We wake up to the sound of rain in the night and the morning is overcast and soggy. Pawpaw and freshly baked bread for breakfast. Coffee sweetened with condensed milk.
We walk out behind our hotel into the bush looking for a lighthouse. In the villages skew teethed children who smile and say ‘bonjour’ tugging at our arms with soft fingers. Everyone we see greets us smiling. Women washing clothes stoop at a stream. We can see them between the palm fronts.
We’re lost fast despite a dog which adopts us and initially leads the way but now hangs back at our badly chosen path through puddles and mud. We cross a rice paddy on a raised mud path sinking in to our ankles. I nearly loose a shoe and pull and push to get it back out again. We fall about laughing.
We check with a small child – Le Plage? Oui Oui and come out on a long white sand arc the mainland a pale blue ridge far out to sea, a wooden pirogue bobbing on the waves just off shore. We walk north along the coast. The brown mongrel dog with yellow eyes following us all the way. He has mange on the back of his neck and pulls back his lips showing his teeth in a ‘smile’.
The beach is littered with coconut husks and sea urchin shells. I find an enormous cowrie – the size of my hand but don’t want to keep it. We walk round the tip where the pirogues cross and up the east coast. The perfect spot to swim – free of sea grass and urchin spines. An old pot bellied European man with a shaggy beard and the long white hair of a hermit is bobbing nearby.
We find the lighthouse at the top of a long ridge at the end of the island. When we climb out of the forest onto the ridge the heat hits like a wall and even the calling of insects is somehow smothered by the wave of heat. From the lighthouse we can see out over the green blanket below to the sea beyond. There are a number of abandoned buildings and one newly painted all locked up. We sit on a balustrade and look out to sea.
We’re hungry and eventually emerge at the Lemur Hotel. The bungalows are the same A-frame shape as ours with banana leaf roofs, the doors and windows are flung open so you can see right through the middle – they are all empty. At the restaurant we sit by the window and manage to order two bottles of coca cola but we can’t make ourselves understood over lunch. We ask for pomme frites and pomme de terre are offered but as we don’t know what they are we decline. The phrase book is back at the bungalow. There is a box of French scrabble and elongated playing cards with antiquated pictures printed on them. We give up on the food and pay our bill. They have a beautiful wooden whale hanging from one of the rafters and a lemur on a pole. No sign of the troop of tame lemurs promised by the guide book.
From the Lemur Hotel we walk left again along the coast past and come across some more fishermen – these ones with a pile of dead octopus on the sands the skin pulsing brown and then white. An old man with a hand full of crabs – their legs ripped off – waits for his son who is heading to shore in a pirogue to collect him.
The dog has abandoned us as the prospect of food has waned. We pass a home where a woman and child are eating on the patio – three men go out to sea in a boat with fishing rods. There is a hook scale hanging at the front door. The dog rates them more highly and that is the last we see of him!
We head back to our hotel for lunch and it’s a long walk round several rocky promontories. In some places we can climb up over the lip of the land treading on grass which is warm, long -bladed and sticky. But in others we have to wade through the shallows weary of stone fish.
We have lunch (brochette) on the jetty out of the sun. They send the English speaking waiter. While we’re eating another dog comes begging at the table. There is a string of clotted blood strung between its top and bottom eyelid and the iris is a foamy red. Its ears are flattened and its tail down between its legs.
Afterwards I lie and read and worry about how many Malagasy francs we have. Rob goes back to the lighthouse to draw. I swing in a hammock next to the beach strung between coconut trees and sway myself back and forth with my foot staring out at the dusk clouds and the darkening water. Children in pirogues pole home. One of the boats has “Boeing 777” written on the side.
In the bar we meet Ant who is from Bournemouth and has come to Madagascar to see lizards, frogs and chameleons. He’s a divorced gardener with a penchant for rum and an easy laugh. Ant says it is a nightmare to get from Isle St Marie to Toamasina – he waited a week for a boat and then got one so laden with soft drinks that the bow was almost level with the water. They set off at 2am in heavy rain – chugging out and then eventually had to turn back because of the surf. He decided to fly. I hope we don’t have to. I hear him talking to a Frenchman later - saying he’s lost his purpose and something is missing from his life.
Walking back to the room I hear voices and see people wading along the shore carrying an oil lamp and a net and calling to each other in the dark.
It rains again - but not as hard. You don’t get wet when you stand in it but you can hear it tapping like fingertips on the leaves of the roof.
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