Coo-Coo for Coconuts

After a long, dusty 10 hour taxi brousse ride I arrived in Mahajanga on June 1 around 4:30 pm. I had been told that the road was good from Port Berge to Mahajanga, and this was partly correct. After the town of Mampikony, the onion capitol of Madagascar, the road is paved and even has painted passing lanes and road signs (!). Before Mampikony, however, the road is what one might generously call bumpy. The 3-4 hours it takes to cover the 84 km from the Port to Mampikony is spent traversing deeply rutted roads with 10 m stretches of the old disintegrating paved road intermittently alleviating all from the very slow, jarring ride. I can’t remember the last time I was so elated to arrive at a destination (although, pulling into the Port upon my return was pretty sweet). The problem of the roads here in Madagascar is representative of the many cyclical problems that developing nations face regarding their infrastructure. The roads are poor and so when it rains, the only way to travel is by massive cargo trucks. These camions tear up the road even more creating deeper ruts, which then makes the behemoth vehicles all the more necessary. Attempts made to fix the roads are often band-aid solutions, when the answer needed is a lasting, well designed system to prevent future problems (i.e. drainage systems for water runoff).

I got to the Anjary Hotel and promptly washed the layer of dust that had been caking my body for the past several hours. My first hot shower in a couple months was exquisite and so was the air conditioning cranked at full blast. I went out with a worker from the hotel as I was not too familiar with this provincial capitol. He took me to a nice little restaurant that overlooks the bay. I treated him to a dinner of beef and shrimp brochettes and a couple THB’s. As is typical, a communication snafu meant that more food came than was expected and the price exceeded what was in my pocket. Gasy culture dictates that the person doing the inviting to dinner must pay for everything. Well, I guess I invited my new friend to eat, although my intention was to only get a couple beers. I hadn’t eaten lunch and so I wanted some food, but there was no way I could order food and not offer to get him anything. The long short is that he got a very good meal for free and I left the restaurant in debt to be repaid the next day. My friend then asked me to do him a favor. The favor involved me going to his house on the outskirts of Mahajanga and proving to his wife that he had actually been eating with a vazaha and was not out cavorting with a new girlfriend—not too much trust in that relationship. Without really thinking about it, I said yes as I thought it could be an interesting little trip and I had nothing better to do by myself in Mahajanga on a Thursday night. We took one of the large taxi buses that run throughout the city to the area where he lived. The ride took a long time because of frequent stopping, and I started to realize that I had gotten involved in something that could take a very long time. I was very thirsty, completely out of money, and did not want to spend any more time sitting on my arse in a taxi. Finally, we got to his street and then walked to his house which was a one room house made completely of tin. I greeted his wife and corroborated her husband’s story while she breastfed their 5 month old baby. It was a pleasant, yet very awkward encounter. After five minutes at the guy’s house I made my way to the taxi bus pick up and caught another long ride back to the hotel where I drank 1.75 liters of water without stopping.

I awoke very early the next morning as it’s not easy to sleep when you haven’t seen your girlfriend in a month and a half and you know she’s traveling solo on a 15 hour taxi brousse. Any anxiety on my part was alleviated when I remembered that Abby is the toughest girl (sorry, young woman), that I have ever met. She could easily wup any guy I know and no doubt could put a severe hurtin on any overly friendly Gasy dude. It was unbelievably good to see her when she walked in the door. It had been over a month and a half since Abby and I last saw each other and even though we have phone conversations, they are usually hurried and brief due to phone card limitations. Needless to say, this is difficult on both of us, but we always fall right back into where we left off. The distance and lack of communication are tough to handle, but we know that when we see each other that all the recent lows will be erased. I personally have never experienced the emotional peaks and valleys such as those presented by the Peace Corps experience. The low of being isolated and lonely, is immediately trumped by getting to spend time with my beautiful girlfriend in the pleasantly exotic city of Mahajanga—the highest of highs. We spent the morning reacquainting over pain au chocolat and café.

Highlights of the Mahajanga vacation were many. Morning activity usually commenced around 9 or 10 and always revolved around strong coffee with sugar and either yaourt de maison or a freshly baked pastry. As we casually consumed our breakfast, we would plot the day’s activities which mainly centered around where to swim in the afternoon and where to have a good meal that night. The rest of the morning would be used to take care of practicalities such as email/internet, shopping for souvenirs, or buying bottles of wine. One morning we ran into Lauren, another PCV, who is in the education and is teaching in Mahajanga. She showed us around and took us to the big market which had one of the finest outdoor fish markets I have ever seen. Huge tuna and jumbo shrimp were only a few of the many fresh seafood selections. It was great running into Lauren as she showed us around a part of town we would not have found on our own. Another morning Abby and I spent the morning walking all over Mahajanga in search of hand made paper lanterns that were being sold for the upcoming June 26, Malagasy Independence Day celebrations. We walked all over town in the midday heat and couldn’t find a single damn lantern. A frustratingly, fun excursion that allowed us to see many parts of the city that would not be seen my most other tourists. A couple afternoons were spent swimming in a great salt water pool perched on the ocean’s edge. Our finest afternoon, however, was spent at the local’s beach, Grande Pavois, where we relaxed in the sun, swam in the Mozambique Channel, drank a bottle of South African Chardonnay and ate crevette bengets (fried dough balls with shrimp). We wrapped up many an afternoon by strolling along the Bord du Mer, a side walk that lazily winds around the ocean front and has been nicely landscaped with palm trees and white benches, while the sunset fell from the horizon leaving the sky painted in hues of purple and orange. Sometimes ice cream or a rhum de maison provided a nice exclamation point to a great lazy day.

Meal time played a very important part of our vacation. I got on a huge coconut kick while in Mahajanga, and so it became a quest to eat and drink anything and everything coconut. Shrimp in a coconut butter sauce over rice proved to be my favorite dish and though long and arduous, my journey to find the best punch coco finally ended after much sampling but with one definitive winner, Punch Coco from the Fishing Residence Restaurant. The key to good punch coco I’ve determined is to have a strong rum offset by a perfect combination of fresh coconut milk and fresh vanilla bean as well as to be chilled or served over a couple ice cubes. Finding the perfect Punch Coco (so far Baboo Village on Ille. Aux Nattes) means that I will rarely be found without a glass of it in my hand—I love it. Thanks to Lauren the PCV we became aware of the Pizza Marco, arguably the best pizza in Madagascar. The place is French owned and is only open from 6-10 pm. It is sits among many other small Gasy owned restaurants and epiceries and one would never know it existed during the day, however, when open, it stands out. Pizza Marco is a very popular destination with vazahas and is busy every night. The pizza is creative (think pears, coconut, shrimp) and the atmosphere is unique. The waitresses are scantily dressed in uniforms that advertise the restaurant in very convenient places for wandering male eyes. We spent our second to last night at Pizza Marco watching the opening ceremony of the World Cup and listening to the French patrons cheer against Germany in the first game. Another great find was a hacienda style coffee house, reading room and Malagasy crafts store owned by a small Spanish lady. Abby and I found the place during our last couple days and we were pleasantly surprised to find that she served iced coffee and real cookies. The outdoor reading room/courtyard, the plants, fountains, décor and the very comfortably cushioned couches created a very pleasant and relaxed atmosphere to enjoy a cold drink and read a magazine.

The return to Port Berge took a long time as night travel over deeply rutted roads is slow going. I was disappointed to learn upon my arrival that the cell phone company that had been putting a satellite receiver in PB had yet to turn on the service. Returning to site after being away for an extended period of time is always difficult. The transition from speaking English and spending a lot of quality time with Abby to spending a lot of alone time while speaking nothing but Gasy takes some readjusting to say the least. My readjustment, while difficult, was aided in the arrival of my new companion, Gigi the kitty cat. Never having been a cat person, it has taken some getting used to sharing the house with a feline. She is a very small kitten, she cries all the time, and recently after eating some deworming medicine she has pooped very long white worms. She has developed an obsession with my feet and this foot fetish has led her to get accidentally kicked and stepped on occasionally. I feel that Gigi won the cat lottery of Port Berge as she will get a shot at a good life by living with me, however I have made up my mind to treat this small animal as just that, a small animal. I find it difficult to reconcile pampering this cat like Americans do their pets, when there are sick and starving children down the street who could use the deworming meds and rice that I daily feed my cat. She will be given a good life for a cat, but she will sleep on the floor, she won’t have little outfits to wear, and she will eat rice and dried fish. There will be no Meow Mix. Also, Gigi was brought on board to do work, that being rat extermination. Since her arrival, I have not been aware of any rodents so I think her mere presence is a rat deterrent.

Well, if you’ve gotten to this point, thanks for reading and I hope you weren’t too bored. I hope summer has treated everyone well—Happy 4th of July!