The airport building in Antananarivo is small and uncrowded. We wait amongst ten other passengers for our luggage. A young girl walks on the carousel – her hands held above her head by her mother. The tent is late but once we have it we begin organising and from the domestic terminal find that that there is a plane leaving for Isle St Marie in thirty minutes. We buy tickets without checking the price and regret it.
The plane is delayed and so we wait in arched wooden chairs beneath a concrete ceiling that has been cast on wood so that it has the grain and texture of beams but you can see from where the lights are missing that it is just thick cement. A man sitting behind me with long white hair falls asleep – snoring – a lit cigarette between the fingers on his lap. Across from us a couple entwine on the bench.
The plane is a twin otter – we sit beneath the wing at the back with the pilot’s briefcase between our feet. The plastic casing of the side panels is cracked and Rob’s window has been mended with polyfiller. “There are the types of planes that god down really easy hey?” says Rob as we go up the stairs.
Back up and out over Antananarivo and the green paddy fields and red clay and thick orange rivers winding between them. The houses are compact and square and always double storied – they look like they’ve been extracted from a terrace and then dropped like Monopoly hotels.
On Isle St Marie the airport is a beach hut – albeit a concrete one and we wander in and stand amongst the departees until we are summoned outside to a pile of baggage on a shelf of concrete. It has started to drizzle and the hotel couriers swarm round to take us to their employees. We reach agreement with a woman called Auriele who wears a badge and says we can have free transport to Nosy Notao on condition we come and see her hotel. And so we are driven down a small dirt track with huge, round puddles to the shore where pirogues laden with babies cots are setting off for the islands off the shore.
We await a motorboat which comes across the bay, water splashing over the bow. Now it is prepared for us: a tarpaulin for the luggage and cushions for the seats. And we are off across the turquoise water, swaying palms looping upwards off the sand on the shore to the right. On the left, a tongue of the mainland, overgrown, wild and full of birds. We pass two children – probably six and three – afloat alone giggling.
The jetty is made of plastic drums strung together somehow that sink and shift like a carpet as we walk across them. Still suspicious of a trick we ask to see the room which is a perfect palm thatched bungalow three metres from the shore – with twin beds and bedside tables, two saucers, two enamel cups and two white towels with cakes of blue soap resting on top.
We lock up all the money and walk along the beach for perhaps a kilometre or two and see only two women and a man alone (tourists) plus villagers who greet us and move on. They don’t pester or bargain or follow us. They seem genuinely friendly. We stop to swim but Rob says the coral isn’t great and so I lie against a tree. We talk about choice and freedom and whether life on an island like this can ever really be enjoyable if you don’t believe you have the choice.
Back at the Hotel Napoleon I lie in the bungalow and write. Rob reads in a hammock hovering precariously over the crab holes. There are hundreds of crab holes with huge fat crabs that stick out their eyes and then claws and emerge each evening, scuttling back in when a child runs down the path.
Villagers walk past saying greetings and waving carved whales and a woman comes to turn down the bed and tuck in the mosquito net. She hands me a coil of mosquito repellent and a candle (which stands in a lump of coral) and some matches which are soggy to the touch and can only be struck (after some experimenting) by rubbing them backwards and forwards against the flint.
In the bar we have our second beer, having had the first one at dusk on the jetty under white umbrellas with the wind in our hair, looking down beneath our feet at the clear water and white sand. Pirogues going past, one with two giggling children in the bow, their father paddling home.
At 7:30 we ask for dinner – grilled fish and chips. Delicious. Our is the only table set for 2 – the three others are for single men and we wonder, what with the bowl of condoms on the bar counter, if we have found the only gay hang out in Madagascar.
The bar is round and made of wood and palm leaves and has slatted windows that let through the breeze. The floor is all sand and there are pieces of handmade furniture full of surprises – pull out leaves on the tables and secret drawers. On the table where we sit are resin balls with fat brightly coloured insects in them including a large spider with a deflated belly like a popped chewing gum bubble. Long black masks hang on the wall and there’s a huge canvas of a harnessed angry whale with a Victorian pavilion strapped to its back swimming a frothy green sea, framed against a yellow sky.
The wind has been blowing and blowing in the trees and it sounds like rain so that I keep having to get up and check. The ‘grande’ bungalows have strings of shells hanging in curtain on their verandas which I’m glad not be nearer. We can hear the sea breaking against the reef and crickets in the woods behind the camp. I think this might be paradise.
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