What’s in a name, that sometimes keeps whispering in the back of your mind “I should go there someday”? Is it some form of the magic of words? I don’t know, but somehow I’ve lived with that name of Madagascar ever since, at about 9 or 10 years old, I watched a TV series of Paul et Virginie, and heard someone say “votre mari est mort, de la fièvre, au nord de Madagascar”. Through the years, that sentence, its sound, kept resurfacing again and again, as I looked at world maps as a child, or planned trips as an adult. Then recently, a young friend has been actually living in Madagascar, and I asked myself: “why not now?”.
So I went to Madagascar, a very real place, more reknown today on account of a few animation movies. And it was a great and very interesting trip. It was my first experience of a “real” African country (even if it’s not exactly Africa, but it’s more so than Morocco or Cape Vert), and it lived up to my expectations.
I landed in Antananarive, the capital, known as Tana. I guess it’s more or less like most 3rd world capitals – big, poor, with some islands of secluded prosperity, polluted and traffic ridden. Poverty is always disheartening, even if expected. This could be a beautiful city: spreading over several hills, a pleasant weather on a plateau, a soft and clear light, with lots of beautiful colonial buildings and the bustling activity of the ubiquitous street markets and stalls.
But one cannot stop noticing the pollution, the garbage, the young unemployed people idling on the streets, the beggars, the passed-out drunks on the sidewalk, the open-air sewers, the men urinating anywhere, the buildings unkempt and ruined. I walked a lot around the town, through the daedalus of small alleys and stairs on the hills, from the markets and shops downtown to the more quiet streets of the Haute Ville, dominated by the charred walls of the Palais de la Reine, a 19th century symbol of the wealth and power of the ruthless queen Rovalonna I. As the Lonely Planet guide says, in Tana all the world is a market, where you find on street stalls everything you can think of plus probably a few you wouldn’t remember; also meat and fish stormed by flies.
But you can also enjoy coffee and croissants at the French-influenced patisseries and eat excellent food at a number of restaurants. The French cuisine, combined with African and East Asian influence, is great. (You also find what it looks like the whole of old Renault s and 2CVs that disappeared froEurope, but I guess there must be others in other former French colonies). And, even if I had “vasaha” (the Malagasy word for “white”) written all over my T-shirt, shorts and backpack attire, I actually felt quite safe and at ease everywhere, even if sometimes annoyed by the frequent “la vanille, voulez vous la vanille?”. Maybe it’s because of the European former colonization, or because we’re used in Portugal to Africans, but I felt at home, unlike in Marrakech, for instance.
Then I went to Anzojorobe, about 80 km north of the city. Lots of traffic getting out of town – narrow streets, cars parking anywhere, taxi-bes stopping, men pulling loaded carts… But once passed the long suburbs, we drive through a beautiful plateau landscape, unfortunately mostly devoid of trees – deforestation is a huge problem in Madagascar, due to the use of charcoal as the main energy source and the smuggling of rosewood and palissander. Anyway, one hour after leaving Tana one feels in a different world, of wide landscapes and small ocher-colored villages.
We reached Anzojorobe, a forest reserve, then a short walk in the sunset light till the Saha Forest Camp – a very pleasant lodge in the forest, by a river with green rice fields, whose “tents” have canvas walls but all the comforts of civilization.
The next day, my first hike – an easy track through the forest, and my first sightings of lemurs (idris and sifakas) and several beautiful birds. The Anzojorobe forest is beautiful but not especially wild, it was a nice introduction to Malagasy nature though.
And after a good lunch and some idling, back to Tana, where we were greeted by a typically huge traffic jam. Plenty of time to watch the roadside stalls and the myriads of people walking by, many of them dressed up, many of them tipsy. It’s Saturday evening, and the driver tells us there’s a lot of people celebrating famadihana, the strange Malagasy ritual that consists in the yearly unearthing of the ancestors’ corpses, enveloping them in new shrouds and burying them again. I’d like to take lots of photos from all those people coming and going and making business, but I’m always shy of taking people’s pictures, always fear they feel I’m behaving as in a zoo or something.
So, after a very tasty dinner at Kudéta restaurant, and a few hours sleep, taxi to the airport and off to the North!
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