Traveling from the U.S. to Madagascar presents a philosophical conundrum ─ the U.S. with its cybertechno-, remote-controlled, make-it-happen-now mentality and Madagascar with its mora mora (slow, slow) patchwork of Third World and developed world modernizations. Which society is more complex? Which is saner? There is no answer, as both vibrate and stumble along, sometimes for the good and sometimes like a zoo with no fences. After spending a few weeks in Madagascar, the ways of life in these two worlds gave me some indelible experiences and impressions.
Airplanes
Once you leave the U.S., airport security is more humane. The large, crowded, and complex set of terminals in the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris has a more streamlined security system that doesn’t make you feel like a criminal. Air Madagascar, our carrier between Paris and Madagascar and within Madagascar, didn’t give a hoot whether liquids and gels in carry-ons were stored in Ziploc bags.
Security and airport systems took on a local flavor in Madagascar as we flew between the capital city Antananarivo (Tana) and the smaller towns en route to visit several natural parks and reserves. Sometimes computers were down. Sometimes it seemed computers weren’t used at all. They generally asked for our passports multiple times, whether they really needed to or maybe just to be officious. However, no other security precautions were in place in airports outside of Tana. It was like the good ol’ days in the U.S. when you just checked in and walked onto the plane.
The most lax airport security we found was in the town of Maroantsetra, the gateway to the rainforest on the Masoala Peninsula. There the fellow from our hotel who took us to the airport checked in our bags and obtained boarding passes for us. We never even showed our passports. Our flight to Maroantsetra was full, and the crew invited one of the women in our group to sit in the jump seat in the cockpit for the flight. Our flight leaving Maroantsetra was also full, and another member of our group flew in the cockpit jump seat. On one of the legs of the flight back to Tana, the pilot allowed me to visit the cockpit for about ten minutes. We talked about the different policies of airline security, and he knocked on wood that terrorism wasn’t a problem in Madagascar.
We also found a world of difference in luggage handling between the U.S. and Madagascar, especially outside of Tana. Bag tickets are bar-coded in the U.S. and easily traceable. Conveyor belts ferry the bags around the terminal carousels in a rather methodical manner. Generally there’s no need to push and shove. Conveyor belts are non-existent in the smaller towns of Madagascar. Luggage retrieval is often catch-as-catch-can. Again, Maroantsetra airport was unique with its system that seemed like a lottery. The ground crew carted the luggage to the terminal and unloaded it behind a counter. Then the luggage handlers started calling out the tag numbers in Malagasy, and the owners tried to wade through the crowd at the counter to retrieve their luggage. Fortunately we had reserved a multi-day tour to the Masoala Peninsula before we left the U.S., and our guide met us at the airport. She took our baggage claim tickets and rescued our backpacks.
Money
We’re spoiled in the U.S. You walk up to any ATM, slide in your credit or debit card, punch a few numbers, and voilà ─ money pops out. In Tana, sometimes this works as well. The Bank of Africa ATM wouldn’t accept my Visa card. It gave me a message of “communication error”. Perhaps its computer was down, as that is a common affliction in Madagascar. We simply walked a few blocks to another bank ATM that accepted my card. In Tana, the ATMs are located in lockable vestibules outside the banks, each one manned by a security guard. It was a comfort, as the streets are crowded and often filled with beggars (and pickpockets, they say).
It was a crapshoot finding out which credit cards worked in Madagascar. In Tana, most banks accepted Visa but not MasterCard. The bank we found that accepted MasterCard wouldn’t accept debit cards, even after explaining they worked just like regular credit cards. Just when we were convinced our Visa cards were universally accepted in Madagascar, we arrived in Maroantsetra and found the one and only bank in town would only accept MasterCard. They didn’t notice or didn’t care that mine said “Debit” on the side.
When no ATM is available, changing money with a credit card in a Madagascar bank can take as little time as twenty minutes or as much as half a day or more. Without instant computer links to the banking world, changing money with a credit card requires faxing information back and forth. During the wait, the bank keeps both your credit card and your passport. Banks are closed between noon and two PM and when there’s no electricity (an event that occurs at random intervals). In order to change money, we found it was best to go to the bank in the morning to start the process and then hang around the bank for about an hour in the afternoon. They weren’t just picking on foreigners changing money ─ we saw many local people sitting and waiting for their transactions as well. Mora mora.
Although the bank in Maroantsetra accepted MasterCard, none of the businesses in town accepted any credit cards. The electronic communication systems for credit card billing have not yet reached that corner of the island nation, nor has the Internet. We paid for the tour package to the Masoala Peninsula with Malagasy cash, the equivalent of $350 per person. The largest unit of local currency is 10,000 ariary which is worth about $5. We each had to count out about seventy bills to the tour operator at his home on the evening before we embarked on the five-day adventure.
Counting all that cash for five tourists took awhile, but the geckos crawling on the living room walls kept us entertained while we waited. In one corner we saw a gecko and a cockroach that was just as long as the lizard, but it was built like a tank. I wondered which critter would win in a showdown.
Thoughts and Sensations
The first few hours in Madagascar were filled with a bit of culture shock. The poverty, poor roads, and random orderliness reminded me of Mexico, as did the heat and humidity. Tana is a teeming city of nearly one and a half million people. It is built on several steep hills, but it sprawls outward onto the lowlands. The outskirts are marshlands which the people use to cultivate rice. The view from the plane showed that nearly every lowland area in the central region near Tana was partitioned into bright green grids of rice paddies.
White rice is a staple in Madagascar as are white bread and white noodles. They sell dry beans in the open-air markets, but we never found bean dishes in the restaurants where we ate. It is a nation that seems to shun whole grains, but is partial to fresh vegetables and fruit. Food is cheap by U.S. standards. I bought a bunch of three bananas in the open market for one hundred ariary ─ five cents.
We hiked a lot in the brush and drier forests of the north, and in the east coast rainforests. And we sweated buckets. Everywhere we went we carried plastic bottles of Eau Vive water. Our guide to Ankarana Reserve in the north promised he would have enough water for the five of us on our three-day camping trip, but he didn’t realize how thirsty five Americans who weren’t acclimatized to the heat and humidity would want to drink. On the last day he asked me to buy a six-liter pack of water bottles, I guess because we were drinking up his money.
With sweat comes body odor. Everywhere we went, the musty aroma of b.o. blended with the scents of the forest, the leaves decomposing in the duff, and volatile plant oils. You don’t always know if the musty, musky scent is human or a part of the natural flora and fauna. In the towns, the musky odor mixes with street and market smells, at times combining with the scent of dried, fetid fish to sour the air. Sometimes you wonder if the b.o. is coming from the person in front of you or the person passing you. Then you lift your knapsack from your back to retrieve the water bottle and realize you may have been inhaling wafts from your own armpits.
The Malagasy people tend to be very friendly to foreigners or vazaha. We often heard children calling out to us, “Bonjour, vazaha!” It was a true and friendly greeting without the negative connotations associated with derogatory name-calling we use in our society for people of diverse foreign origins. It wasn’t unusual for teenage boys to walk up to us to try out the English they were learning in school. They seemed to have a canned dialog, including, “Do you speak English?”, “What is your name?”, and “How do you find Madagascar?”
We had local guides for all our excursions. We communicated in English and broken French, and they taught us Malagasy words. We joked and laughed a lot and made the guides a part of our group. We asked them about their lives and dreams. After our time together, each of the guides told us the same thing ─ we were different from other Americans. Through our humor and our conversations, we made a friendship bond with them. They were used to older tourists who didn’t have much to say and who had expectations to do this and that during their stay. Those tourists didn’t understand mora mora, the Malagasy way. We went with the flow and marveled at everything and everyone we experienced. They liked us for that.
One of our guides told us the people of Madagascar work to eat. They don’t have extra for vacations and extravagances. Many would love to visit America, but they’ll probably be content with experiencing America through the tourists they meet and through TV, movies, music, and clothing. It seemed that whatever Big Lots couldn’t market in the U.S., they could unload it in Madagascar. We saw people wearing baseball caps with LV or Las Vegas written across the front. Someone probably bought a ship container full of the production overruns and sent them to Madagascar. We also saw a man wearing a green and yellow windbreaker with an NFL emblem that looked legitimate, but the writing on the jacket said “Green Bay Parkers”. We had to wonder whether a maverick manufacturer was trying to sell fake NFL products like fake Gucci and Ray-Ban sunglasses, or whether Madagascar was a convenient place to sell a legitimate production run in which someone really fouled up the spelling. The Malagasy people wouldn’t know the difference between a Packer and a Parker, and they probably wouldn’t care if they did know. They play soccer.
Some Malagasy people are industrious entrepreneurs (like our guides and tour operators), but a French ex-pat we met said most of the people lack the interest or initiative to lift themselves economically to a higher standard of living. It’s a deep-rooted cultural thing. It’s common to find hotels and restaurants owned by French ex-pats, dry goods stores owned by vazaha of Indian or Pakistani ethnic heritage, and other cafes and shops owned and run by Malaysian and Arab vazaha.
In spite of the poverty, homelessness is not a problem except in a city like Tana. In the countryside, even the poorest people have shacks built of local wood, thatched with palm leaves, and sitting on stilts to keep the floor dry. They live hand-to-mouth, but they have a bed and a roof.
Most Malagasy people are slim. They walk or ride bikes everywhere and engage in manual labor, often hauling heavy loads. We rarely saw overweight children, and even then, they were just a little pudgy and not obese. Many people, especially in the countryside, walk barefoot. It was amazing to see scores of pousse-pousse (pull cart) drivers jogging the streets of Diego Suarez barefoot, pulling people or a load of goods.
Although most of the Malagasy population is Christian or animist, we heard Muslim prayer calls in the cities. No one seems to be arguing for fundamentalism in any religion. It seems to be a peaceful coexistence of alternative religious philosophies. Maybe Madagascar can teach the world a thing or two about getting along. If you took petroleum and mega-corporations out of the equation, maybe there would be no basis for Islamic fanaticism.
While religious intolerance is not a problem, the country is in sore need of improving its infrastructure. The hotel where we stayed in Maroantsetra is on the opposite side of a 200-yard wide river from the main part of town. A bridge that collapsed last year used to connect the two sides. No one knows when the bridge will be rebuilt. In the meantime, everybody crosses back and forth in small boats often loaded with people, bags, and bicycles.
Roads connect some towns and cities, but there’s no network of reliable highways connecting the country. You have to fly. Madagascar could grow economically with a network of solar-powered electrical grids and nationwide access to the Internet. Cell phones are very popular there although reception may be patchy. Water quality is always bad, and heaven knows how much and how effective wastewater treatment is. The list goes on and on.
Besides the lemurs, chameleons, orchids, limestone tsingy, and other natural wonders that draw foreigners to visit Madagascar, the sense of adventure, exploration, and discovery is part of the attraction to visit the island. If you can leave your twenty-first century American expectations behind in the security line at our hometown airports, you can tune in to Madagascar and marvel in the experience of the Malagasy people trying to march forward into the modern world, but always several footsteps behind.
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