Travel in the Time of Coup

I publsihed a travel piece in October 2011 issue of Travels Thru History, with the above title (go here for that version: http://www.travelthruhistory.com/html/exotic45.html). I had to pare it down considerably to meet the length requirements of the ezine. Here's the full piece:

At the airport in Antananarivo the immigration kiosk was closed. A sign on the window told us that visas were €62. A handful of us waited, promised that someone would be coming to attend to us. It was hot and humid and most passengers had left for their varied destinations. Two men leaned against the kiosk and talked to each other of the business ventures they would be attending to in Madagascar. We smiled and sweated and nodded to each other with a strange air of camaraderie as we waited.   I finally got impatient and strolled over to a man in uniform.

            “Visas?” I asked, palms up, fingers splayed.

             He immediately moved into action, speaking French to a group of loitering officials, and we were herded to the customs desk. The visas would be paid for upon departure.

            On the drive to our hotel our guide told us that we shouldn’t leave our room because of the political unrest. He spoke a bit of English and periodically fed us tidbits about Antananarivo and the Malagasy people but his English wasn’t good enough for much of a meal. The driver, with inverted baseball cap, said little other than comments in Malagasy to the guide. The traffic was hectic, with the typical African phalanx of weaving cars and combis, pedestrians stitching their way through the speeding boxes of tin, a breath away from impact, rickety bicycles ambling along the roadside, men pulling carts of produce, and the occasional rickshaw. I remembered a trip to Mombasa, and like then, was awed at the absence of collisions from such tight trajectories. We passed through rice paddies with compounds out there on patches of solid ground looking much like hobbit houses. Great cones of dried rice husks sat among the houses. A Zebu (a breed of beef) or two plodded through the paddies or vegetated on the grass by the roadside. Bright mosaics of laundry were left to dry on the embankments, littering the grassy slopes with shirts and shorts and undergarments. The hills and houses of the city rose before us like a sloppy layered sandwich, rich with life.

            Our hotel was the Residence LaPasoa. We would be there for our first and last nights in Madagascar. The name had a funny resonance for me that would grow over the next nine days, and on our last night, a day after the coup, lush with Three Horses Lager, I went out onto our balcony that overlooked the narrow street below and called out to the standers and strollers and hawkers below, “Residence LA-PA-ZOaa!”

            They were mildly amused. I knew by then that the Malagasy people were a kind and gentle people, with smiles that came easily.

            We were the only guests at Residence LaPasoa, as we would be elsewhere. There’s nothing quite like the threat of cyclones and a coup d’etat to keep the tourists away. After the coup, the journalists poked their noses into the pub below, Ku De Ta, just for the name. It was all quite wonderful for us, but not so great for the gentle Malagasy people who made a living by the tourism industry. But in fact, there was nothing to be nervous about. That’s the way it is; people go about their business because that’s what they have to do, and the politicians scrabble for their piece of the pie.

            The plane to Ille St. Marie stopped at Toamasina before touching down on the island. Then it finished the cycle and went back to Antananarivo. Unlike there, the porters at the airport at Ille St. Marie knew what the word no meant. A driver was waiting for us to take us halfway up the island to La Crique.

            Marc, the owner, greeted us. “Welcome!”

            We were not alone, but almost. A French couple building a bungalow about 10 km up the island were having lunch. Rainy seasons and coups are terrors for the tourist business, make no mistake.

            “But you came.” said Marc, as if we were courageous. He’d had more cancellations than he cared to remember.

            I’m sure La Crique is lovely at any time of year or season of political unrest, but it’s especially nice when you have it to yourselves. A group of women came for a night, a couple for a day. Mornings beneath the palms, the sea swaying and drumming a steady beat, the fishermen and sea traffic passing in their lithe pirougues, as graceful and smooth as ice skaters, days crunching on broken coral washed onto the beach, or ambitious snorkel swims around the rocky islands that ringed the bay (one I didn’t think I’d make), fine dinners every night in the open to the music of the ocean, and nights filled with love and fun, both before and by candle light after the generator was turned off. Marc loaned me his nylon stringed guitar after we had a little jam session and I played beneath the herringbone of the thatched roof as the rain beat down. It rained almost every night, but the days were filled with sun and splendour.

            I don’t think a few more people would have spoiled all that.

            There are not that many glam tourist activities on Ille St. Marie, thank god. Apparently renting a motor bike and taking a tour is one, and of course the pirate’s cemetery, or the zoological and botanical gardens. We chose to walk. And walk we did. It’s a small island but getting across its 10 km width is a mission. A new road has been built since cyclone Ivan but it’s difficult to imagine anything other than assault vehicles making the trip. Some of the hills are so steep you almost need a ladder to get up them.

            Of course, we had the dogs of La Crique with us. There were three of them, led by a little mutt who was a terror for chickens. With the emergence of a lanky Malagasy chicken from the rice or bush his ears were perked and in about two seconds the chase was on. The other dogs followed. That’s the way it is.

            They killed a chicken on that walk. I felt like I’d stolen from somebody. They weren’t even our dogs.

            We passed a small village, and people working in the fields, their backsides to the sky. They smiled and waved at us, or asked, “You need boatman?” high above the sea. There were patches of indigenous vegetation but the land has been well worked over. This was disappointing but it didn’t ruin too much.

            We were walking across the island in 40 degree C heat to have lunch at La Paradiso. We were greeted by Florance, who eagerly took us to the restaurant his mother ran. All through lunch he regaled us with the many things he could do for us, for very little Ariary. Times were tough, we knew that, but we had no wealth to spare, we weren’t that kind of tourists. But what a lunch it was! Chicken in coconut sauce, shredded crab in the shell, unprocessed rice, Three Horses, a finger bowl with purple petals, and peace. Every bit of it was harvested locally and cooked fresh, and every bite was a delight. As we ate the little mutt chased a village boy and bit him on his ankles.

            We took another walk as well. Somehow we imagined that we were walking to have lunch at another restaurant toward the tip of the island.

            I don’t even eat lunch normally.

           We walked a long way, and nearly made the top of the island. But there was no restaurant, the resort was further still. Just another 20 kilometer walk, why not? We walked through villages with houses built on platforms above the sandy soil that would course with the water that flows to the sea in the storms.

            There was a nagging feeling of invasion of privacy, especially since the dogs of La Crique were along again, but I was glad for those walks and the life we’d seen.

            When our beautiful time at La Crique was over and it was finally time to make it down to the crossing to Ille aux Nattes for two nights on that tiny island, everyone piled into the bakkie: Joseph, Serafine, Venise, and a mysterious old man who had appeared two days before, with a typewriter perched at his back window. On the one-lane road we came face to face with a large red lorry and as the various manoeuvrings and jockeying for positions were executed we finally saw a giant chameleon. Its blue and white body was poised on a fallen palm frond and C leaned over me to take the picture, her left boob lightly touching my thigh.

            You get to Ille aux Nattes by pirougue. The boatmen line up and beseech you to vote for their boat. You could walk across the channel if you wanted. We stayed at Baboo Village, but right next door is a place owned by a South African, Ockie, and unlike Baboo Village, he had guests. Two of them. They were Dutch and had some business on Madagascar but for now they were chilling with Ockie, until they felt like doing something else. In the evenings they watched DVDs on the widescreen and in the mornings they sat on the deck with coffee and whiskey and watched the pirogues cross the channel, carrying bicycles and people. There’s a sandy trail that circles the island and you can walk it in a couple of hours, depending on your stops. Stop by the Maningory Bar and Restaurant and you might see one of the few lemurs left, semi-domesticated. You can take a pirogue around the island, stop for a bottle or three, for you and the boatman, swim in the clear water where the Madagascar Strait meets the Indian Ocean, and make it back to the lodge before sundowners and yet another French meal. 

            On the plane back to Joburg about a half dozen journalists were on board. The coup was over and they were headed on to the next story. We waited on the tarmac for twenty minutes for the last of them, carrying his satchel and talking on his cell phone as he mounted the stairway. One of them, a light haired middle-aged woman sitting across the aisle from me, lifted her flaccid arms and clapped, slowly but loudly, as he entered the cabin. No one else joined in, but there were calls and jests. I got the distinct feeling that they all thought that they were the only ones on the plane, the other passengers more like faceless manikins than real live people in the flesh. I was in front of them in the queue at customs as well, but they were soon whisked off like royalty, and not because they had a story to cover.

            I thought of the two little girls who walked with us to the west, trudging barefoot to school the ten kilometres across Ille St. Marie, a journey they made every day, with empty hands and stoic hearts, and the smiling villagers on top of the hills asking; “You need boatman?” I thought of the woman who sold us pastries at a spaza shop; “You want three, four…” I asked C. “…or five...” said the smiling woman as she walked up the path to open the shop. I thought of Paki the pirougue man of Ille aux Nattes, and Joseph at La Crique, and musty cemeteries with midget crypts, and the lithe climber who pulled down the coconuts to fall on the sandy trail, and the shopkeeper who couldn’t understand our requests for the title of the almost rumba music we heard as we passed, and the sage guitar of Manhi at the Zebu Bar and Lounge on our last night in Antananarivo - and so many others we’d encountered, and I thought that the journos had missed the story, and I was glad to see them go, like cockroaches underneath the moulding.

            Coups come and coups go, but the people soldier on, barely blown by the breeze.

            What a place!

            Don’t hesitate to go.