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A river trip down the Tsiribina

We planned on touring the southern part of Madagascar, but hadn't quite figured out how we were going to go about doing it yet. Well as they say, when in Rome do as the Romans do, or in this case when in Madagascar do as the French do, so after some exploring around town we sat ourselves at a street side cafe across from our hotel, ordered coffee and croissants, and began to discuss how we might go about seeing the country.

Not a lot happened there besides getting jacked up on coffee, but later back at the hotel we met a tour operator who was planning a trip down the Tsirabina river for two other couples the next day. The Tsirabina river trips start from a town named Miandrivazo somewhere in the middle of the country and terminates near the west coast, most of which isn't accessible by road. It sounded like a pretty good idea since a canoe trip down the Tsirabina would allow us to see parts of the country that we couldn't see otherwise, ultimately bringing us to the west coast, where we could continue south and return to the capital without revisiting areas we'd already been to.

The tour operator introduced us to a couple from the Netherlands who had already signed up, and discussed the details including meeting our tour guide, describing the conditions of the river, and the private car ride through the highlands to the town where our trip would start. The couple from the Netherlands, named Tijl and Marije (pronounced "Tile" and "Mariah") seemed nice enough, and we speak from experience when we say you can't overestimate how important that is if you're going to spend six unshowered days with anybody. Marije is spending a semester in Madagascar studying anthropology, and Tijl had come to visit her for a few weeks. We met the guide, a fellow named Frankie, who after some discussion appeared to know what he was doing which was another good sign.

It being our first day in Madagascar, we weren't sure we were ready to move so quickly before taking in a little more of Antananarivo, so we told the tour operator we'd let him know the following day. After Frankie left, the first signs of Tijl's sense of humor showed when he said the first time he heard Frankie's name, all he could think about was the character Frankie Four Fingers in the movie "Get Shorty." Being that Frankie had a kind of stocky, tough guy look, that pretty much cemented Frankie's name for the rest of us.

The next day while having breakfast at the cafe across the street from our hotel, Frankie found us and asked if we were still interested in the river trip. It turned out that another couple had backed out of going, and Tijl and Marije had already left Antananarivo for another town a few hours closer to Miandrivazo to do some sightseeing and wait for the others to catch up. We were a little hesitant about leaving so soon, but the wheels were already in motion on this one and we didn't know how long it would be before we could find another trip, especially with people who seemed friendly and easygoing, which made it less likely we'd end up living a Malagasy version of the movie Deliverance. We told Frankie Four Fingers we were in.

That afternoon, Frankie came to pick us up. We were to take a taxi to the taxi brousse station at the southern edge of town and travel to the town of Antsiribe, about four hours south, where we would catch up with Tijl and Marije and spend the night. In Madagascar, travel is mainly done by taxi brousse, which translated, means "bush taxi." Taxi brousse's are simply vans, and every town has a station or two from which they all depart. Like every other country we've visited, the vans are always of questionable reliability and dangerously overloaded. It's already scary enough than one van generally holds 19 people, but we have seen them careening down the road so full the doors couldn't close. We weren't really looking forward to our first taxi-brousse experience, but at least the six hour trip the next day to Miandrivazo was going to be a private car, so we got in our taxi headed for the station and did our best to prepare ourselves.

No matter what anyone says to you, a person's first trip to Antananarivo's taxi-brousse station simply cannot be prepared for. Each taxi brousse is privately owned and runs a certain route which begins once the taxi brousse is full. Predictably, the best seats are in the front of the van, while being crushed in the back can be a nightmare for anyone without a sleeping-limb and body odor fetish. The goal of every taxi brousse driver is to fill the van as quickly as possible, while the goal of every passenger is to get the most desirable seat available. Since there are usually several taxi brousse simultaneously trying to fill up for the same destination, passengers usually have to make the choice of getting terrible seats on a vehicle about to leave, or getting more desirable seats on a van that has yet to fill, which could in some cases take hours.

As we were to discover, the taxi brousse drivers will go to great lengths to get you in their vans so they may get underway and earn their living. This was aptly demonstrated by a man who actually leapt onto the hood of our moving taxi as we approached the station, laying across the front, holding the windshield wipers to keep the driver from shaking him off, while yelling to Frankie which taxi brousse he should take. His desperate tactics earned him only milliseconds of our undivided attention before the car was literally surrounded by no less than 20 shouting men sticking their arms and heads as far into the moving cab as they could, describing the merits of their own taxi brousse. The taxi was forced to a halt by the mass of flesh, Andrea and I feeling like any second we might be dragged from the taxi and torn apart in the direction of 20 different waiting taxi brousses.

We were about one second away from complete and utter panic, while Frankie remained unphased. Once he was able to push the door of the taxi open far enough to get out, he began a somewhat byzantine process of selection amid the cacophony, made his choice, and we watched helplessly as several men accosted our two backpacks, making off with them to one of the vans nearby. It was all we could do to keep them in sight, eventually our fears being somewhat eased as they were hoisted atop the vehicle and safely strapped down. Amazingly enough, once the decision as to which van we would be riding in was made, the mob dissipated as fast as it had formed, moving on to prepare for the next potential passenger.

In an effort to provide a modicum of comfort, Frankie had chosen a taxi brousse that was empty, allowing us the seat of our choice. We chose to sit in the row directly behind the driver, rationalizing that in the highly likely event that one of the threadbare tires should not be able to withstand the strain of 19 people and half a ton of luggage above and give out sending us into oncoming traffic, at least we wouldn't be the first ones through the windshield. You know, we were told this year would change us in ways we didn't know. We never thought that would include becoming experts at seat choice in death-trap vehicles.

Some time passed before Frankie came by with a young Malagasy man named Jonah whom he introduced as the man who would be our guide. This came as a surprise to us, although the timing was brilliant as we were too freaked out by the frenetic chaos around us to let it really sink in: Frankie Four Fingers would not be joining us on the river trip. We couldn't exactly back out, lest we be left stranded at the station amid 100 psychotic van drivers with everything we owned in a cordura sack on our backs. Jonah was about 25 and spoke English well enough that we understood most of what he was saying. He was clearly educated and had no difficulty answering our questions, one of which was that he had been recruited to lead the trip a scant four hours before. It was the first crack in the veneer of our highly touted river trip, but at the present moment we chose to see where it went from there, mostly just to stay alive.

About an hour passed before our van filled up enough to leave, the afternoon waning as we pulled out of the station. Once out of the city, the driver did his best to preserve what was left of his tires by keeping no more than two wheels on the ground around each curve on the twisty road toward Antsiribe. Our description of the word "uneventful" has undergone a significant change as of late, so you'll have to take it for what it is when we say the ride that afternoon was just that, as in: everyone lived.

A couple of hours into the trip the taxi brousse stopped at a roadside cafe, where Frankie and Jonah introduced us to some traditional Malagasy cooking. The dish of the evening was zebu meat, which is a common livestock animal similar to a cow. Although we were unclear how it had been cooked, a piece of zebu was put atop a pile of rice and served with a bowl of hot water with a sprig of greens in it. Although remarkably tasteless, it was here that we were first introduced to what we have termed the "dirt bite." As you might expect, a dirt bite is that unmistakable sound you hear between your teeth when they connect with a piece of terra firma, and as we were to discover it was to become the only consistent thing about the rest of our meals during our stay in Madagascar. The "dirt bite" is not to be confused with the "rock bite," which we were also to become accustomed to, but thankfully for our teeth much less frequently. Later that evening we arrived in Antsiribe and after getting the blood back in our limbs, met Tijl and Marije at our hotel where we discussed the forthcoming trip and got to bed early.

In the morning we all met after breakfast to discuss the events of the day, Frankie joining us once more before we departed. The van was waiting outside, and after a quick stop to the grocery store we were on our way... to the taxi brousse station, where people began once again to do their best impression of sardines in our van. Something was seriously wrong, this was supposed to be a private car. Upon questioning, Jonah was just as surprised: he had never been given the impression that this was to be a private car. Frankie Four Fingers had slipped away minutes before we could take him to task for this clear indiscretion. Frankie clearly having done this before, we knew it was too late to withdraw, and with Jonah being as clueless as us about the whole thing we didn't even have someone to yell at.

Our van now full and accepting our fate, we headed off toward Miandrivazo. As we headed away from the city, we got our first daytime views of the rural countryside in central Madagascar. As we passed through the rolling hills the brilliant green terraced rice paddies and the bright red soil of the high plains made it appear as if someone had turned up the color knob on the entire countryside. Occasionally the scenery was interrupted by small towns of old colonial style buildings, many of them seemingly barely standing, with people milling about in the street on their daily business. Like we've seen in other countries, the road through any town seems to be used for so much more than cars, and people generally look upon passing vehicles with minor annoyance. Besides people, vendors, and animals in the road, the mystery of the dirt bite was answered as we noticed that it was on the asphalt at the side of the road that many farmers dry their rice, autos actually running over some of the grain when the intermittent pile encroaches just a little too far into the street.

In everyone's life there are occasionally moments, usually completely unexpected, which give a new perspective or new dimension to everything you might perceive in the future. It was one of these moments we had when we saw our first guy-with-a-spear. We've all seen a guy-with-a-spear in photographs or on television, but there was one seminal moment when we saw a real, actual living guy standing on the side of the road with his spear in hand. The guy didn't look like we'd expect a guy-with-a-spear to look like, he wasn't wearing a loincloth with a bone through his nose or anything, and it wasn't a fancy or decorative spear. But there's something about when you see a guy that runs after something and pokes it with a stick to kill it that makes all those camouflage-wearing hunters with high powered rifles and scopes all seem like pussies, because they've got nothing on a dude with a spear. We decided not to document the sighting, somehow feeling it best not to take pictures of guys with spears. Sounds crazy, we know, but we're going with our gut on this one.

We stopped for lunch in one of the larger communities in the region, the crowd in the street parting as the vehicle entered town. Jonah's guide skills were quickly put to test when the restaurant that he had intended to bring us was inexplicably closed. We ended up walking down the road until we found a place that was open and had probably never seen a westerner. It was more like eating in someone's kitchen, but a really weird kitchen, with people milling about and chickens walking between our feet on the dirt floor as we dined on their brethren above. When we asked to use the bathroom, we were directed to go out the back, between two buildings, across the road and behind another building which we could urinate on. Maybe they had an agreement with the owner, but I couldn't see any reason to urinate on that particular building as opposed to any other.

We spent the rest of the afternoon slowly descending from the high plains, and after only one minor breakdown we made it to Miandrivazo, actually known for being the hottest town in Madagascar, unfortunately in degrees, not style. The town certainly lived up to it's reputation, we were wilting as we got out of the van. Now that Frankie Four Fingers was gone, it was not so much of a surprise that our hotel was less than we had hoped for. At least it was close to the river, our starting point being only 30 yards behind the hotel, but this unfortunately meant that there was a swamp running right up to the back of the hotel which had the remains of a couple of old cars slowly being assimilated into the mud. Our room faced the river at the back of the hotel, and opened onto a porch which ran the length of the building. There were two toilets at the end of the porch, one of them a squat toilet with the third largest spider we've ever seen inches away from where you'd squat. I certainly wasn't going to give an arachnid that type of access to my privates, so I chose the clogged western style toilet next door and held my nose. We hadn't realized how hot it would be down from the central plains, and their were only screens for doors to our rooms giving us great views to the mass of mosquitoes trying to get a meal. Due to the lack of any solid materials for a door, we wondered briefly what views we might be giving the locals, but there just wasn't a lot we could do about it, so we kept the lights off, turned the ceiling fan on full and sweated it our under the mosquito net for the night.

When we woke early the next morning it was already hot and destined to get a lot hotter. Before we headed down to the river, Jonah firmly suggested we each buy a hat and an umbrella for protection from the sun while on the river, and brought us to the local market to do so. The Malagasy people seem to have a thing about hats, both men and women wearing styles you might call flamboyant, and those were unfortunately the only hats we could find. Tijl and Marije chose to get by with their own hats, while Andrea and I decided to go for broke and found the stupidest hats we could, mine looking something like a wide-brimmed multi-colored straw gardeners hat. We managed to find umbrellas that were even more stupid to match, but we couldn't say anything to the Malagasy people around us who thought we all looked pretty snappy, nodding in approval.

Our last errand of the morning was to drop by the local police chief's office where we had to get some sort of permit to take a couple of canoes down the river. Since it was early the police chief was nowhere to be found, so we sat around waiting while someone went to find him. Eventually a woman showed up, opened the doors to a small office, asked for our passports and began an excruciatingly slow process of filling in three or four separate logs with pertinent information. Not wanting to appear impatient, we sat quietly and tried to look respectable with our extravagant new headgear and umbrellas as it began to get very warm.

Preparations complete, we made it down to the river where a large crowd of people had gathered to see us off. This was big stuff, apparently, with half the town shouting and loading things into boats, while the other half of town was trying to get their daily business done on the banks of the river. Our two canoes, called pirogues, were simple craft about 18 feet long made from hollowed out trees. They were full of gear, two spots in each with a small square of foam rubber having been cleared for us. There were to be four people in each canoe, two paddlers and two guests. Jonah would be a paddler in one of our canoes, while three other local men had been hired to fill the remaining paddling positions. With all of our food and gear, including live chickens, we couldn't move around too much, which was good because any one of us could have easily tipped the things over with one wrong move.

Just before embarking, the village leader came to perform a ceremony of safe voyage to their ancestors, which involved all of us doing a shot of some local moonshine, after which we were asked to make a donation. We weren't quite sure why dead ancestors need money, but with 50 people standing around two rickety canoes, we threw down some cash and quickly shoved off.

We were finally off, the townspeople waving as the current caught us and began to move us downstream. We waved our goodbyes, watching the crowd grow smaller for a full 20 yards before Jonah headed for shore and stopped on a sand bar, where two young women came out of nowhere and got in the pirogues. Jonah introduced them as his fiancé and her friend, and they would apparently be helping out on our journey. This was news to us. Now we had five people in each rickety canoe making them even more unstable, with each move the gunwales precariously close to being eclipsed by water. It was starting to resemble a taxi brousse in there.

Again we were underway, this time actually leaving Miandrivazo behind and onto the river. At this time of year because of the summer rains just recently ending, the river ran high and was so full of sediment it was the color of coffee. It wasn't polluted, but it was virtually unswimmable, simply dipping a hand in resulted in a fine grit on the skin. This became maddening as the day became unbearably hot, us jammed in our wooden torpedoes unable to cool off. We couldn't help but notice that while we were dousing ourselves in bottled water, our hard working paddlers had no such option, simply filling up our empty bottles with river water and waiting until the dirt settled before drinking it.

We moved downstream, through beautiful scenery of grasslands, occasionally passing villages of grass huts that looked like they hadn't changed in a thousand years. The first day went lazily by, our hats and umbrellas being absolute lifesavers from the relentless sun. Towards days end we pulled the pirogues up on a sand bar, set up our tents and enjoyed dinner on the riverbank, which curiously, Jonah's girlfriend had nothing to do with its preparation, before heading off to bed. The weather was uncomfortably hot even in the evening, and the tents excruciatingly small, the air ten degrees hotter inside them. We also learned late at night that the mesh on the tents was not small enough to keep out the mosquitoes when we woke covered with bites, so we covered our bodies with insect repellent and prayed for a breeze.

It was a little cooler by dawn, and we started our day early to get some distance on the river before it really heated up. At around lunchtime we arrived at a magnificent waterfall, made that much better by the fact that it was about 1000 degrees out and we couldn't swim in the river. It couldn't have been more perfect, the clear, cool water spilling off a cliff 30 feet above like something out of a movie. We spent the hottest part of the day washing and cooling off, which was good because between the sweat, mosquito repellent and dirt we were all starting to resemble cinnamon rolls. The afternoon was spent paddling through some wonderful scenery, spotting various birds, bats, lemurs and chameleons, before camping on the riverbank again in the evening.

Our third day on the river was our last, and to give you an idea of how deliriously hot it was in the middle of the day, Andrea and I spent a good deal of time referring to zebus as "ze-boo-boos," with a Yogi Bear accent, calling out to them onshore with marginal success. Another hot topic of discussion was comparing our pirogues with the Russian pastry pierogi, concluding that arguably, chicken pierogis are the least seaworthy of the entire pirogue/pierogi family.

We landed at an inconspicuous spot on the riverbank some time in the heat of mid afternoon, leaving our pirogues for the last time. It was hard for us to imagine that the three paddlers who had guided us downstream now had to paddle upstream all the way back to Miandrivazo, when we could barely handle sitting under umbrellas not doing a thing. It was here that one of our not so helpful kitchen helpers stayed on board while Jonahs girlfriend not surprisingly was coming with us. We were still trying to figure out what purpose she was serving besides the obvious, but maybe Jonah didn't want to be fifth man out with two other couples.

Some local people came by, seemingly as interested in us as we were in them, and we managed to share a few laughs before a man arrive in a wooden cart drawn by two zebus to take our gear. We piled our things on and for the next couple of hours waded through five miles of mangrove swamps to get to the nearest village with a road, arriving late in the afternoon exhausted and dehydrated.

Jonah had arranged for us to stay at the nicest place in town which we were told had a generator, and each couple was given a grass hut to sleep in. There was a stall out back with a bucket of water for washing, but considering where we were coming from it was practically nirvana. As evening approached and the air cooled, we took the opportunity to walk around the village, being mobbed by children calling out "Vahaza," which translates oh-so-politically-incorrectly to "white person." Once we learned that the term wasn't being used as an epithet, it was actually pretty funny. One father, anxious to show his toddler a person of lighter skin, made his child scream in terror as he pushed him upon us. So much for my future in child-psychology.

Later, back at our hotel, we were told that there would be a big party that evening in an area only feet from our grass huts. We were sort of flattered at first until we figured out it was most likely because we were paying to have the generator run so they could play the stereo. The music started a little after dark, and since grass huts have notoriously poor soundproofing qualities, we joined in the revelry until we were tired enough from the beer and dancing to keep us comatose through anything short of an air raid. The locals had no intention of letting plenty of perfectly good electricity go to waste however, and were going strong until about 4am. We knew we were going to pay for it the next day in a four-wheel drive over dirt road for six hours, but for everything there is a season, and after the past few days we all needed a little cold beer and relaxing.

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