Going to Tana was exhausting but in retrospect, smooth sailing and reasonably quick. Two days and two nights on a taxi-brousse headed up the middle of the country. At one point I was sharing a seat with four men, a woman who smelled like sour milk, and a chicken.
I enjoyed the capital city more this time around, perhaps because after eating rice, rice, and more rice for nine months, Indian food, pizza, and ice cream seemed like a real treat. As I was sipping a chai latte and eating a chocolate cookie at The Cookie Shop, a north american style coffee shop, I almost forgot that I was in Madagascar. A bit strange.
The 50th anniversary of Madagascar's independance day was celebrated while we were there. The streets were filled with temporary markets, carnival games, and food booths. We went to watch the fireworks, but got caught up in a bottle neck of people trying to get closer. We spent most of the show trying not to get trampled, and then helping the husband of a fainted pregnant woman to put her on a motorbike and push her out of the crowd.
The trip home is the truly epic part of this story. Nine days, a train, 7 taxi-brousses, and a mail truck later we traveled the 900km. Being that there was no direct brousse to Fort Dauphin on the Friday we decided to head down the east coast. A train ride, on which I saved the life of a drunk man who came dangerously close to teetering head first onto the tracks, took us through some beautiful scenery to the coast town of Manakara where we got mobbed by crazy pousse pousse drivers and waited for a taxi brousse headed south. We managed to find one early the next morning that took us to the village of Vangaindrano where we spent time with some of Yvon's family who he had never met while we waited for yet another brousse. It was a tiny village, where apparently a vazaha had visited about 10 years ago, but a foreigner hasn't been seen since. Needless to say, I was the main attraction at the village soccer game that evening.
The next morning we found another taxi brousse headed south to the village of Manambondro where we were told that there were no taxi-brousses going any further south, but there are always 4x4s willing to take passengers. We spent the evening and the entire following day sitting by the road with our luggage waiting for a car to drive by. Not a single one. We tried hiring two guys to take us on their motorbikes 70km to a village where there might have been a taxi-brousse, but they were asking a ridiculous amount of money (vazaha price). The next day, we decided to head back to Vangaindrano and then to Farafangana. We couldn't wait any longer for a car that might never come in a village with no cell reception or any other communication with the outside world.
In the end, we decided that we would have to go all the way back to Fianarantsoa and south through the center of the country. In all, a detour of about 600km. The brousse that took us from Farafangana to Fianara arrived at 2:30am so we slept in the car in the station. The bus from Tana passed by but was jam packed full, but we were told that the post office had a truck going directly to Fort Dauphin that morning. The post worker said he would be happy to pick us up, but only from Ihosy (200km south) as he was afraid to take passengers in the company truck past the gendarme check stops. After a brousse ride to Ihosy, the driver again said he would be happy to give us a lift, but only after we took a taxi out of town past one more gendarme checkstop (note that the gendarme here aren't the scary variety that one often thinks of when in Africa... although perhaps still somewhat corrupt. Numerous times I saw brousse drivers slip gendarme bribes to be allowed to continue with their over capacity cars through checkstops). We traveled in the back of the truck with the mail, or more accurately, on the mail for the remainder of the afternoon.
The Chariot
We stopped in a small village just after dark. Apparently a taxi brousse had been attacked by bandits or zebu rustlers a few days previously, so no one was driving through the night. I'm half convinced this was only rumours... I never once felt at all unsafe. The next day we set out again and traveled until mid-afternoon when the post truck broke down in another middle-of-nowhere village. I think I shed a few tears at this point, due to a combination of being tired, a little bit ill, and having to wear the same pair of underwear for three days. Luckily for us, Yvon's grandparents live in the village so we had a place to visit. They were surprised and happy to see us, and I was given the gift of a live chicken. We were informed that the truck had been fixed and would be ready to head out again at 4am. After pushing it up and down the road for 1.5 hours in the wee hours of the morning, we managed to get it jump started and after a few more hours finally arrived back to Fort Dauphin.
Me and my chicken
If you feel in need of a grand adventure, I highly recommend Madagascar:)
See you in Canada in a couple weeks.
