Africa Part4

Madagascar

The Madagascar experience was different from the mainland Africa in a number of ways. The first and most significant being that nothing on the island was trying to kill you. Nothing! No large predators, no angry large herbivores, no overly poisonous snakes, spiders or frogs. It was very nice. It is perhaps valid to note at this point that some of the plants did like to cut you and that any time you get a cut of any type there was a very good chance it was going to wind up infected.  The other notable difference from the places we had been is that most people did not in fact have any working knowledge of the English language. This was made even more difficult by my lack of a working knowlage of ither French or malagash. 

Most of our time in Madagascar was spent in the tiny hamlet of st Luce. This is a vague blip on the map 4 hour drive from the middle of nowhere.  There was about a 45 minute walk to the beach and 3 hamlets including ours on the way totalling just under 1500 people.  The hamlet closest to us had just about 700 people in it and was considered the biggest one. This is a generous statement about a place with no road and no power sources. Well there was one shop owner who had a generator and played kung fu movies most nights in his establishment. There was also a mining camp not too far from us with solar generators and we could go over there and pay ~ 25 cents to charge something. 

The community was small but very friendly. It was fairly easy to buy things at the shops using a combination of about 5 words of malagash and charades. The best night we had at the project was probably the night we had a bush party. We got a local band to come play and they had some dancers. It was fantastic getting to party with the locat community. We all danced together and had a great time. It was really neat because it was just people getting together for a party 100% not toursty at all which was a nice change from most of what we have been doing in Africa.

Our camp was also very basic. we had a long covered area that we used as a dining area. There was also a cook house and a storage shed. This was the sum total of solid ish structures on the premise. There where long drop toilets and a kinda grass hut built on a concrete slab arrangement for the shower. The process being you pump water from a well into a bucket then use that to shower.

The project work was very interesting and had a lot of different parts.  The first part was obviously lemurs. We did a few things with them including walking transects and doing behavure studies. For the transect we would walk down a set path through the forest fragment and count how many lemurs of what species we could find. Then measure the distance from the transect and take some data on the tree  they were in. this was done both during the day and at night. The behavure studies were mostly spent wandering through the forest fragment till you come across a lemur and then you follow it for an hour and a half so you can record data on what it is doing and what type of trees it is in.

Other than lemurs the next most common activity was looking for frogs and geckos. This was one of my favorite things and consisted mostly of looking through swamp and leaf litter to find frogs or geckos. Then you would either hold very still and try to get somebody to identify it before it runs off or try to catch the jumpy little bastards.  Both methods have a moderate success rate. This was also done during the day and during the night walks. An offshoot of the looking for geckos thing was looking specifically for a critically endangered little guy found only in the forest fragments around st luce. Right now in about 300 hectares but after the mining company finishes clear cutting and mining what they plan to the habitat will be down to less than half that. So we looked through large spikey plants and tried to catch the little guys so we could take down hopefully enough information that they will be able to keep some of them in captivity.  

The last main part of this project had to do with community development.  the first part of this was building stoves for the local people. This was a great program because it helped the people and the forest. The stoves made boiling a pot of water some 70% more efficient. This means the forest doesn’t get cut down as much for fire wood and the people in the village don’t have to spend as much of their days looking for fire wood. The second part of the community development had to do with education. We had 2 days a week where we would go down to the school and teach an environmental and conservation lesion to the kids there.

Lastly I think it is important to make a note about the transportation we had in and around st luce. We only drove 2 times, once on the way in and once on the way out and boy was I great full. On the way in the van lost its exhaust pipe and muffler that were then attached back on with aluminum foil…. Go Africa mechanics. The second time we were in a huge truck with just kind of seats around the edge… it did have walls which was a nice safety feature considering that at many points I thought the truck was going to roll. This was not the fault of the driver… it was just a function of the “roads” really to call most of this a road is an insult to shitty roads everywhere. In town and by our camp it was mostly just sand with no plants growing on it… further on we lost the sand but there was still no plants. This was the only defining feature that let you know it was not say… field. In many places the term dry river bed would have been an accurate description. In other cases just. River would work. This is because the “bridges” probably wouldn’t have held the weight so we just drove around them.  I will get back to the bridge in a moment after I add that at some points there were mountain bikers happily jumping and sliding down the road. In some places it was so rocky and uneven that it would have been hard to even walk it. Now the bridges… picture a cracked and broken rectangle of concrete on either side of the stream or river you want to cross. Now attach these together with 2 small concrete beams… now lay sticks across the beams…. Hammer about 3 more sticks per side over top of the sticks directly above the concrete beams. Now let it sit and get old and more broken… now you have the bridge. At many times it was truly frightening.

Overall Madagascar was fantastic and we had a really great time tromping through the forest. It may have had way to much condensed milk for my liking but it had a lot of character And it was quite the adventure. Now back to the mainland and hopefully no more tents!