, becomes too fat to leave the burrow, and is then eaten by the ants), tree frogs, edible fruit and medicinal plants too numerous to name.
‘Does Anita Roddick know that around 65% of all endemic Malagasy plants have medicinal properties?’ I asked him jokingly.
‘Who?’ Vivi replied, though when I explained he told me that many foreign universities and research teams certainly did know this and had made a habit of coming over, studying them and returning home to patent their DNA.
By midday the trail had become a confused and overgrown animal track with a habit of disappearing. Frequent bouts of bitching and cursing from Maminty signalled that things were becoming even worse. The words spoken, half in jest, by Vivi as we had driven out of Tana began to weigh heavily on my mind. ‘We will be the first people to walk this route in six years.’ As the people and clapperboard houses had flashed by I’d thought nothing of it, but I was now beginning to realise the importance of his words. We were going to get lost in the jungle.
Things had certainly changed since the last trekkers had walked this way. Three major cyclones had torn through since then, and the last one (in January 1997) had killed more than 100 people and left around 30,000 homeless. These meteorological upheavals, along with more than half a decade’s forest growth, had altered the trails somewhat, so that when we finally hit the shore of the Pangalanes Canal Maminty gave thanks (or at least that’s what Vivi told me he said). We had a celebratory lunch before swimming in the cool clear water. Refreshed, we set off again and immediately picked up what was thought to be THE trail. Two hours later we were totally lost and had begun to cross and re-cross swamps, back-tracking, cutting fresh trails and getting absolutely nowhere.
After hours of this behaviour you had to look on the bright side. At least I was getting to see the forest at close quarters, stumbling upon treasures such as a beehive of sweet wild honey, which Nary tried to harvest, much to his cost; pitcher plants next to a lake inhabited by Nile crocodiles; and an amazingly beautiful horned chameleon we must have walked past twice (such is the benefit of backtracking) before Vivi spotted it. Lemurs (cute, furry and dim-witted mammalian ancestors of monkeys and humans) are one of Madagascar’s greatest tourist draws and Vivi assured us repeatedly that he had often seen brown lemurs in the area. Every flash of light through the canopy or moving shadow suggested that a whole troop was about to come swinging through the trees.
By late afternoon there were obviously diverging opinions amongst the guiding staff, who were talking with increasing haste and expression in Malagasy, whilst casting furtive glances in our direction. This was not a good sign. It was getting late and endless walking was getting us nowhere. All the decent drinking water was gone (we were onto brown swamp water with a couple of Puritabs thrown in for luck) and above the sound of the frogs calling to each other across the swamp was the relentless drone of mosquitoes.
In a last-ditch attempt to get to the evening’s camp we found the canal’s overgrown fringes in the gathering gloom and followed the waterway north, wading barefoot through the very bilharzia breeding grounds my doctor had warned me about. After fifteen minutes squelching through God-knows-what, my head filled with thoughts of burrowing parasites, it became clear that we weren’t going to make it before nightfall. We were defeated. All we could do was make a rough camp beside the canal, light a dirty great fire, get Vivi to tell a few stories and sit it out. In reality we were in no danger, and as the stars lit up the sky and a gentle breeze picked up, bringing the roar of the Indian Ocean drifting across the canal, being lost in the rainforest didn’t seem too bad a way of spending an evening after all. Eventually someone would see our fire and come to our rescue. Wouldn’t they?
And so they did, just as I had resigned myself to a case of malaria and an early-morning swim through crocodile-infested waters, and Vivi was winding up the story of how Maminty had ended up owning a bed that belonged to the first president of Madagascar. The hero of the hour was Francis, manager of the Bushhouse Hotel where our trek was to end. We had been missed and he was the cavalry, spotting the burning branches we’d started waving as soon as we’d heard an outboard motor. We sped the frustratingly short distance to our camp site by the light of the full moon and were treated to cool beer and wonderful Malagasy stew.
The next few days were almost as adventurous. Where there was no other way through, we waded across waist-deep mangrove swamps and caught pirogues across the deepest of channels. Every now and then Maminty was forced to cut a way through dense vegetation so that we could follow a route he was sure had been there six years before. We eventually made our way to the shore of Lac Ampitabe and on to the village of Ankanin’ny Nofy (the ‘House of Dreams’) where the luxury of the Bushhouse Hotel awaited.