Antipode – Chapter 6

Escapes from Tana

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

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Back in Tana, city of contrasts. Gated houses with freshly painted blue shutters sit, protected, next to three-walled shacks, next to rice paddies. Old men rummage through burning piles of trash, keeping ahead of the smolder, picking out pieces of rags, half a bottle with no bottom. Smartly dressed women in fitted suits gingerly walk through this city of sudden holes that drop thirty feet to sewage below. Children in t-shirts down to their ankles, eight or ten holes in the backs and sides, always of the same dingy hue, wander barefoot through remnants of chicken butchering. Some wait in line at the neighborhood water pump, where families come to retrieve water with which to cook and wash, brightly colored buckets at their sides. The taupe of their shirts, deep brown skin showing through, on red clay earth, all dims next to the vibrant artificiality of their buckets—red, blue, yellow.

We struggled to escape Tana’s grasp as soon as possible. Next we were headed to Ranomafana, the park with the most logistic support in all of Madagascar. We were staying at a house in Tana reserved for researchers working at Ranomafana. Every day we visited ICTE (the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments), also called Projet Ranomafana, the organization funded by American universities and some government monies to help administer the park. Benjamin Andriamihaja, the chief of operations there, is a highly organized, efficient, honest, and warm man.  He is also perennially stressed, as he has to take care of all the mistakes made by those less organized, and less honest.

Because we were going to Ranomafana, Projet Ranomafana was going to allow us the use of one of their vehicles and drivers to get to the park, which is about a twelve hour drive over horrible roads. Vazaha don’t drive themselves in Madagascar, as a rule, and certainly not long distances in vehicles owned by other people. Unfortunately, none of the Projet Ranomafana vehicles were in working order. A couple of Toyota quatre-quatres were the least compromised, and they had different things wrong with them. So it was logical that ICTE attempt to hybridize the two. One had no tires or brakes. The second had an inoperable piston ring problem that caused the car to be filled with smoke when the engine ran, which itself was rare. Unfortunately, they weren’t the same models of Toyota. After two days, the effort was abandoned.

Meanwhile, Bret and I loitered in the small courtyard, told every hour or so that we would be leaving for Ranomafana shortly. We amused ourselves in the mornings by getting patisseries from one of the city’s fine bakeries. The French first imagined baguettes, croissants, and pain au chocolat, and they sold their recipes to the Malagasy for the small price of imperialism. We occupied ourselves midday by going to the Indonesian restaurant up the street, an unexpected find. Its only drawback was the proprietor, who took a liking to us, and insisted, every time we came in, that we come visit his private museum. This alleged museum was mysterious, and a bit scary. We had only a murky understanding of the museum’s contents or purpose. The proprietor made allusions to Malagasy-American collaboration and richly decorated rooms, but we never learned more.

After days of this, Benjamin suggested that we rent an entire taxi-brousse for the journey, and that ICTE would split the cost with us, as they needed to send down some luggage for Earthwatch volunteers currently in the park. Alas, the drivers went on strike—against whom was unclear—and blocked all the roads out of the city. We went back to the Indonesian restaurant for lunch and another invitation to the private museum. The drivers abandoned their strike, and the search for a rentable vehicle was back on. Finally one was found, and we were off on a long, grueling nighttime road trip to Ranomafana.

Children playing a game in Ranomafana. Photo: Bret Weinstein.

Ranomafana is in the long, lone remaining strip of eastern forest still standing in Madagascar. Higher in elevation than the lowland rainforests of the Masoala, with a base elevation of 2600 feet and rising from there, Ranomafana’s two basic seasons aren’t wet and dry, but cool and cooler. We were there in the cooler season. The forest is dense and steep, and many small rivers snake through the region. Rainfall is in excess of eight feet a year, most of which falls as drizzle during the cooler season. We were in for a cold, damp time of it. The lemurs, not themselves immune to the constant spitting rain, hunkered down and made a habit of looking miserable in trees overhead.

Base camp at Ranomafana, in keeping with its reputation as a logistic powerhouse, has a kitchen building, a one-room library/laboratory, and several cleared areas where tents can be pitched. When we arrived, all tent areas were taken by the Earthwatch volunteers who had been welcomed with open arms by Pat Wright, the American primatologist who founded the park. The place was a zoo, with vazaha do-gooders crawling all over it, and no research being done. We remembered, from our previous trip, that there was a remote camp at higher elevation, Vaturanana, and decided to hike to that as soon as possible. Pat Wright wished we would stay—more researchers interacting with Earthwatch volunteers meant a better experience for them—and to entice me, she insinuated that there was a high density of Mantella near base camp. Bret had made it clear that he hoped to find the endemic sucker-footed bats that hung out, suction-cupped, to the insides of young rolled up leaves, and she suggested the presence of many of these bats as well. After a cursory look around the area near base camp, with the ambient noise level high due to so many people, and most animals hiding as a result, we decided it wasn’t worth staying more than one night. We set up our tent and then played along, interacting with the innocent but research-obstructing Earthwatchers, and with one distinctly non-naïve young woman who called herself Jessica.

Perhaps she had heard Pat Wright talking about us and our research interests, or perhaps she was being ingenuous. Regardless, when Jessica introduced herself to us as a future biologist who wanted to work on herps, or bats—she hadn’t decided which—we were completely charmed.

“Are you one of the Earthwatchers?” Bret asked.

“No no,” she waved her hand dismissively, “I’m volunteering here, watching propes for Pat Wright’s project.” Prope is researcher slang for Propithecus, a remarkable genus of primate unique to Madagascar.  Technically not lemurs, but close, they are sifakas, and sport long lithe limbs and pointy, quizzical faces. They bound through the trees in a unique form of locomotion called vertical grasping and leaping.

“They’re wonderful,” she added, “but I’d rather watch herps. Nobody seems to know anything about the frogs or lizards. There’s female dominance in lemur society, and gripping social interactions, but lemurs aren’t the only things behaving in this forest.” She seemed downright passionate.

As a student of behavior myself, I have long felt it critical that the organism of choice spark deep interest in the researcher doing the work. Scientist or no, we all have to follow our passions. As with good literature, I find the stories of what animals do timeless, and deeply engaging. The natural histories that weren’t good have disappeared, continually replaced by classics, so every bit of animal behavior is rich with history and possibility. Unraveling the patterns that define animal lives, and explaining them, is a puzzle I enjoy.  The same was apparently true for Jessica.

I asked her where she was going when she was done volunteering at Ranomafana.

“I’m starting at Oxford in a year,” she said, a bit abashed, as if this were a strike against her. I assumed she was starting a graduate program there, taking a year off between college and grad school. But no. She was only 17 at the time, had just graduated from the French lyçee in Tana, and was taking a year off between high school and college. The daughter of a UN diplomat, she is British, but had never, at that point, lived in Britain. She grew up in Kenya, Swaziland, Burkina Faso, and Madagascar, and is fluent in French. Her keen mind for evolutionary biology had her looking for field adventures until she started school in September of the following year—she wouldn’t be volunteering at Ranomafana for the entire time.

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The next day we hiked to Vaturanana—Vatu, for short. There were four researchers there already, which was for the best, as if there had been nobody, we wouldn’t have known when to stop hiking. Vatu is a research site, in so much as there is a space flat enough to have a food tent, fire, and table. A river runs nearby, but unlike in Ankarana, water isn’t limited in Ranomafana. Flat spaces are. Two of the researchers were working on lemurs, the other two on the elusive fossa, the largest member of the carnivore family in Madagascar. There aren’t any cats, dogs or bears native to Madagascar—no leopards, grizzlies, jackals, or hyaenas. The native predators are all mongooses and their ilk, and the fossa is one of these. Unlike the cute little red and black critters we had seen playing in Ankarana, the fossa was reputed to be the size of a German shepherd, sand colored and fierce. Cryptoprocta ferox. Even the Latin name sounded menacing.

Luke, the graduate student studying the fossa, was pissed off. A juvenile fossa he had put a radio collar on had gone missing. Carnivores are rare in any ecosystem—it takes a lot of space to house enough rodents and other prey to feed a carnivore—so the loss of one marked individual was a big problem for a carnivore project. Luke suspected that villagers living in the park had killed it, as he had originally trapped it by baiting with live chickens, and it had developed a taste for them. Now it was probably stealing villagers’ chickens, which wouldn’t make the villagers happy.

The Ranomafana forest was strangely quiet. The constant buzz of frog and insect calls of other forests was missing. Many tropical frogs aestivate, or go underground, during the cold season, as during dry periods, emerging once the conditions are again to their liking. In my few days at Vatu, I found no Mantella at all, though I was assured that they were there in the “right” season. Odder still, I found very few of the other frogs that were prevalent elsewhere—none of the pale green treefrogs, and few of the drab brown numbers so common on the Masoala. There were some lovely geckos, living in prickly palm-like plants called Pandanus. But even in a swampy section, where I sat for a day, silent and still, waiting for animals to emerge from the gray and drizzle, the forest was eerily quiet.

At night, the six of us sat around eating rice with vegetables and soy sauce—big bottles were available in town, and every week a local man was hired to carry supplies up to Vatu, an all day trip. Sitting with the other researchers, we heard the park gossip.

There was ongoing logging, and a generator, the generator, had been stolen by one of the park employees. To put this in perspective, Pat Wright, who has arguably done more than any other vazaha can hope to with regard to conservation efforts in Madagascar, hired essentially the entire town of Ranomafana, in various capacities, to help with the new park—porters, drivers, and the elite positions, naturalist guides. She brought in money and resources. Still, one of the top people in that local organization was profiting from logging in the park. And the generator that was bought for base camp was stolen.

But this was old news to the researchers at Vatu. The sudden death of the brother of one of the guides was breaking news. When Bret and I hiked back down to base camp in pursuit of promised bats, we found that another man had died in town, and a third was deathly ill. A nasty gastro-intestinal infection appeared to be eating holes in their intestines, and causing them to vomit up black sludge. When we suggested that it sounded rather ominously like Ebola, which isn’t known in Madagascar, we were silenced. One of the bodies was transported back from town in an ICTE car. Plans were made for the Earthwatch volunteers to attend the funeral. No mention was made of the potential for the spread of infectious agents this way.

We were finding no frogs or bats, and the possibility of an outbreak of something truly nasty scared us, so we decided to leave. Ranomafana offered up the car that had transported the dead man, but we declined. Thanks to Luke, who was Pat Wright’s student and had decided to leave as well, we got a ride in an uninfected car. Three quarters of the way to Tana, in dead of night, the vazaha had to pee, and we asked the driver if he could pull over to the side of the road. The Malagasy don’t often reject the suggestions of the vazaha, so he pulled over. The men stayed near the car, while I walked a short distance away to a ditch where I could squat in relative privacy.

“Hurry up! Get back here!” I heard Bret yell. I was annoyed. What was the hurry? We were making good time, especially for Madagascar. I got back to the car, and we sped off.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked the car. Bret explained.

“The driver told us there have been shootings here recently. People killed on the side of the road.”

“In Madagascar?” I was incredulous.

“That’s what he says.” I was never so pleased to get back to Tana.

With one week left in Madagascar, we headed to the final region I had been considering as a research site, even though I had already decided on the Masoala and Nosy Mangabe. Less than 100 miles from Tana by either train or surprisingly good road, the reserve called Analamazaotra by the Malagasy, or Périnet by the French, is probably the most visited, and certainly the most crowded, of Madagascar’s nature reserves. A huge area around the reserve, an area known as Mantady, had been slated for national park status for years, but nothing had yet come of it, perhaps because there was mining interest in the area as well. The town of Andasibe is the closest human settlement to all of these areas, and it was there that we went.

This town, unlike many of the places we were revisiting from three years prior, had truly changed, and it seemed possible to point to a single cause. Previously, there had been two hotels in town: the old Buffet de la Gâre, a grand old French colonial hotel with polished floors, rundown about the edges but with an air of grace, on the edge of town at the train station, now being run largely by local people. And the Orchidées, a Malagasy version of an old Western bar and whorehouse, complete with wooden balconies running around the building and swinging doors. The floors were splintery, the rooms spare and none too clean. This Malagasy-owned establishment sat right in the middle of town. Most tourists stayed in the Buffet de la Gâre, removed somewhat from the daily activity of the townspeople, but still contributing to the local economy. We had stayed in the Orchidées before, and intended to do so again.

This year there was a new hotel in town, a grand vazaha-owned and -operated affair with individual bungalows, and no glitches in the electricity or service. Most importantly, this tourist hotel offered the implicit promise of a buffer from the local culture. There would be no chickens or small children running past you as you sipped your drink here. No wooden-wheeled wagons rumbling past at six in the morning, on the way to market. No sad eyes or hands extended, no shouts of “vazaha, vazaha!”

In the wake of the new hotel, the Buffet de la Gâre had fallen on to even harder times, and the Orchidées was close to ruin. Few people but tourists had reason to need a hotel in a town like Andasibe, and the new hotel had attracted most of them. In town, the locals were less friendly than before, less eager to interact with the backpack-wearing vazaha as we walked into town. Walking through the doors of the Orchidées, the dank, dark room took a few minutes to get adjusted to. Two Malagasy men sitting at a table began talking to us in boisterous, largely unintelligible French. A pretty young woman sat with them, staring down at her plate, while the two men tried to engage Bret in increasingly loud conversation. We stood looking dumbly at them for a while, until finally I understood their meaning.

“They’re trying to sell her to you,” I said to Bret. The woman still hadn’t looked up from her empty plate. We escaped from the would-be pimps, got a key, and went upstairs to a room far darker and scarier than three years earlier. What had once been a town of dirt roads and open air shops selling the usual assortment of toothpaste, twine, biscuits and rice, where laughing children pushed rings of metal with sticks, now seemed poorer, more desperate and, understandably, more filled with resentment at its fate.

Later that night, Bret went out for a night walk into the forest in search of wildlife, a little tsangatsangana, with the only other resident of the hotel. I stayed in the room alone, nursing a head cold, uneager to go out into the cold drizzle that had stayed with us since Ranomafana. In that small space, with only three empty rooms and an open air communal bathroom sharing the second floor of the Orchidées, I began to hear footsteps on the balcony outside, and taps on the wooden shutters I had bolted shut. Men began to sing outside the shutters, slightly off key. I heard no women. Anyone who had been paying attention in this small town would know that a white woman with a lot of gear was alone in a room at the Orchidées, an unlit part of town where vazahadidn’t go. The strains of song rose and fell, and occasionally there was a crash, which started dogs barking. If they had really wanted in, they could have broken the shutters, by standing on the balcony outside and forcing them in. But they didn’t, and a few hours later, when Bret returned, I wasn’t ready to talk about the noises, preferring to wait until morning, when I could confront the place that had scared me, even if not the ghosts who had roamed and sung and tapped the night before.

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The next morning, Maurice the Naturalist took us into the forest. Maurice didn’t remember us from three years earlier—a naturalist guide near Périnet sees a lot of vazaha come through—but we remembered him and his proclamation of belief in Nature, as there had only been a few Malagasy guides in our lives. The rates for guides were hourly here, and extremely high because of the rich tourists who came to see the forest for an hour, then retreat to the new hotel for drinks. Maurice had assured me I wouldn’t find any Mantella this time of year—winter here meant average temperatures of less than 60 degrees, and a lot of fog and drizzle.  So we hired him for two days, one day to show us a region most people not hunting lemurs or cutting wood didn’t see, the second to hike us in to a remote spot where we could camp, and hopefully find our way out again on our own.

The first day we rose in the chilled pink dawn, and walked through rock quarries and tiny shacks with smoke drifting from them. By the time we went past the last shack, we had been walking long enough that its inhabitant was already out working. In this landscape of massive rock formations, the Malagasy government had hired poor men to break rock for roads. Some men quarried large pieces and collected them in piles. Other men broke these pieces into gravel, with hand-sharpened, human-powered metal tools. This man was enormous for a Malagasy, probably six feet tall, muscles rippling with each stroke at his pile of rocks. He gave us a huge smile as we walked by, then asked a question, in Malagasy.

“He wants to know if the vazaha have had their rice yet today,” Maurice translated for us. We shook our heads “no,” assuming the beautiful rock-breaking man spoke no French.

“I have already had one bowl,” the man told us in French, surprising us—a day laborer bilingual in the language of the colonials, he could hardly have routine use for his French. “We Malagasy,” he continued, “have many bowls of rice a day, to keep us strong.” He flexed his biceps by way of demonstration. I was almost ready to sign on to the all-rice diet. He looked at us with some pity. “How do the vazaha stay strong?” We had no answer for him. “Eating vegetables and carrying heavy packs around” seemed a weak response at best. Breaking rocks into gravel by hand and eating several bowls of rice a day was clearly a quicker route to impressive strength.

Maurice thought we should press on, so with promises to eat more rice, we left the man to his rocks. That day and the next, the three of us engaged in mild competition to find the most, the best, and the most agreeable lemurs. Indri, the largest of the non-human primates on Madagascar, were plentiful in this forest, and though they were skittish, bounding away from noises on the ground, with patience we were able to find a few couples. Indri are monogamous, pair-bonded, and vocal, their twice daily duets reminiscent of the songs of humpback whales. There were also more sifakas—Jessica’s propes—a species of almost pure white. When we found them in large groups, they made alarm calls before leaping away through the trees. The related Avahioften sat in the crooks of trees and stared, unblinking. Maurice asked us if we wanted to see more Avahi, then took us to a spot in the forest, non-descript to our eyes, and told us to wait.

“Just after dusk they will be here,” he said, peering up at the fading light. Sure enough, at 6:40 by our watches, several Avahi bounded through. The next night we went back, and at the same moment, we again saw these graceful primates leaping in to our field of vision, from tree to tree, then gone.

Bret and I stayed a few days in the forest alone, camped at the top of a glorious waterfall.  We were looking for animals of all sorts, and found no Mantella, but plenty of lemurs and geckos. The forest was dense, and we neither saw nor heard any other people during this time. When time grew short, we packed up our tent and hiked out several hours to a dirt mining road that led back to town.

A Frenchman in a truck laden with Malagasy workers stopped to pick us up not long after we reached the road. His Malagasy was fluent, his English non-existent, and though his name was McDonald, he insisted that he was a real Frenchman. He had lived in Madagascar since 1964, and was currently heading a road crew to improve the existing mining road. He was picking up workers to take them home for the day, though it was early in the afternoon. As we stopped to pick up a man digging white quartz by the side of the road, our man McDonald said to himself “it’s two o’clock, he’s worked hard, he is done for the day.” He volunteered, then, that each member of the road crew earned 130,000 FMG per month. A little over $30.

“Is that sufficient for a family to live on?” I asked. He smiled ruefully.

“If a man is single, it is enough, but for a family, no.” It struck me that Maurice, with his marketable skills as a naturalist guide, made one and a half times the monthly wage of these road workers in just two days. But his work, and therefore his pay, wasn’t consistent, so some months he might make nothing. When Maurice left us, he returned to his wife and four-day-old son with full pockets, money enough to feed them, at least for a while.

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Our plane left Tana on a Sunday night. On Monday morning, President Zafy was due to be impeached. Parliament had voted him out of office, but he had already declined to leave once, arguing that the army was on his side. One might speculate that the only reason for Madagascar to have a military is to back their favorite governmental factions. The existence of a prime minister, in addition to a president, and a shadowy king figure who might not even be real, makes the balance of power opaque to outsiders. I asked Benjamin, who had been a government official before taking the job with ICTE, who wields the power in Madagascar.

“You know how it is,” he shrugged his shoulders. I didn’t know how it was. That’s why I had asked. I asked two other Malagasy at ICTE, as well as a woman selling patisseries, and they all gave me the same shrug, the same non-committal, “you know how it is.”

The night we left, there were rumors that military helicopters were flying in erratic circles over the city, as if taunting Parliament to try, just try. I hadn’t suspected, before then, that Madagascar owned any military helicopters.

“You’re leaving at the right time,” Benjamin told us. “Probably nothing will happen, but just in case, better to be gone by tomorrow.”

As soon as our plane left the ground on what was to be a multi-day, seven leg journey home, the experiences in Madagascar began to fade, hard to recall in vibrant, living detail. Did I remember correctly that no diagnosis had come of the strange GI-related deaths at Ranomafana, and no autopsies were scheduled, as that would be disrespectful to the dead? In the air, on hold between two worlds that couldn’t understand each other, this seemed implausible. I took Vermox, a dewormer available over the counter in Madagascar, not because I really thought it would treat whatever had struck people down in Ranomafana, but because it was the only thing in my arsenal that seemed vaguely relevant. And I thought about returning to Madagascar.

“I don’t want to work there completely alone,” I told Bret while we sat on the ground in Djibouti, tucked in between Ethiopia and Somalia.

“I don’t think you should,” he agreed. “It wouldn’t be safe.” I hadn’t even been thinking of my physical safety. I was concerned about my sanity. I was going to need someone to talk to besides frogs over the course of several months. Then it came to me.

“You know who would be perfect, as a field assistant? Jessica, from Ranomafana! She wants to do behavioral work on something other than lemurs...and she’s already in country...and she speaks French. It couldn’t be better.” I was immediately focused: if only I could compel Jessica to come be my field assistant, all would be well.

I fell into a reverie, trying to recall some of the wonder and craziness of being a vazaha in Madagascar, now that it was remote, but only hours in the past. As Madagascar receded as daily reality, it came back in slow, dreamy waves that suffered from a lack of plausibility. The tsingy of Ankarana, and learning from Angeluc to suck the insides of gourd-fruits for their precious water. Being ferried to shore in a pirogue by Solo, ripe forest glistening ahead of us. The ghosts from the balcony of the Orchidées, and the curious native primates nearby.

But the reason for all of this experience, the science, came back, too. Discovering Mantella laevigata in bamboo wells, fighting and mating, was glorious. There is such grand biodiversity in the tropics. All seems disorder at first glance, but it can be parsed, identified and understood. In the tropics, many of the rules made by temperate-based ecologists fall apart, and field biology explodes in a chaos of unknown vectors, uncontrollable variation within and between seasons, watersheds, populations. In the tropics discovery can still happen routinely—it is almost difficult to avoid, if only you keep your eyes open.

Waiting on the tarmac of the St. Louis airport, our last stop before home, the little boy next to me asked his mother persistently, but pleasantly, “Are we up in the sky now? Are we up yet?” He had been told he could have his tuna once we’d taken off. Tuna, he knew, was what he wanted. Being airborne was only incidental. Finally we departed, and four year old Scott had his tuna at last. Then he looked out the window, in disbelief and wonder at the scene below. On the final leg of this particular adventure, I shared the company of a curious little child, who was just beginning his. Tuna was his goal, but flight, with its surprises and discomforts, may prove to be just as enduring.

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So ends part I.

Next week: Part II, Chapter 7 – Reentry