Antipode – Chapter 5

Because It Is Natural

Antipode was originally published in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.

From Diego we flew on a tiny prop plane to Maroantsetra, a town at the northern tip of the Bay of Antongil, on the west edge of the Masoala peninsula. The Masoala has the largest remaining tracts of lowland rainforest in Madagascar, and two sites in this northeastern region held the greatest promise for long-term research. There was Nosy Mangabe, a small island just three miles off the coast, and a camp called Andranobe, much farther away, on the Masoala itself. Andranobe had been launched by Claire Kremen when she was doing her own dissertation work on butterflies. Now she and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) were working to make the whole region a national park. Though I hadn’t met her, we had talked at some length before I came to Madagascar, and she had recommended Andranobe as being a forest rich in frogs. I was coming to realize, though, that while most of Madagascar is rich in frogs, the particular ones I was looking for were a bit harder to find.

After we landed on the dirt airstrip at Maroantsetra, which sported a single windsock, and unpiled from the plane to wait in the sad, lone building, our bags sat by the tiny plane for fifteen, twenty, twenty-five minutes. The plane was going on to Sambava, so there were about fifteen Malagasy wandering about, waiting to board, but our bags just sat there. I approached the man who looked like an authority, a man standing behind the scale used to weigh luggage and make sure it came in under the 20 kg limit. A sign on it read, in French, “not accurate below 25 kg.”

The man behind the scale said they would bring us our bags, and told me to wait. I was frustrated, hot, and impatient, so Bret decided to take the matter into his own hands.