Travel Times May Vary

Today, the vacation part of “workcation” officially began, as we headed to Ranomafana National Park to see the lemurs. My colleague, Rachel, was awesome enough to do all the planning in conjunction with our Madagascar office, so I only had to be worried about being ready on time for our departure. 

As we left Antananarivo, the landscape quickly became rural (e.g. fields of rice just outside of town). 

brickyard on the outskirts of Tana

We took Route 7, one of the national highways, almost the entire way. Technically it was a 2-lane road, but those lanes felt pretty narrow with oncoming traffic! It was also almost always the only the paved road in sight. Consequently, we shared the road with everyone—lots of Taxis-brousses (bush taxis) that appeared to be the same size as our van but stuffed with twice as many people, the occasional private car, semis, farmers driving wooden wagons pulled by zebu (cows with humps on their backs), and even some bicycles. But mostly everyone appeared to get around on foot along the edge of the road. The women gracefully carried any number of things on their heads while wearing lambas (their kangas or sarongs), which reminded me a bit of Tanzania, except the women here often wore wide-brimmed hats. 

It’s a big island, the 4th largest in the world in fact, but when I saw that our route was less than 200 miles on a map as the crow flies, I thought we’d be there in a matter of hours. What I didn’t consider beforehand was that the road traversed the spine of highlands that runs north-south, winding more often than not. So what I thought would take 4, and what we’d heard could be traversed in 7-10, really took closer to 12 hours. Thankfully a friend had suggested applying peppermint essential oil to stave off motion sickness. Granted, we did stop along the way to buy handicrafts and more than my fair share of wooden nativities, but it still made for a very long day. For all that, the landscape didn’t change all the dramatically once we were clear of Tana, aside from a few towns of note. It was as if the landscape had been painted every shade of tan, with terraced fields almost the entire way. 

A few impressions: 

• Very few trees in sight, and many of those we did see were planted exotics. It was hard to picture what this looked like when it was all forest. We did drive through a patch of “tapia woodland” that reminded me of the chaparral back home, and reminded me that “forest” has a very broad definition, depending on context. 

Once the forest is cleared, the soil here erodes easily.

• At a glance, farming practices hadn’t changed much in a long time. They used zebu to plow and stir up the mud before digging holes with spear-like shovels to plant rice. The plots were almost entirely rice at early stages of the planting cycle. 

typical landscape in the highlands (T. Larsen)

rice paddies

• We occasionally saw roadside stands selling handicrafts that appeared to be part of development projects. Instead of a diverse assortment of objects, you’d see several stands in a row selling identical products, from musical instruments to concrete lawn statues to toy trucks. 
• The churches were the tallest buildings and clearly stood out in the landscape. 

one of the many churches we saw along the way

• Family tombs are stone structures nicer than some of their homes, and are the setting for a unique cultural practice known as Famadihana, or “bone turning”. Every few years, extended family will gather at the tomb and direct descendants will enter, bring out their ancestor’s body, wrap it in a new layer of fabric, and pass the bones around. Family bonding on a whole different level. 

typical family tombs

• Along some parts of the drive, the road was lined by eucalyptus—possibly planted by the French to provide a source of timber or to create lovely tree-lined boulevards.
• Many of them have since been hacked at, including the roots, to provide firewood. 
• Rural houses were usually built of mud bricks, but they were almost always 2 stories with verandas. 
• I didn’t see corn growing (wrong season) but we did see it drying from a few balconies. 

maize drying from the veranda

laundry drying on the riverbank

It was dark, damp, and late by the time we arrived at our accommodations, the Cristo, and I was exhausted from a long day in the car. I ended up with a bungalow to myself, and was soon tucked in under the mosquito netting for the night.