Big Hair South

Volobe Sud (literally translated as “big hair south”) is the most remote village I’ve worked in with Azafady. I’ve just come back from 3 weeks building a school there. It’s been an amazing 3 weeks but it’s good to be back. I have really missed cheese. Volobe is a hard place to be for a solid stretch of time that long!

The school has been built with no major problems but what has struck me about this scheme is the epic scale of organising the work here.

Volobe is a 3 hour camion ride north of Fort Dauphin (to Tsanoriha, just north of Mahatalaky for those in the know). On reaching Tsanoriha there was quite a sight waiting for us. Some 300 people from Volobe greeted us chanting welcome songs and blowing an old bugle to further rouse the group. It was pretty overwhelming. I’ve never seen a welcome like it! From there you have to cross a terrifying bridge or ford the river (I forded the river. The bridge looked so scary). It is then a 3.5 hour trek into the mountains crossing a further 7 bodies of water before you get to Volobe. Getting 15 volunteers and their bags there was in itself a serious undertaking. But then of course all the materials for the school building have to be transported there too! In all, it took the best part of 300 porters all day to carry all of our kit and materials the 20 km to Volobe. An incredible effort from all involved and an amazing feat of Malagasy organisation!

God awful bridge at Tsanoriha. I opted for wading the river.

Dodgy Indiana Jones style bridge

Army of cement bags arriving for the latrine we go to built next tuesday. Each bag weighs 50kg. Finished school in the background.

Volobe is the most beautiful place we’ve worked. It feels truly cut off from the rest of the area in the heart of the mountains. It gets incredibly cold at night and beautifully hot in the day. No phone signal, no car access and a very limited supply of bolo, frego, coke and gouty (all local biscuits and the lifeblood of pioneer schemes). Coffee trees scattered through the campsite along with pigs, dogs and disoriented roosters who crow all through the day and all through the night (but then we killed and ate the roosters so our vengeance was had!).

Campsite

Paddy fields

Beautiful Volobe

It’s so peaceful (apart from the roosters) and all along the local river there are secluded seating areas where you can sit and sun warmed rocks and watch the birds go by. Lunch hours are spent dozing under coffee trees and devouring more books.

The view from the square foot of phone reception in the area. It's a patch of sacred forest where local people are buried (hence it being the only patch of intact forest in the area). Has a very magical quality to it. I almost expected dinosaurs to come stumbling out at dusk!

The only major break in the peace (save for the roosters) came from round the clock partying by the local people. Winter season equals circumcision season in Madagascar, an occasion for a huge party with lots of round the clock moonshine consumption, singing and dancing. The stamina it requires to keep dancing and chanting through the village for 2 days straight is pretty incredible. The guides assured me that the spirits of the ancestors had possessed them and it was this that was giving them the strength to continue. I’m more convinced that they got their powers from the copious quantities of a local spirit of another sort…

Frog in the porch of my new spangly tent.

So, all in all, another good but hard (and healthy!) three weeks. I am now eating and relaxing as much as I can before we head back out next Tuesday.

P.S. I’ve added more pics from my holiday with Mum and Dad to my last blog entry. Enjoy them!

So much news!

Isalo National Park

Mum and Dad getting swamped at Agnena

Isalo National Park

Piscine Naturelle in Isalo National Park

Giraffe neck weavil at Ranomafana National Park. Just plain bizarre.

Leaf tailed gecko Uroplatus. Amazing creatures

It’s been two months since I last blogged. Such a long time! But in summary, scheme three drew to a close. By the end we had planted 11 000 trees (a mixture of fruit trees to provide an extra food source and fast growing species to be used as an alternative fuel source to the native forest), built 13 fuel efficient stoves and acted out a killer play on the benefits of using these stoves for World Environment Day 2009 in Ebakika.

Off to plant some more trees

Ian and Frank as village women for the play in Ebakika

Once gain, Angazety proved to be as temperamental as ever. The most incredible storm I have ever seen managed to damage all but four of the tents at the campsite. Lots of water for those lucky seedlings though.

Angazety when it was behaving itself

Angazety after the storm

For one of our days off we watched a wrestling match at Tsanoriha (a hamlet just south of Mahatalaky) which was incredibly confusing. The female contingent of the crowd would rush onto the wrestling area every now and again to whip the competitors with sarongs. Even by the end of the matches we still hadn’t worked out if it was the winners or the losers who were whipped! Great atmosphere though.

I think my health fared marginally better than in January but I still picked up a few nasties along the way...

Very sprained ankle sustained while running to long drops cross country in the dark.

Tropical ulcer

Once scheme 4 was done, the Jones family adventures began (minus Chris who is now the only Jones family member in full time employment. He had to stay at home and be responsible, man the fort and water the garden poor lad).

I’ve been very excited for quite a while about my parents coming out to visit. They’ ve done a fair amount of travelling well off the beaten track and I was hopeful that the mix of beautiful scenery, unique wildlife and wonderful people would pull two more people under Madagascar’s spell.

Mum and Dad in the forest at Antsirabe. How many pieces of kit do you need?!

Along the way we would be staying in some fairly swanky hotels, eating three cooked meals a day (which would hopefully contain very little rice and no beans at all) and recharging my batteries after a fairly long period of unsettled health.

The tour started at Tana airport with our guide for the 2 weeks, the ever smiley Claude, and the driver of our 4x4, Haingo. We hightailed it to the reserve of Andasibe, a 4 hour drive east of Tana.

Andasibe is the only place in Madagascar where you get to see the famed Indri, the largest species of lemur (it is the size of a small child, looks a bit like a panda and makes eerie noises like a whale). My pictures of lemurs are all crap but google Indri and you get the general idea! Being on the central plateau, Andasibe is a fair bit higher than Fort Dauphin and it was absolutely Baltic at night. I even wore my fleecey booties! We were the only 3 guests in the beautiful Eulophelia lodge. A theme which would sadly repeat itself time and time again as we wended our way through Madagascar. But we had a really great stay there in our little verandah-ed bungalow with changing room sized bathroom. Limitless hot water!

Following that we headed onto RN7. The main arterial road of Madagascar which runs from the capital; Tana in the central highlands to Tulear down on the south-west coast. It’s amazing how different the scenery is in the highlands. It looks like a completely different country when compared to Fort Dauphin. There are so many more people. Villages everywhere. But then again, I guess we were passing by on the main highway of Madagascar. Perhaps if we’d branched off from the main road I would’ve seen the rolling expanses of nothingness that I’ve come to expect from Malagasy countryside. The houses are mainly two storey thatched mud houses. And there are so many paddy fields. Everything looks fertile and productive across the rolling, rounded, grassy hillsides. And the people look so different. The Merina and Betsileo tribes of the highlands have a much stronger Malaysian and Polynesian influence than other Malagasy tribes but they still have the same incredibly friendly nature that I know from other parts of the island.

Highland villages

Paddy fields, rocky outcrops and rolling hills. Very beautiful and so different to the south!

We made lots of stops on route. Ambatolampy, then Antsirabe (completely deserted and a very eerie place to be at the moment) and on to Ambositra (home to lots of incredible wood carving and marquetry. You can pick up a hand carved chair for £15. I need to go back there before I get home to stock up on carved goods!) before arriving at Ranomafana National Park.

We were staying at an incredibly swanky bungalow on the hillside overlooking the rainforest at Ranomafana. Gourmet 3 course meals for lunch and dinner. It definitely helped to reverse some of my weight loss! Lots of lemurs, even the golden bamboo lemur and the greater bamboo lemur both of which are critically endangered. The greater bamboo lemur only has around 50 individuals left in the wild so we were so lucky to be able to see them.

After three nights of luxury we headed back onto RN7 and headed south passing through Fianar (Madagascar’s second city) before pulling up at Ambalavao for the night. We were then headed into Bara country. The Bara are a seriously hardy tribe with strong links to East-African culture. They are primarily zebu herders and zebu are at the centre of many aspects of their lives. A young Bara man is not considered a man or cannot prove himself to be of worthy husband material to a prospective father-in-law until he has stolen a few zebu. Needless to say that being in the heart of Bara country, Ambalavao has an enormous zebu market. It runs over two days with buyers selecting their beasts on a Wednesday then coming back with the money on Thursday. Since the number of zebu a person owns is seen as a sign of wealth and power and a big zebu will set you back around 700 000 ariary (£200 - £250) there was some BIG money changing hands. The market place itself is just outside the town and I get the impression that there aren’t many vazahas that go there. But it is definitely worth a visit. The backdrop against the mountains in the early morning is stunning.

On the outskirts of the zebu market at Ambalavao

The next part of the journey only lasted a day but I feel that it deserves a special mention. It is very self indulgent and I’m not sure that the pictures quite convey the character of the landscape but I’ll do my best!

Just before RN7 gets to Ambalavao you dip down over the edge of a plateau. You are then greeted by a panorama of colossal granite mounds rising up from the plains below. The hallowed rock faces of Andringitra National Park are laid out for display right in front of you. My camera battery had sadly died by this point but I’m sure my Dad got some good snaps so if he sends me any I’ll put them up on the blog.

The whole scene was very reminiscent of the far north-west of Scotland. Granite tumps rising up out of nothingness (granted it’s mainly Torridonian sandstone up in Scotland but I won’t get into that here…). The scope for adventure along this stretch of road is enormous. To any climbers out there, there must be thousands of unclimbed lines within spitting distance of the road. And they would be huge routes. I’ll let you see for yourself…

Anja National Park. Community owned and community run and so much granite.

Granite

The "bishop's hat"

The "bishop's hat" side on

So down RN7 we continued, stopping at 50m intervals to take more pictures of big granite mountains. Mum’s patience for putting up with mine and Dad’s spray on “just how much it looked like Scotland…” was very impressive! Thanks for humouring us Ovy! The external temperature on Haingo’s car’s thermometer was gradually creeping back up to the high 20s. It was good to be back in the south.

We travelled on south through Ihosy, (capital of the Bara people) and on to our last National Park of the trip; Isalo. Isalo is renowned for its heavily eroded sandstone landscape and hiking through the area. It is undoubtedly a very beautiful area with lots more weird and wonderful rocky formations. We were staying in a truly palatial hotel with little individual bungalows set in amongst the rocky outcrops to the south of Isalo NP. I had my own mezzanine with its’ own toilet! Again, apart from a coach load of ancient French tourists we were the only people staying in this beautiful hotel. Nice and relaxing but a bit eerie sometimes.

We did two walking circuits at Isalo. The first one was the walk to the Piscine Naturelle, a beautiful natural oasis in amongst the seemingly completely arid landscape. The colours in the water and the palm fringed pool backed against the prehistoric rock formations make it a pretty idyllic place to lounge around and soak up some of the southern sun. Until the coach load of French tourists caught us up…

The second day saw us slithering our way up the canyon on the way to the Piscine blue, Piscine noir and Cascade des Nymphs (frog waterfall. I didn’t see any frogs though). Lots of scrambling over slimy rocks, lots of lush, green soggy vegetation. It could easily have been a setting for a herbal essences/bounty advert! The afternoons were ours to entertain ourselves as we wished. There was a lot of lazing about, a lot of reading and Mum and Dad treated me to a massage which was incredible. I felt the most relaxed that I’ve felt in a long time.

The next stop on the itinerary was Tulear down on the coast and Ifaty, a small town to the north of Tulear which has stunning beaches. En route we saw our first baobab trees of the trip (yey!) and passed through the sapphire mining town of Ilakaka. As a western tourist I DO NOT recommend stopping in Ilakaka. It’s the only place in Madagascar where I have felt unsafe. Not a fun place to break down I would imagine.

We didn’t spend much time at all in Tulear itself but Ifaty was a very restful place to spend 3 nights. Gorgeous white sandy beaches, completely deserted with little pirogues dotted along the horizon. The Jones family mainly dossed about reading, sleeping, writing, listening to music and pootling along the beach. Dad and I went out for some snorkelling within the lagoon off Ifaty beach. I have to say that the fish were beautiful but the coral itself was pretty unimpressive. A lot of it has been bleached by rising sea temperatures and the coral has also been damaged by local fishing practices. It’s so difficult when the local tribe, the Vezo, depend so fully on the sea as a source of income but also as a definition of their identity. It makes it very difficult to reduce the pressure of fishing when the Vezo’s whole identity is so inextricably tied up with fishing in the area.

We did go to the very cool Reniala reserve at Ifaty. There were lots of weird and wonderful plants from the spiny desert there but I’m not going to lie, I was there for the baobabs and the baobabs alone. They are hilarious and I love them. Who wouldn’t?!

This baobab is 1200 years old. It definately deserved a hug.

Ifaty was the last place on the Jones family itinerary. The next 7 nights had been left blank for the Fort Dauphin experience!

It had been so good to get away from Fort Dauphin but it felt so so good to be getting back and catching up with everybody. Amazingly the Air Mad flight from Tulear to Fort Dauphin left over half an hour early. Although, we were flying on Independence day so maybe the pilot had a party to get back to?

Whilst in Fort Dauphin, with the exception of the day we arrived and one other day, the weather was truly grim. Cold, wet and windy. True winter weather. Not what we wanted from the south!

It was very surreal showing the folks around Fort Dauphin at first. The meeting of two different parts of my life which often feel like they’re from two different worlds! We went to Libanona beach, fed bananas to greedy lemurs at Nahampoana reserve and ate out a lot. The highlight for me personally was taking Mum and Dad out on a road trip to the bush to show them some of the projects I’ve been involved with over the past 9 months. We stopped off at Agnena to see the latrine and school that Azafady built, had lunch at the hotely at Mahatalaky, surveyed the swamp where we camped and saw the seedlings at Angazety and then on to St Luce to look at the Azafady tree nursery and campsite. It was a pretty long day but it was really good to show Mum and Dad where I’ve been living and what I’ve been doing for so long. When I do come back home it’ll be really good to have people to talk to who have actually been out and seen it.

It’s been really good fun catching up with Mum and Dad. Being able to completely turn off and tune out and not be responsible for anybody or anything has been so good. It was sad waving them off in Fort Dauphin but I know I’ll be seeing them soon and anyway, and besides, I had work to do!

The next load of pioneers came out, scheme number four. We’re off to Volobe Sud. One of the most remote villages that Azafady have ever worked in. It is miles away north of Ebakika and then some. We’re building a school and a latrine there. Lots of cement mixing! At least I’ll be good and fit and I now have a new spangly tent (with an integrated lighting system, I’m excited!).

My last scheme as coordinator. Very mixed feelings about it all. Very excited about the prospect of new challenges but there is an awful lot that I’m going to miss about being coordinator. Mainly the people. But I know that I need to give my body a rest and my mind something new to chew on. On that note I’d best go pack my bag for the bush tomorrow! I have a feeling it’s going to be a long but exciting day.