Dear friends,

Mbolatsara [still well!] and GREETINGS FROM MADAGASCAR! I hope this letter finds you all well!

Come next month I will have lived in Madagascar one year complete. It’s hard to believe it has been so long. I miss you all more than ever and hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday. I just had a great visit from my sister, Sarah, and am now preparing to go back to my village and pick up teaching environmental ed, forest inventorying for the Wildlife Conservation Society, and rice harvesting where I left off in V after the Lemur Festival last month.

To those of you who have been keeping an eye on weather patterns in my hemisphere, we are in the cyclone season and have had some severe storms lately in my part of the island, but nothing to worry about. Sarah and I were evacuated from my village during her visit because of heavy rains and flooding (the water was at shin level outside my door when we were picked up by an ANGAP 4×4). None of my friends in the village were terribly concerned; all had been through such storms before. My house is on stilts and all possessions were piled on my bed and kitchen table before I left, so I expect to find little damage when I get back. My concern during Sarah’s visit was potential election violence, but all went relatively smoothly and Marc Ravalomanana was reelected President.

I think I’ll take advantage of this rare opportunity of computer and internet access in Antananarivo to write you all a little update on what I did this week, if you care to read on. Here goes, a week in the life of a Peace Corps environment volunteer in Madagascar:

After broussing [taking public transport] 9 ½ hours from Antananarivo and getting some sleep at the Peace Corps transit house in banking-town-A, I took a morning bush taxi to my PCV friend A’s site, a small town, also called A.

Small-town-A is nestled in the once rain-forested but now barren hills that line eastern Lac Alaotra, the largest freshwater body in Madagascar. (I have trouble calling it a “lake”, seeing that it’s so shallow that flat-bottomed dugout canoes used by fishermen often scrape the silty bottom even at considerable distances from shore.) Each year more and more of the marshland is claimed by farmers for rice farming, water surface is taken over by invasive aquatic plant growth, and the lake fills in as soils are deposited by heavy rains falling on the eroding hills that surround Lake Alaotra. The lake and its neighboring forest corridor are critical conservation hotspots on the island.

All around small-town-A (whose name implies the town has a train station, but which has not since the days of [former President] Ratsiraka) are rice paddies and zebu and trodden red mud. Houses are made from red earth bricks covered in a layer of dirt, ash, and cow manure and have roofs of thatched reeds or dried matted grass. Very different from the ravinala [palm frond] stilt huts of my coastal region. The town has a small fruit and vegetable market complete with a butcher (something my village does not have,) and there is a small convent of Italian nuns in town who run a medicine dispensary. Rumor has it the Italian masoers love to eat pasta. No rice, only pasta! Just imagine. Scandalous!

My friend A is working on training a small group of guides to take ecotourists out on the lake to see its highly endangered, endemic wildlife. Remaining marshland around Lac Alaotra is critical habitat for a number of rare waterbirds and home to an adorable subspecies of the rainforest-dwelling bamboo lemur, the “bandro” Hapalemur griseus alaotrensis. This subspecies is only found in the diminishing marshes of Lac Alaotra and is thus critically endangered. I had the great good fortune to see five bandro at very close range in the two ridiculously early mornings A and I spent out on the lake with her Malagasy counterpart, a fishermen, and some of her guides in training.

Bandro are most active early in the morning, when they feed on zozoro (Cyperus madagascariensis) reeds, and can be seen crossing reed bridges between clumps of vegetation in their respective territories.

On our first day, we climbed into dugout canoes in the early morning light, shivering in the rain and passing equally cold-looking fishermen whose canoes were laden with hand-woven fishing baskets despite this being a no-take season. To see my first bandro, I climbed carefully out of the tippy, cracked, wooden canoe, camera shielded from the rain by plastic bags, onto the mat of vegetation where a lemur was conspicuously disturbing the papyrus-like zozoro heads as it foraged.

I soon heard the fisherman steering our canoe, who had climbed out before me, thrashing around in the reeds, trying to chase out the bandro so that I could get a clear picture of it. My protests in Betsimisaraka (not the dialect of this region) were either not heard or not understood, and the poor frightened little lemur’s head and beady eyes soon emerged from the tips of the zozoro, a second bandro clutching the reed stalk just below him. Got some nice views of the two of them, but unfortunately with my short, fogged lens my photos just don’t do the little guys justice.

My reason for visiting the Lac Alaotra region included hiking out to the surrounding rainforest corridor National Park of Zahamena, to take pictures for use in a new Madagascar Wildlife Conservation (small local NGO) guide that Amy is writing for the region. We spent two mornings and one afternoon out on the lake, then got our packs and tents ready the following day to head for [yet another!] A, a village a half a day’s hike from the entrance of Zahamena National Park. After locating a fantastic ANGAP guide and porter/cook, we bought supplies for our two days in the forest (10 kapoaka of rice, 4 kapoaka of beans, some rock salt, and a few onions…that’s right, rice and the occasional bean, three meals a day!) and made for the hills.

The half-day hike to the forest corridor was sobering to say the least. The sparsely vegetated dry grassland of the hills leading to the Park, a product of Madagascar’s destructive tradition of slash and burn agriculture, reminded me of the desert scrub landscapes of Arizona or New Mexico. Less than 200 years ago, most of those hills were covered in rainforest. Now, little pockets of trees remain in the gullies between hills where water run-off collects, small reminders of a very different landscape of not so long ago. As we walked, I made up new lyrics to Malagasy pop songs with our porter, mainly singing tunes along the lines of aiza ny kakazo? (”where are the trees?”). I’m realizing how remarkable it is that in my region of the northeast much of the rainforest is still intact.

As if on cue, when we reached the forest boundary, a group of brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvis) began grunting in the trees just ahead of us. The ANGAP agent and I crept closer and started mimicking their grunts to see if any of the members would approach us. Several lemurs got very excited and leaped down to branches closer to our level, peering down at us inquisitively, grunting back at us and straining their necks for a better view. It was incredible how curious they were about us and how close they allowed us to come to them. Making eye contact with one male, I struggled to bend my mind around how many eons of evolution lie between us.

Exhausted, we made camp and cooked a big pot of steaming rice. I gave our Malagasy guides their first taste of beef jerky (which our porter suggested we reconstitute in hot water like they do dried fish, to make loca / ro to eat with our rice). We then hiked up to a magnificent 100+ meter waterfall and basked in its spray for some time, dipping our blistered feet into the cool pool that collected at its base.

We awoke the next morning to the calls of babakoto Indri indri, a haunting, indescribable wailing in the forest that sounds like something between underwater recordings of whale song, air being let slowly out of a balloon, and fog horns. Not a bad early morning wake-up call.

Later that day, at one of the mountain summits, A stopped on the trail and pointed at something in the trees with a gasp. There, staring back at us in alarm with icy clear eyes in stark contrast with its black coat, was a male Indri, the largest of the lemurs. My jaw dropped at the sight. There’s something about the babakoto that just takes my breath away.

After a few minutes of observation, I decided to see what would happen if I mimicked the calls we awoke to that morning. The babakoto burst into a fit of crazed confusion, shifting back and forth on the tree trunk, listening keenly, staring at me. Finally he reared back with his great head, opened his mouth to display teeth and a very red tongue, and let out a long series of deafening, howling replies. I couldn’t stop laughing and gasping. Such a moment! The Indri leaped directly over our heads, hopping to a tree to our left, and then we repeated the exchange. Eventually he caught on that I was not of his kind and moved on down the mountain, disappearing into the canopy.

Our trip out of the forest and back to the village was slow going in the rain along the slippery red mud paths. We stopped to eat rice, boiled eggs, and bananas with a lovely family at the base of the mountain. Then we made our way along the final 3 ½ hour hike back to viallge-A in the dusk and eventual darkness. We arrived covered in a thick layer of mud, feet swollen and muscles aching, but in high spirits after a wonderful few days in the forest. The next morning we headed back to small-town-A and later broussed to banking-town-A.

I love this country.

And that was this week! Would adore to hear how each of you has been if you can find the time to respond. I have three days of internet access left before I fly back to isolated M and then head back to my village. Do keep in touch!

My best to all,
Rachel