Two PC friends were visiting and they managed to go to Nosy Mangabe and Masoala. Rachel said their trip was “four of my most incredible days yet”. Just phenomenal! Had to keep pinching herself to see if it was real. They had great weather; took a boat to Nosy Mangabe - 2 nights. Sitting on the beach, they saw a mother and baby whale breech. There have apparently been fewer whales sighted this year, so they were really lucky to see them. Rachel also said that white-fronted brown lemurs stole tomatoes from their packs.

On a hike on the island, they found a Berkize (?) chameleon, so small it can sit on your thumbnail. Also frogs the size of a pea. Went on a nocturnal hike. Saw leaftail geckos - can change colors like a chameleon; can lick eyeballs since no eyelids. If a bird catches it, it releases its tail.

On the boat ride to Masaola, they came very close to two pods of humpback whales. A pair turned on sides and showed fins. Also a pair of dolphins.

Saw a pair of red-ruffed lemurs. The orchids are blooming. Saw a rare one that Darwin wrote about - predicted existence of a moth that wasn’t discovered until 14 years later.

Rachel returned to her village after the friends left. She took the taxi-brousse and was able to talk to a girl her age on the way back. Rachel found that her fence had been knocked down again by someone trying to avoid the pothole that is still there, but otherwise all was well. Some of “her” kids saw that she was in the taxi-brousse and so all the kids came running. They immediately wanted to get back to “business as usual”, i.e., playing with her fish cards, looking at “boky” and playing with Trader Joe’s balloons.

Too exhausted to make an entry when we finally set up camp last night. It was a very long day. Up at 5 am, didn’t get to camp until 6:30 pm, a good hour after dark. None of us planned to be out so late and we had no lights with us. The rainforest is a dangerous place when navigated blind! The good spirits of the Malagasy transect team members kept me from breaking down and drying at not being able to see where and on what I was putting my hands and feet. Camp was situated very far from the transect yesterday, but faced a beautiful little waterfall. I bathed in it this morning, washed my hair and everything—first time I’ve been clean in 6 days. Now I’m filthy again from a morning of hiking in search of the transect. We ended up on the wrong mountain since our GPS wasn’t finding a satellite signal. Finally two of the pioneers’ internal compasses navigated the team to where we finished our point de mesurage yesterday. On the way we heard the grunting of a group of lemurs and one lemur came very close to last night’s camp. Also at camp, outside the door to Phil’s and my tent, was a scorpion. It was small and robust, unlike the ones we saw in North Africa, but still not something you want to cuddle up next to at night.

My back is very sore from bracing myself to keep from sliding down the slopes yesterday—at one point around 55 degrees—after it had rained all morning. Slowly, however, my body is adjusting to the demands of following this transect. Phil made an amusing mistake in his English yesterday. He is German, speaking to me in broken English. The animateurs speak broken French with me and the transect team in broken Malagasy. Bet Phil wishes there were a German around to be coherent with! He said: “There is a lot of humanity in this forest.” He meant ‘humidity’, of course, but with the 17 of us, I suppose there’s more humanity here than usual, also.

From this slope you can see all the way across the bay to this side of the Massoala Peninsula. Quite a view. The river valley is also small-scale rice farming and you do see some tavy and saroka, but the rainforest surrounding this GCF looks relatively intact (although not primary growth) and is so very beautiful! It’s not raining today—not yet, at least—and that makes a world of difference. I think I hear the team approaching. I went on ahead while they did a study plot since I’m so much slower than everyone else in my soggy, traction-wanting hiking boots.

Phil commented this morning that the Malagasy—at least the men in our team—remind him of Hobbits. “They must eat all the time and they have flat, broad, bare feet. Wrap their meal in leaves like little green packages when we must eat on the trail.” He’s right. To save time, we all packed mounds of steaming rice on three lingosa leaves and folded them into square pouches. We’ll eat the plain rice with peanut butter I had the bean-seller in the market at M make for the trip. Straight roasted, handshelled pounded peanuts with the kapoaka of brown sugar I gave her mixed in. It’s crunchy and amazing. Strange as the main course, but you get used to taking little bites of your peanut butter ball and tossing them in your mouth with a leaf-spoonful of rice. Okay: team arrived. Back to climbing…

I put my hands on a tree a couple of times today that one of our team tree experts later told me is bad for your hand—or something like that, didn’t quite understand what he said in Malagasy. Tonight my palms feel like they are coated in a fine layer of sandpaper, and the many small cuts on my fingers from clutching thorny lianas sting unpleasantly.

As if to say “chin up!”, a group of lemurs (not sure what species as again, I have only heard not seen them) grunted and groaned a welcome as I set up the tent. They were many and close. Their chattering sounds like a cross between pigs oinking and frogs croaking–interesting vocalizations. I hope I get a view of some before this trip is over.

The highlight of today was arriving at the mountain’s summit and looking out over the spectacular landscape of the Park. Misty rainforested mountains, sunbeams breaking through the early evening clouds, rivers catching that light and glistening—just breathtaking! Made every ache worth it and reinforced why I am here, playing my little part to protect this remarkable place.

As the light dimmed and then broke anew through the clouds, the calls of a group of black and white ruffed lemurs rose in the air, filling the vast space, as if on cue. Such a moment!

“Higher and higher and into the forest we go!” Today was one of the most physically strenuous days of my life. The rain last night fell hard all morning as we hiked the slippery slopes of our transect, mud everywhere. At one point I had a stunning view of the mountains southeast of our transect, all the way to the Bay of Antongil and Nosy Mangabe in the great distance. Could see several villages and the river we traveled to get to our launching point. Also found a gorgeous vista of rain clouds and mist clinging to the forest on adjacent mountains, with the silhouettes of giant Vapaka and Ensine (?) trees framing the peaks. Just like views you see in National Geographic magazine—only I am taking them in first-hand. Have to pinch myself every so often to make sure I’m really here doing this.

I found two leeches on my body today. They are nasty, sneaky little suckers—no pun intended. One made its way up into my shirt and I plucked it off my stomach before it had a chance to start its meal. The other one really freaked me out because I reached up and pulled it off my eyebrow! Noticed something black moving around out of the corner of my eye and started to wipe it away when it clung to my finger and wouldn’t let go. Before coming to Madagascar, I read about Raxworthy and the leeches he got in his eyes doing research in the part of the country. I hope I make it through this mission without learning the joys of that! Leech on eyebrow is bad enough!

Out here, leeches are maybe the least of one’s worries. I saw a millipede that was 9 inches long this afternoon. They’re poisonous and a sting from one of those can cause high fever and all sorts of unpleasantness. Also a hindrance to those traversing this forest are the many species of trees, vines, and lianas that have sharp thorns lining their trunks like armor. Somehow the Malagasy transect group does just fine in the mud, climbing up a 48 degree slope. Me, I slip and slide and grasp for any vegetation that can save me from falling down the mountainside. In that split second when you lose your balance and panic for a stable grip, it’s hard to confirm that what you grasp does not have faty be [big thorns]. The thorns also tear at your clothes and scratch your arms and make you itch.

On a lighter note, we finally reached foret eclaircie today—still not primary forest but better than the savaka and foret degradee we’ve found so far. You only occasionally see giant trees with buttressed roots, and light does penetrate the thin canopy, but the plant biodiversity is remarkable, and it feels like real rainforest. We made camp today right in the heart of the forest and as I write this I am being serenaded by a chorus of tree frogs and other nocturnal creatures, accompanied by the gurgling of a little stream. There are giant bird’s nest ferns crowning the larger trees’ branches above our camp. As I ate dinner with the transect team on a bed of leaves under the tarp at the center of camp, a tiny frog that I think is endemic to this area jumped onto my plate and balanced on the rim for a few moments before hopping onto the plate a few folks down from me.

Also saw a crab about as big as my palm living in the water collected in the knot of a white vapaka tree. I was impressed by the microhabitat he selected and turned into a perfect niche—never would have guessed that there were crabs that live in trees in the rainforest here. Always associated them with bodies of water. Also saw crickets with antennae 5 times the length of their bodies—ridiculously long. And insect-mimic spiders, several species, each having evolved to look like a different non-predatory insect to fool prey. Have seen a few birds but no large fauna. This trip would be heaven for an entomologist. I have seen so many species of ant! I imagine many of them have yet to be described. And this all, not within the boundaries of Makira, but along a transect line in a GCF (transfer de gestion) zone. [i.e., a zone that is between the parkland and inhabited land, presumably]

I hope we at least hear some lemurs in the next few days. Wish everything I own weren’t wet, or at least damp. Also wish I did not have red, raw spots on my heels and toes from my hiking boots. What will my feet look like and feel like on day 12, I wonder? Best not to think about it.

One of these days I’ll get around to writing out the transect procedure to solidify it in my mind and help those at home better understand what I’m doing out here (or at this stage, observing being done).

Dinner was rice with beans; lunch was rice with peanut butter; breakfast was rice with little dried shrimp. Fruit leather is a very good invention and should be given a medal for excellence in the field! Time for bed!

Holy poop, I’m sore! Scaled forested mountain sides so steep today that I was sure I’d fall to my death, to be discovered days later, half eaten by wild lemurs. It would be so much more convenient if I weren’t afraid of heights as we do this transect work. Completed data for one “point de mesurage” today. It poured rain as we ate our rice tonight. Tomorrow will be more of the same gradient, but slippery as hell, to boot. I am exhausted and damp but can’t stop thinking how lucky I am to be out here doing this study and seeing this amazing forest—and cultivated land (interspersed pineapple, tsumanga, mangahazo (manioc?) zerofle (cloves?) is also on the transect line.)

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!