Best Road Trip Ever!

So we just arrived in Tana (Antananarivo), Madagascar's capital city of one million people. It is a very active big city that is very much in the european city model, except dirtier. It is pretty sweet, and quite a culture shock. What I really want to talk about is our road trip to get here.

By the time the roadtrip started I was in perfect health. It turns out that as soon as I thought I was getting sick, I took antibiotics and made a full recovery in 24 hours. I really doged a bullet on that one, go immune system!

We started out driving to Isalo. We were starting to enter the mountains. It kind of reminded me of the american southwest, but with tropical plants and Africans. We swam in some awesome natural pools and had a hike to see the cool weathered limestone.

Then we headed to Anja for two nights. These mountains are a little bit older, a little bit bigger and a little bit less tropical. It was great to see community managment of a park in action. It appeard to be working quite well. We had a long hike through a saddle. At lunch, Eric bet one of our advisers a case of Beer (only a joke, no real beer was exchanged) that he could hike this one peek from our lunch spot in 10 minutes. Being the true Irishmen that he is, Barry took the bet since the peek was pretty far away. After eating eric took off into the shrubary to ascend the mountain. After a couple of minutes I looked at him and was like, "he isnt going to make it, but he looks like he is having fun" so I took of after him. I caught up and we hiked the peek together, through the shrub covered boulder feild. It was awesome and totally worth it. We came back to the lunch spot an hour later, not quite the 20min round trip that we had hoped. We missed a seista but had tons of tun. We also did some academic work looking at how the park is managed and such. It was a nice visit.

After two days there we headed of to Andringitra, but not before stopping in the market to buy warm clothes. We hiked to our campsite at 6,000ft of elivation. It was definitely a rugged mountain environment. We saw more evidence of the values of community managment and got to live in the mountains. At night it got down to the low 30s. Not the weather I was expecting when I was packing to go live in the tropics. I had a warm sleeping bag and managed. Others werent so down with the cold.

On our second day at Andringitra we climbed Mount Boby, thats right, it is called Mount Boby. It was a solid 7 hour hike round trip and the peek was at 10,000 ft. It is the second talles peek in the country and the tallest that is accessable, the other one is surrounded by dense forest, marajuana farms, and men with guns that protect those farms. The hike was great though. I got to hike it alone since the group took rediculous breads all the time. I got to enjoy some really sweet bird songs and sweet views on the way up. Then I got 25 minutes on the peek to enjoy the quiet before the group arrived. It was really great. The peek was unreal but I have to say that I enjoyed the process of hiking and descending more then the actual peek. These mountains are really cool, they are super old and so all of the surfaces are very weathered. Look at this geo nerd spin his wheels.

Our next two days were an excellent contrast. We spent two days in the the Jungle at Ranomafana National Park. We visited hot springs, went on a hike in the forrest, and talked with villagers about the impact of the Park on their lives. On the hike we saw three species of Bamboo lemurs, a fossa, two nocturnal lemurs (one was a mouse lemur, we saw them on another night hike), some chamelions, and leaf tailed geckos. We were super luckey and got to see the greater bamboo lemur. We saw the mom and his two kids who are the only three wild specis of their kind remaining in the world. The other two are in a Zoo. It was really cool. Living in the jungle maked me excited about spending a month in the jungle for my indipendent study project (ISP). On the impact study we learned that the villagers are not recieving their promised 50% of the entrance fees because of government corruption. They still slashing and buring outside of the park instead and not much in being acomplished, except for happy european tourists and money for rich Malagalsy. It was kind of depressing. I wonder if I will find the same thing when I go to Makira for ISP.

That is all for now, I hope all is well with everyone and I will try to post again before I leave for the jungle for a month of no internet.

Tulear

So we left the city of Fort Dauphan and are now in the bigger city of Tulear on the West coast. It is really nice. Today we had a lecture of coral reefs and then in the afternoon went snorkeling on the reef to see what we had learned. It was unreal. Our hotel is very nice, we have been eating well too. Life is still not "american" but there are definitely more comforts of home (running hot water, a sit down toilet, more than beans and rice for dinner...). It is Mango season and our Hotel has tons of mango trees in the courtyard. Every twenty minutes to a half hour we hear a bang of a mango falling on the roof and rolling to the ground. Consequently the ground is covered in ripe, sweet delicious mangos. Life is good, still very busy but good.

A week in a malagasy village

So I just got back from my eye opening experience at the village stay. I stayed in a little village 4km from the village of Faux Cap in the Tandroy reigon of Madagascar. There were four houses, each about 10ft by 7 ft and 6 feet tall at the peek. There was Papa, Mama, and their kids and grandkids, ten to fifteen in total. I really liked the family, they were all really sweet. We went to the beach to bathe, worked in the fields, planting sweet potato and watermellon, and helped feed the cattle. There were zebu caddle and chickens running around the lawn all the time, none of which they eat by the way. We had dance time everyday. It was an hour to an hour and a half of Malagasy dance. At first I thought it was rather repetitive but each day more and more people would show up to dance and see us. Eventually we learned more complex moves and I started to really like the dancing. That was definitely a highlight. As for food we at the rice and beans that we brought, plus lots of sweet potato (the malagasy version is not as good as the american version). We would occasionally eat eggs from the chickens. I had a lot of fun with Elizabeth, the other student that I was staying with, we got along very well and have similar academic interests so the academic side of the stay went very smoothly. I really enjoyed learning about the culture and lifestyle of the Tandroy people. Instead of a life based on making money and getting power through material possesions, they collect cattle because the number of cattle that you sacrifice at your funeral determines your status in the afterlife.
I really liked my parrents in the village stay. Mama was very sweet and always smiling. Papa also seemed to be high on lifem grinning from ear to ear when ever we would communicate. It was hard to communicate with them at first but by the end my few words of malagasy, his few words of french and my improved skills at explaining with gestures made things a lot easier. There were also tons of super cute kids in the village, I had some photo shoots with them and one of them tought me some awesome dance moves.
My favortite observation was that everyone in the village only worked 4 to 5 hours a day doing all of the various chores. I am extremely impressed that they still manage to live a subsistance farming life, doing that little work during the day. Granted their diet is not to diverse, eating sweet potato, manioc(nasty chalky potato), corn, milk, eggs, beens, squash and watermellon only. I think it says something true about the value of living simply. There was nothing bogging down their lives and they had plenty of time to spend enjoying eachothers company, dancing, and relaxing. It has allowed them to develop some very rich cultural traditions. It made me think about living more simply back in the USA.

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