Hello everyone, I’m writing from Fianarantsoa today, quite some distance from where I last had internet access, and I’ve seen so many beautiful things since then. Right now, we’re traveling from Tulear to Tana, hitting landmarks along the way and stopping irregularly for discussions with local communities and NGO workers about the programs that they’re running. It’s a manic mix of pure tourism, hiking through gorgeous cliffs and photographing lemurs, and our school work. We’re getting better at asking questions all the time, as we learn to anticipate the problems of community oriented management programs, government involvement, and reliance on donor funds. We’ve all become astonishingly cynical, but at the same time there’s a lot of hope. To explain, we no longer accept anything an NGO tells us as given, always questioning their goals and their sustainability and how well they communicate with the community. But as we learn to ask harder questions, we find that there are NGO’s and people working here in Madagascar who are ready to respond to us, who can point to solid successes and places where they have been able to pull out of a community and have left it with more sustainable resources, better healthcare, maybe even a source of income. I wouldn’t say that I’m a practiced traveler now, but I’m learning to love the inconveniences of the third worls, and I can find my way around a new city comfortably. Bedbugs and dirt are common, but I have yet to catch malaria, so life is well here.
The places I’ve been in the past few days are too beautiful and numerous to describe, but I’ll do my best. We visited Isalo national park, which at first seems to be a long sweep of limestone studded savannah, ringed by the peculiar mining towns that have sprung up around illegal sapphire mining in the region. As we entered the park, however, we found that rainforests of Pandemus palms still survived at the very peaks and basins of the cliffs. Steep cliffs reminiscent of the grand canyon hide waterfalls which tumble into little pools and lakes among the rocks. We explored several of these, and uncovered several species of Opleurus lizards and Madagascar beeeaters, now one of my favorite birds. We also found tombs hidden amongst the stones, and had an interesting discussion about how local people are able to use the cliffs to temporarirly enter bodies (local customs require them to be kept in the cliffs before they are buried a second time)
Then, a long tata ride to a little community reserve set in a crumbling granite clifftop. These local people decided mostly on their own to conserve some remaining forest for ring tailed lemurs, and the results for them have been spectacular. At the same time, though, as we were seeing the wonderful things ecotourism has done for their community, our readings (you have no idea how hard it is to do class reading on a moving bus) were walking us through all the limitations. We came away from a beautiful hilke over and under enormous boulders the size of houses with the sense that though ecotourism was locally viable, the scope couldn’t begion to touch the many other endangered sites in urgent need of protection.
Next, to Andringitra, the second highest (and highest accessible) peak in Madagascar. It felt like coming home, to climb up to 6000 feet and suddenly find autumn. Cool weather, invasive juniper scrub, and tall grass like English heathland made me remember for the first time that my birthday is coming up. We spent several days there, and climbed up to the summit at 8000 ft. The mountain there is called “the place close to the heavens” and it is undescribable. Tall fingers of gray rock every where, and below it stretches of twerraced rice paddies, and not a bit of it like home.
Now we are in Fianarantsoa, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen, apparently because it is an endangered cultural heritage site, and so foreign money has been poured into restoring the painted wood balconies and clay roofs of not quite 200 years ago. It’s surreal, to see buildings without obvious cracks, and to see such a picturesque landscape surrounded by the same firescarred fields and eroding rice paddies.
Tomorrow we lwave for Ranomafana, and I won’t have internet until we hit Tana, the capital, on my birthday. No computer either, so I need to go write a paper… until then, wish everyone the best, much love from Madagascar. I still don’t have malaria.
-Charlotte
