Today was boot camp for a conservation worker in Madagascar. Omigod! Cannot believe I made it through in one piece. It didn’t rain today, for which I am incredibly grateful, but I spent 7:30 to 3:45 in the field, following this third transect. Phil came down with a bad stomach bug yesterday and had to stay behind at camp while the 14 of us—2 ‘animateurs’, 2 brush-cutters/trail heads, 1 tree specialist, 8 porters/transect aides and I—started the mission without him. Poor thing! We’re all worried about him.

The two animateurs are university-educated and so speak French. All others speak Malagasy with me and I struggle to ask them questions about the local uses of native trees we come across and medicinal plants they point out. Anita is the only other female but out here in the field we’re all mitovy [comrades, maybe]. That’s different from the division of labor and company I have grown accustomed to in Voloina. All the men in the team are eager to help, share their scavenged sugar cane [fary] with me, even prepare it with their machetes so that I don’t have to use my teeth to strip off the outer layer. They encourage me to try new edible plants when we come across them. I tried the seedy fruit of the lingosa plants that cover the slopes that were once farmed and now are being reclaimed by opportunistic, fast-growing plants. They have a pretty ginger-like flower that stems from their base and produces red seed pods that you break open to eat the black seed surrounded by white, stringy flesh. They’re bitter and tangy. The guides say lemurs like to eat them—well, the lemurs can have mine! Yuck!

We hiked along the transect all day, confirming our position with a topographic map, GPS, and compass. Covered about ¼ of the total transect and couldn’t do a single tree inventory because we didn’t encounter intact forest until the end of the day, despite the fact that all the area we covered lies inside the Makira boundaries. I was amazed that even on the practically vertical slopes we scaled, following the transect course, farmers have integrated manioc, banana trees, vanilla orchards, and orange/citrus trees into the land where primary forest once stood. At least it’s integrated non-monoculture farming, but it meant we GPS’d our positions along the transect but didn’t get any real tree surveying done. We did eventually arrive at the forest boundary, marked it, and will return tomorrow. Walked back to camp along the valley floor past little ravinala huts and through rice paddies, wading through streams when we came to them and cleaning the thick mud from our feet. Whereas the way to the forest boundary along the transect involved 5 and ½ hours of hacking vegetation with machetes on steep, muddy slopes, the walk back through the valley took about 1 and a half hours.

Tomorrow should be all dense forest trekking with our supplies in tow until we find a good camp. I don’t know how the porters do it! Those who carry our packs have it bad enough. Many walk with heavy sacks of rice tied to bamboo poles that they balance on one shoulder, walking along the slippery trails with their load. No wonder they have such muscular builds. It’s a lot of wear and tear on a body, though. Every bit of me aches and this is just the first day with good weather. I wish I had a real pillow to sleep on tonight instead of some clothes stuffed in my tent bag. Mmmm. That would be nice. Maybe I’ll have a Trader Joe’s fruit leather for dessert tonight and that will make me feel better.

There are six porters sitting in a circle around a candle shedding dim light on the ground tarp, playing with the deck of miniature cards I offered them when we returned to camp this afternoon. They’ve been playing for the last two hours—it has gotten dark in the meanwhile. Glad the cards are bringing so much pleasure in a tent in the middle of the forest in Madagascar. I sure loved playing cards with that deck with Dad when I was little and we were on trips. Tonight I am grateful for my headlamp from REI and my Buzz-Off mosquito-repelling socks. Yesterday as we made camp I was ever so grateful to have Mom’s L. L. Bean raincoat. I felt bad taking it off, but now I am sure glad I did!

Today I saw this amazing tree that flowers in big beautiful red and pink clumps along its trunk. Have never seen a tree with flowers along the trunk—even cooler than the tree with nasty thorns covering its bark that I saw in the DC botanic gardens and then recognized today in the rainforest. The trunk-flowering tree’s Malagasy name sounds like ombilahala. I remember it because omby means cow and hala sounds like challah, the bread I used to eat at Brandeis on holy days. The flowers occur in compound balls that remind me of challah loaves for some reason and are the color of cows’ tongues. I’ll do anything to remember all the Malagasy tree names that are thrown at me during the day. Sometimes my associations are a tad far-fetched… Over and out for today!