As my month here with Jamie comes to a sad end, I feel the need to sum up our holiday vacations here in Mcar. We started out the Christmas season by giving my neighbors a whole duffle bag full of clothes that Jamie had brought from my dad and mom’s old clothes, along with some of my own. They were ecstatic to get them and have been wearing them everyday since. It’s funny seeing the guard of my high school sporting a Chi-Hi soccer shirt as he walks around the school yard. After a week of having Jamie in my classes with me, we headed off to the capital and then hopped on a brousse the next day to Fianarantsoa, a regional capital south of Tana.
From there we went to Isalo National Park, which was a gorgeous sandstone formation surrounded by desert. Inside the sandstone were small canyons and natural pools with tropical vegetation. We were all exhausted after the first entire day hike into the park, especially because of the downpour we encountered. We showed up to our campsite soaked through and our feet were torn up. The next day we spent swimming in all of the natural pools, which were gorgeous and felt amazing in such a hot climate. The next day we packed into a small brousse, sitting four people across, surrounded by young German tourists. We drove through a small sapphire trading wild west-ish town that was filled with young men.
We also drove through the town where the female PCV was murdered in 11 years ago. At a police stop, we were again apologized to by the policemen and told that they wanted Peace Corps to come back to their community. I have experienced this many times while I have been here. The Malagasy are extremely ashamed of the horrific incident and still make sure to remind all of us volunteers of it. The man who did it is still in jail and people in this country use his name as the greatest insult you can call someone. I want to just add that I have never felt unsafe here, not even for a second.
We finally arrived in Tulear, which is a coastal city on the southwest coast. We ate some good pizza and crammed into a hotel room. The next day we took a local brousse to another PCV’s site just south of Tulear. This site was on the ocean, as advertised, but in a bay full of seaweed, and mangroves, which was not advertised. Needless to say, it was hotter than heck in this place, clean fresh water was hard to come by and going into the ocean after the tide finally came into the bay was like wading in a huge bucket of hot concentrated pee with stinky seaweed under your feet. It was not a great experience. There was no electricity there, which meant no cold drinks and it was 95 degrees when we woke up at 7am, according to our travel thermometer. The volunteer’s neighbors did pull through on the goat though, and we watched it be killed, and charred on a fire before being cut up and cooked and eaten with rice. It was tasty. Then that night we had a bonfire on the beach with smores and an amazing view of the stars. We also celebrated Hanukkah every night because one of the PCV’s with us is Jewish. We ate potato latkes with jam and laughing cow cheese and lit the menorah every night. The next day, we returned to Tulear on a packed truck filled with the morning’s catch of fish, shrimp and sea cucumbers. I’m proud of Jamie for holding back complaints about that smelly, hot, crammed trip!
After another day in Tulear enjoying cold drinks, good food, and a trip to the local discotech, we took a 36 hour brousse ride to Morondava. Morondava is also on the west coast, but there is no road connecting the two cities during the rainy season. We left at 7 in the morning and arrived at 7pm the next day. I barely slept and our ears were practically bleeding from the blaring music the ENTIRE ride, but we were able to see tons of the land, which changes from coastal beach to dry desert with baobabs to sandstone to huge granite rock formations to the plateau rice fields and back again. There was a lot of peeing on the side of the road that went on during that day and a half long car ride.
When we finally arrived in Morondava, we stayed in a super cheap hotel the first two nights so we could splurge for New Year’s Eve by staying in a bungalow on the beach. We rented a taxi one day to take us to a secluded and gorgeous beach outside of town. We swam there for a while, and played in the crashing waves on the white sand beach. It was the exact opposite of our Christmas beach experience. Then we hopped back into the taxi and drove to the Avenue of Baobabs, which is an area where a lot of baobab trees are alongside the dirt road. These massive trees look amazing, especially at sunset when we went to see them. We walked up and down the rows of trees, taking a million pictures and talking to the children that live nearby. We started dancing one of the local dances with them, called kilalaky, and gave them plums that we had gotten on the plateau. It was definitely one of those experiences where I felt like I was inside a National Geographic magazine picture that had come to life. I loved every second of it.
We also went to this amazingly posh restaurant where we ate tuna crusted with shredded coconut and prawns in garlic sauce and sautéed vegetables. It was the most delicious meal I have eaten in this country. And probably the most expensive. This place was high-class, with rooms costing 130-180 Euros a night to stay in, which is unheard of in this town, let alone this country! This new place had every amenity and would be a great place to stay in for a nice honeymoon. On New Year’s Eve we upgraded and stayed in a place that had a pool as well as ocean front property. It felt great to use air conditioning for my first time in this country! My site is hot, but this place was like dripping sweat every hour of the day hot. Thankfully the ocean water was cool though. That night we ate dinner, I had delicious crab legs, and then headed out to the local Malagasy drinking establishments and ended up in a Bob Marley bar at midnight, with people playing bongos and other drums and dancing and drinking guava juice and rum while ringing in the New Year. It is a great memory to have.
The trip from Morondava back to Tana was probably the most mentally challenging taxi brousse ride I have had in the year and a half I have lived here. We arrived at the station at noon and sat in the hot wooden shack waiting for everyone else to arrive. At 2pm, we finally all got into the car and drove off… and stopped a block away in front of an ice shop. We all got out of the brousse and waited another half an hour for a lady on our brousse to buy ice. Then, we were off again and made another stop at the hospital. I could not believe my eyes as three nurses carried a frail elderly lady out to the car with just a sheet wrapped around here. She looked minutes from death and was hooked up to an IV and a catheter. The driver took out the portable fire extinguisher and hung up the IV in it. She was to ride the entire 20 hours laid across her loyal husband and son instead of in an ambulance because there are none that go from city to city here for cheap. Whenever I accidentally got a glimpse of her ghostly face, my eyes filled with tears and my heart sank. We had to stop at two small hospitals on the way to have people fix the IV drip. The woman sitting behind me was carrying a five day old baby on her lap and she kept asking us to hold it when she got in and out of the car. I remember feeling forced in between life and death, and it made the fragility of life so conscious. We had one more stop to make before we departed that day. We waited at the house of the woman that I will forever call the “ice woman” for two hours, in the blazing heat with a new born and hospital patient sitting in the hot car. She had to break up her ice and put it in Styrofoam boxes to keep her shrimp cold that she was bringing to the capital to sell. The driver had to take all of the baggage off of the top, add her cheap coolers and then put our stuff back on it. Meanwhile, the ice woman ran and took a quick bucket shower and the rest of us sat and sweated. A lot of cursing took place at this part of the story. Then, we were finally off. We were traveling on a holiday, so when we stopped to eat rice, there was none cooked because none of the roadside hotelys were open. So, we went without dinner and continued on to the capital. It had started to rain and while driving through the dark we felt the tires slip underneath us as we tried to go up small inclines in the mud. At one point, the car died and the men got out to help push start it. When we finally arrived in Tana, I got my bag off of the top of the brousse and it was drenched in shrimp water. The ice had melted and the water had leaked out of the boxes onto my bag. This was the last straw for me. I walked up to the ice woman and asked her to give me money, explaining that now I would have to clean my bag and everything in it and that it was her fault. She laughed and said, “Oh, silly foreigner”. I went off on a rant about how she had no soul and how she made a sick elderly woman and a five day old baby wait two hours in the afternoon heat just so she could pack her stuff and get ready. I informed her that my stuff smelt horrible and my clean clothes were now dirty and that her soulless self should give me some money to buy soap to clean it. She and everyone around here was shocked that I had gone off in Malagasy at her and she dug in her purse and gave me four hundred ariary, which is enough to buy a bar of soap. This ride was definitely an experience that I will never forget.
That’s all I can think of for memorable parts of my vacation. Sunday I bring Jamie to the airport and then the next few weeks are full of exams, my birthday and more teaching. I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and I will see you all in six months!
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