And she calls it modern....
Trip Start
Feb 24, 2005
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Trip End
Jul 23, 2005
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Andasibe, Madagascar
Saturday, March 5, 2005
Because of a late start, we spent one night in Moramanga, about an hour from Andasibe. Here I rode my first rickshaw (called a "pousse-pousse"). Though it was a blessing given a heavy backpack and driving rain, it felt odd to be carted around under human steam. But I'm sure the driver would not want to lose a fare just because I have some misplaced sense of injustice. That night we had a delicious dinner of rice and voanjobury, my new favorite bean. For breakfast we had fried rice patties, breaded fried banana, and a sort of fried doughnut. No South Beach Diet here! At five in the morning I woke to the sound of someone sawing wood, which turned out to be someone polishing the floor below us with half a coconut. It was culturally interesting and totally maddening all at once.
At last we made it to Andasibe, or at least Lacy's little corner of it. We hauled our things up a steep ravine that glistened from the morning's showers. I was instantly impressed that Lacy had hauled water in buckets up that slope every day for two years. At the top of the hill, her house sits among five or six others, all wood. Most of the homes have a separate outbuilding for cooking, and since the cooking is done basically over an open fire, smoke pours out of the gap between the wall and the roof. Chickens wander everywhere, but they converge and sprint like little cartoons when someone tosses scraps out a door or window. Sometimes they even follow you to the latrine, ever hopeful. Paths thick with mud wind between the weathered houses and overgrown foliage. One side of Lacy's house has been practically devoured by leaves the size of a not-so-small child. Enormous banana plants shade every house. This lushness comes at a price, but it's a small one; I've loved staring out the unscreened, unglassed windows in 75-degree weather, watching the rain roil the red earth.
By far the coolest thing about Lacy's house, though, is this: Sitting at the table in the early morning, nibbling rice for breakfast, we can hear an abbreviated whalesong soaring out from the forest--the call of the Indri, reaffirming every morning its place in the world.
