Last night I did a new etching. I’d been sitting at my kitchen table leafing through a book of Edward Hopper paintings, my fingers through the handle of a coffee mug, the remnants of the paper spread out around me. The light faded and I plugged in a lamp, opened my sketchbook to a new page and drew the pub at the end of my street. The green one. With the mosaic tiled floor and unmatched tables and chairs. The smooth dark wood and tea light candles on the tables. You must remember it. It’s still the same, well no, it’s less busy. A new one has opened up across the road.
The Saturday Man
The kitchen door slams closed behind her and Amanda leans heavily against the white washed brick of the courtyard wall. It’s already gone ten o’clock but the concrete is still damp with dew. The café is full of the breakfast bunch: today mostly broad-shouldered railway workers in their luminous orange trousers and muddy black boots. They trail dirt across the linoleum tiles and sling their thick arms over the backs of the chairs, fingers poised to brush against her thigh. There is a smear of egg on the back of her hand and so she wipes it across her apron before reaching into her pocket for a cigarette. The craving for nicotine doesn’t usually come this early in the morning. She strikes a match and inhales deeply, thinking again of the man at the window table, who looks so like her father. His silk grey hair, the long thin, washed-white fingers of a pathologist.
Michael’s Hand
We are talking about the night that Michael set his hand on fire when he comes over to say “Hello”. We are even sitting at our old-favourite table in the very far corner of the bar against the windows. Jenna has the view out across the room, Emmie is on the edge to let her smoke drift out and me, I’m facing them. Three girls at a square table, a bottle of red wine in the middle.
Enough
Catherine in her flat house shoes, watch swinging at her wrist, hair in a bun tighter than knitting climbs the stairs again, feet heavy with reluctance, fingers gripping the polished handrail, potato-mud beneath her nails, pill of anger on her tongue. Her tea sits cooling on the kitchen counter.
Her father waits white as the sheets, one thin claw above the covers, gummy eyed, smells of old breath and empty cupboards, coughs stains onto the sheets.
Her father waits white as the sheets, one thin claw above the covers, gummy eyed, smells of old breath and empty cupboards, coughs stains onto the sheets.
My Inadequate Hair
“If only,” he said, “you had curly hair.” We were lying on a blanket in the sun, in the park. The newspapers were heaped at our feet. I had my head in his lap and he was pressing his fingers into my scalp, rubbing in small tight circles. “Oh well,” I thought. It had been fun.
Going up to get down
Jack is on his way back to his desk to, as they’ve put it, “have a think about it” and the foyer of the 6th floor is unusually crowded; only one of the lifts is working. On the far wall soldiers firing from behind a blockade, loom from a huge black and white print. Beneath it some journalists are clutched over a folio of photographs, paging, pointing. Jack stands off to one side, staring out of the window across the rooftops of the neighbouring buildings. The faint outline of his face hovers ghostlike over the skyline. He presses down a stray tuft of hair that has sprung up on his crown.
A Short Story In Which She Finds Her Feet
They are in a shoebox wrapped individually, in tissue paper, packed toe to ankle. The box is under her bed, right back against the wall, behind a tennis racket and a suitcase of old books. She has forgotten where she put them and almost, that she had them at all. She unfolds them one at a time; runs a critical finger over the scuffed heels and slightly bent toes, rubs the smooth strong arches with the palm of her hand; picks at the painted nails.
She tries them on.
They fit just fine.
She tries them on.
They fit just fine.
Shelly Finds a Film
On the way home, Shelly found a film. A yellow cased, Kodak, Elite Chrome 36 exposure, colour slide film. It was just sitting there on the pavement. She’d got off the 19 bus from town and was waiting to cross the road, when she glanced down at her shoes, and noticed it. She considered for a moment and then bent down and picked it up. There was slight dent in the casing and some scuff marks where the black paint had come off to reveal the silver tin beneath. She shook it gently and although there was no sound, the weight of it suggested that the film was still inside. She put it in her coat pocket.
The Bell Tolls
“I don’t like to be late,” said Catherine Lang as the door was opened for her at 6:50pm. Kate had said 7pm and not to bring anything. Her friends called her Clang. Not unkindly of course but because of her initials C. Lang. And also, a little bit she suspected, for the way that sentences swung with the weight of her confidence, out of her mouth and struck against the conversation. Sure she was opinionated, but so were all the women in her family. Her grandmother: a local MP for many years, had campaigned vigorously around maternity issues, and her ideas shaped not one, not two, but three major legislative amendments in the course of her career. And her mother: former head of the Council of Higher Education and now steering the Education Action Group in their reformation of inner city schools.
Madagascar - Antananarivo
We’re up quite early and fetch Andy for breakfast which we eat at a small patisserie near our hotel. We’re directed upstairs with our croissants and iced doughnuts to a small squashed table next to a tiny window. It’s propped open with a stick and if you duck down in the chair you can see for miles out over the city or down onto a yard below full of pawpaw trees (apparently called papaya by the rest of the world) and old black tires holding down corrugated iron roofs. A smell of chickens and wood smoke wafts up to us.
Madagascar - Andisabe to Antananarivo
In the morning we wait for the tent to dry, eat the last banana and biscuits and then stand around with Andy under the chameleon tree hoping for a taxi brousse. Finally one comes along. It’s more like a bus than the ones we’ve been in before – Rob is squeezed up front and a little door opens in the row at the back to let Andy through. I am in the boot with the tent between my legs and my feet resting on an enormous bag of soil. There’s a wooden box of seedlings at my feet and the usual number of us squeezed into the three seater space.
Madagascar - Andisabe
Everyone else is back at work and we’re camped in the middle of a rain forest – well for one more night at least – running seriously low on French franc currency.
We wake up just after 5am thanks to the green light filtering through the tent and the chatting of the birds in the trees. At 7am we meet our guide Herman outside the Angap office. The park fees are much more than we expected – 125 000 each for a day. Before we’ve even left the grounds (we’re waiting for water which is being fetched by bike) he’s pointed out three chameleons creeping around in the trees of the park. The path curves up behind the office on a narrow paved road through thicket and then out at some fish farm dams where there are two huge fat boas sunning themselves.
We wake up just after 5am thanks to the green light filtering through the tent and the chatting of the birds in the trees. At 7am we meet our guide Herman outside the Angap office. The park fees are much more than we expected – 125 000 each for a day. Before we’ve even left the grounds (we’re waiting for water which is being fetched by bike) he’s pointed out three chameleons creeping around in the trees of the park. The path curves up behind the office on a narrow paved road through thicket and then out at some fish farm dams where there are two huge fat boas sunning themselves.
Madagascar - Tamatave to Andisabe
We get up thinking it is after 7:30am only to find its only 6:30. Change money (a protracted experience involving a lot of counting and recounting and checking and paper work) and then grab some breakfast – pain au raisin and pan au chocolate from the little Salon de The on one of the main roads. After reconfirming our airline tickets and we get a pousse pousse to the taxi brousse station. Poor guy – 10 000FMG for both of us and all our luggage.
Getting a taxi isn’t quite as easy. There are several little kiosks and each one has different services. The first one we try is not offering anything until 6pm and given that it’s a five our journey that sounds pretty dismal. But with some translation assistance from a French guy we manage to find one that will take us to Andisabe as soon as it fills up.
And so we sit and wait. There’s been a long and complicated conversation in numbers which we later realise was the seating plan – numbers written onto tickets. We sit on the edge of a shelter to wait – behind us two guys are fixing a motorbike, starting it up. Huge clouds of smoke belching out from the exhaust. The side of the ticket booth is painted light blue and a man leans out of it smoking a cigarette. It’s slight skew, not quite square.
The minute we’re all packed in we start to sweat. There is a great debate about the seats and I wonder whether we have got in the wrong ones, if that is what is upsetting everyone because no one wants to say anything to us. A girl in the front seat is the only one who pays us any attention - she turns around in her chair to stare and smile.
I decide I love these journeys – the breeze blowing through the windows, the smell of Madagascar coming in: wood fires, hot shrubs, rotten fruit, and rain on warm dusty soil, rivers, new wood where someone is building a house and the never ending lullaby of the Malagasy music. I imagine the one song is saying “The honky tonk in you is driving me”. We hear it again and again later in the cafe where we have dinner. Rob reminds that I always get the words in songs wrong.
Gradually the landscape starts to change as we rise up onto the plateau. Endless palm trees are replaced by endless banana trees and the contents of the stalls beside the road change too. Eventually we climb steep hills in second gear grinding our way to the top – the driver seems quite pleased about the decrease in speed which allows him the opportunity to fiddle with the tape deck. We get a forty minute blast of ‘Hits of 92’ including Young Guns – Blaze of Glory or whatever it is called. We roar down the other side of the hill, not heeding the other side of the road when we swing around corners. At one point a sharp on a sharp downhill corner there’s a bridge with the first six supports knocked out of it no doubt by someone taking the turn too fast.
We cross an enormous old railway bridge and as we climb higher streams sparkle in the valleys below. People along the road carry all sorts of things. Wood is piled up in stacks like a sort of hardware store – wrapped together in bundles. Flower pots for sale.
The guy in front next to the driver is a heavy sleeper whose head drops backwards periodically thumping loudly against a pole and causing much hilarity. A woman gets on with her angry baby and after this no one gets anymore sleep until after we’ve stopped for lunch when the baby falls asleep. There is a wireless microphone set on top of the dashboard which smacks of karaoke – the guy next to me sings along anyway, slightly out of tune.
We are dropped at the entrance to the park but as it is now five pm it’s closed. The night walks start at 6:30pm. We pitch our tent in the drizzle on a hill on the other side of the road. There is no shower or toilet but a large open sided wooden barn filled with table and chairs. When it cools down a bit we walk back up the road towards the RN1. There’s another campsite and a hotel there but apart from yelling children playing on swings no one seems to be around. The restaurant (closed) looks out over a lake studded with water lilies and sizzling with insects.
On the road we see a large millipede of sorts that I am almost convinced is a giant spitting cockroach & a small snake slithering across the road. We eat dinner at a small snack bar at the entrance to the park – two pizzas and a beer. Then I sit writing beneath a large electric light on the office wall surrounded by hundreds of insects – small flying ants, enormous crickets with swivelling heads, a yellow moth the size of my hand on a drain pipe and a praying mantis which hops its way up the wall and when I leave is clutching a large bug between both front feet eating it like corn on the cob.
Getting a taxi isn’t quite as easy. There are several little kiosks and each one has different services. The first one we try is not offering anything until 6pm and given that it’s a five our journey that sounds pretty dismal. But with some translation assistance from a French guy we manage to find one that will take us to Andisabe as soon as it fills up.
And so we sit and wait. There’s been a long and complicated conversation in numbers which we later realise was the seating plan – numbers written onto tickets. We sit on the edge of a shelter to wait – behind us two guys are fixing a motorbike, starting it up. Huge clouds of smoke belching out from the exhaust. The side of the ticket booth is painted light blue and a man leans out of it smoking a cigarette. It’s slight skew, not quite square.
The minute we’re all packed in we start to sweat. There is a great debate about the seats and I wonder whether we have got in the wrong ones, if that is what is upsetting everyone because no one wants to say anything to us. A girl in the front seat is the only one who pays us any attention - she turns around in her chair to stare and smile.
I decide I love these journeys – the breeze blowing through the windows, the smell of Madagascar coming in: wood fires, hot shrubs, rotten fruit, and rain on warm dusty soil, rivers, new wood where someone is building a house and the never ending lullaby of the Malagasy music. I imagine the one song is saying “The honky tonk in you is driving me”. We hear it again and again later in the cafe where we have dinner. Rob reminds that I always get the words in songs wrong.
Gradually the landscape starts to change as we rise up onto the plateau. Endless palm trees are replaced by endless banana trees and the contents of the stalls beside the road change too. Eventually we climb steep hills in second gear grinding our way to the top – the driver seems quite pleased about the decrease in speed which allows him the opportunity to fiddle with the tape deck. We get a forty minute blast of ‘Hits of 92’ including Young Guns – Blaze of Glory or whatever it is called. We roar down the other side of the hill, not heeding the other side of the road when we swing around corners. At one point a sharp on a sharp downhill corner there’s a bridge with the first six supports knocked out of it no doubt by someone taking the turn too fast.
We cross an enormous old railway bridge and as we climb higher streams sparkle in the valleys below. People along the road carry all sorts of things. Wood is piled up in stacks like a sort of hardware store – wrapped together in bundles. Flower pots for sale.
The guy in front next to the driver is a heavy sleeper whose head drops backwards periodically thumping loudly against a pole and causing much hilarity. A woman gets on with her angry baby and after this no one gets anymore sleep until after we’ve stopped for lunch when the baby falls asleep. There is a wireless microphone set on top of the dashboard which smacks of karaoke – the guy next to me sings along anyway, slightly out of tune.
We are dropped at the entrance to the park but as it is now five pm it’s closed. The night walks start at 6:30pm. We pitch our tent in the drizzle on a hill on the other side of the road. There is no shower or toilet but a large open sided wooden barn filled with table and chairs. When it cools down a bit we walk back up the road towards the RN1. There’s another campsite and a hotel there but apart from yelling children playing on swings no one seems to be around. The restaurant (closed) looks out over a lake studded with water lilies and sizzling with insects.
On the road we see a large millipede of sorts that I am almost convinced is a giant spitting cockroach & a small snake slithering across the road. We eat dinner at a small snack bar at the entrance to the park – two pizzas and a beer. Then I sit writing beneath a large electric light on the office wall surrounded by hundreds of insects – small flying ants, enormous crickets with swivelling heads, a yellow moth the size of my hand on a drain pipe and a praying mantis which hops its way up the wall and when I leave is clutching a large bug between both front feet eating it like corn on the cob.
Madagascar - Isle St Marie to Tamatave
I set the alarm but am worried about not waking up on time and so don’t sleep for most of the night. We are up before daybreak at the harbour where the Rhiziny II and the Magdeliene are moored up. People emerge from the darkness and exchange cash and tickets. Nothing is hurried. We buy fruit buns from the boulangerie and eat them out of the plain newsprint.
Some Americans turn up all speaking Malagasy – later we find out they are Peace Core and work all over the country teaching English and doing health work. The boat leaves after 6 putting out across the bay full of people. In front of us a father cradles his son while his four daughters sit in a row next to him taking turns to puke into a pair of green plastic bags he dished out the minute we set off. The boat sits very low in the water and people with their elbows hanging over the edges get them wet.
Some Americans turn up all speaking Malagasy – later we find out they are Peace Core and work all over the country teaching English and doing health work. The boat leaves after 6 putting out across the bay full of people. In front of us a father cradles his son while his four daughters sit in a row next to him taking turns to puke into a pair of green plastic bags he dished out the minute we set off. The boat sits very low in the water and people with their elbows hanging over the edges get them wet.
Madagascar - Isle St Marie
We settle up at Hotel Orchidee Napoleon - $81 for two nights, five meals and quite a few beers. Amazing. So amazing that I can’t help but worry that she buggered up the dollar exchange rate as that all works out to around £10 a day.
After breakfast we get a boat transfer back to Isle St Marie and then began the walk back towards the airport. A truck jammed with passengers came past and picked us up at the first junction: an old woman with baskets of fruit, a young man. We stop for a grandmother and a child in a brightly coloured skirt, hair tied back, shy blinking eyes. And we stop again and again - first picking up another woman (her small boy whose head bumps against my shoulder softly after she lifts him into her lap) and then a man and three boys, one wearing a San Diego t-shirt with some baseball player on the front. The girl in the skirt falls asleep against her grandmother’s arm. It takes about half an hour to drive the twelve kilometres to ‘Le Ville’ weaving round the puddles and potholes, pulling up to check out young girls, stopping for passengers.
The town is just a more concentrated group of houses clustered around the bay. There is a closed petrol station with a shiny red and yellow sign, people on bicycles and cows being herded down the main street. The roads are lined with wooden grocery stores built up on stills, the wares on shelves along the back wall, just visible in the darkness. We get off and pay up. All the notes are in odd multiples of 5000 like 25000FMG – but nothing is even rounded to the nearest 10000FMG so we are always waiting for change.
We wander down the main road past several hotels – one with polished tile floors and tantalising views through the main hall over the veranda of the sea. We walk down a side road and everyone smiles. Waves. Says bonjour or Sallee. On our right we pass an old war memorial, the vague remnants of a chain fence and garden barely discernable through the wild growth beneath it. Later we see men playing basketball in the stamped flat courtyard beside, between two mouldy grey walls. We walk up this road and down another – stop to look at a hotel we don’t like (stained mattress, small rooms) – it’s R20 each a night. The price of four chocolates. We feel guilty that is not to ‘spec’ and have a soft drink in the hot lounge. A woman brings her baby to show us and tries out her English.
Finally we settle on Le Bigorne – it has a small wooden restaurant set back from the sea with dark wooden cabins and fans and hot water. There is a woman who can speak English and we later learn is descended from pirates!
We hire bicycles for the rest of the day and cycle back to town to buy ferry tickets back to Soanieran-Ivongo from the Zannia Hotel on the harbour front in Ambodifototra. Apparently the ferry will leave at 5am. This is certainly good news after the seeds of fear sewn by Ant last night.
We cycled out to the SE of the town back along the causeway which seals off an enormous inland harbour by connecting a small island to the mainland with two concrete strips – so potholed and broken it’s is amazing they can hold cars. The sea water on our right is a beautiful, inviting blue that you can see about 10m down into sparkling with fish. Just off the causeway we turn left and are immediately stopped by a two young men and so know we’re on the right track to the pirate cemetery.
They say they will be our guides for free and we can pay them what we think is fair at the end. We trust them. It’s a good twenty minute walk over iron railway tracks laid sideways and full of water. Past bungalows on stilts and wood fires. It’ a beautiful day, baking hot. Then over a bridge and up a short hill and at the top there is a view of the bay and the small island where the pirates lived. Our guide says that his friend went there last year to look for treasure but found nothing. The graves are grey and weathered and he reads what they say – names, dates of birth dates of death. There were a lot in 1875 thanks to a plague of malaria. The largest gravestones are for the captains. There is an enormous memorial to Captain Kidd who is not buried here but frequented these waters. A pirate’s wife, a pirate’s daughter (4). Also sea captains who worked for the tribal rulers – unlike the pirates who worked for themselves. There is one grave flat on the ground with a skull and cross bone on it – can’t remember the name of the pirate – with lots of burned candle ends on top of it. The last line of the texts asks the visitor to pray for them. Our guide says on the 1st of November, his descendants resident in the village have been remembering him.
On the way back they meet a friend who is chopping the ends off large green coconuts. He passes them round to drink the milk. Then he hacks them in half and cuts a small scooper from the outer shell which he uses to scrape out the soft flesh inside. It’s white and slimy like soap, without much flavour.
The modern day piracy kicks in as soon as we reach the bikes where it turns out there is a minimum charge of 30000 per person – outrageous. We complain and moan and lecture and eventually dole out 50000 + 5000 for the boy who has been watching the bikes. Of course it’s nothing to us but it the principal of the thing we explain – probably making it worse.
We have to go back to the hotel and get more money before setting off again on the rutted road up the north coast. We pass lots of smiling children but only two ask for bon bons. A woman sits bare breasted in a stream her back to the road, bathing. The road is lined with houses made of reed and wood and in between large swathes of forest, a waterfall, a quarry. There are women carrying plastic packets full of bottles, baskets on their heads. One of the hotels is partially washed away.
We stop at the next one we find and order dejeune on the veranda looking out towards the mainland where it’s raining. Pirogues and sailboards drift past. A black puppy tugs at the buckles on my sandals and a skinny white Siamese meows incessantly as we eat our food. They only have poulet – I have mine in sauce, Rob’s is grilled. It takes over an hour to come.
Further up the coast curves back on itself and we have a tremendous view of the forested shore. In some areas it’s been chopped back. All the trees left to lie – so not for wood? Telephone poles are being erected. There’s an old concrete bridge across a river. We see hummingbirds and another with a red beak and a tufted head, a snake shoots off into the grass.
We stop to swim at a long empty beach and when it starts to rain, take shelter under the roof of a locked up house. Before long a man arrives by bicycle. He says it is his ‘comrades’ house. We stand and make to go. Another man appears, quite drunk and by way of a long and very complicated explanation involving months and counting informs us that it is the 31st of December. He tells us how to say ‘Hello’ in Malagasy but the phrase is so long and there’s so much giggling and agreeing going on that we’re sure he must be taking the piss.
Back at La Bigorene and the evening is already settled. It starts to rain again and we stop as everyone else does beneath a palm tree and wait out the worse of it. Little girls pass with umbrellas – four in a row - washing their feet in the puddles. Everyone is out on the verandas, waving, smiling, and calling greetings. An enormous amount of hairdressing is going on: women with combs and beads sit in groups beneath roofs, plaiting, all the heads being done at once. Men sit wrapped in towels while another man clips carefully at their hair with silver scissors.
We have a beer on the veranda of the only hotel in town in which we have seen other foreigners. There’s only one enormous set menu on offer and the waiter says 80 000 but later it turns out to be 180 000 – 360 000 for dinner! I pay in Euro – 27. Unbelievable. The meal includes a glass of rum punch which tastes like pure alcohol and has lumps of banana floating it -all the other fruit has sunk. Later we have banana flavoured rum. We can choose from lots of flavours – hibiscus, ginger (Geremie brings a hunk of it from the kitchen to explain). It tastes nothing like banana.
The first course is small pieces of bread with pieces of raw fish – possibly smoked tuna – and mayonnaise with some garlic and foie gras. Rob tries one but I can’t make myself. There are two terrines – with more bread - sort of fish pates one with lime on and the other tuna? I’m not sure as I’m already feeling quite full and drunk. The main is a seafood bake but the seafood is chewy and not very fresh. It is curried but still very fishy. Pomme frites included. Finally there is supposed to be cheese but we decline and then desert – a sort of chocolate bread pudding. After this I’m stuffed. I dream of this endless series of courses in a nightmare later – except that there are mussels added.
After dinner we’re moved to a smaller table to allow space for more diners. Here we meet Geoffrey – a toothless man who smiles a lot and speaks perfect English. He’s being a security guard for the hotel although it’s not clear what this entails. We’re delighted and spend the rest of the evening talking to him. He reminds us that the pirate’s name was Joseph Pierre. Later two shy women turn up and drink a bottle of fanta between them. Then it’s New Year and everyone is on their feet kissing all round the room – three kisses on alternate cheeks. “Bonne Anee, Bonne Annee”. We head off to bed shortly afterwards.
Rob is sick in the night and I have a dodgy stomach in the morning – the alcohol or the seafood terrine? We feel so terrible the next morning that we spend the majority of it in bed only wandering out to get water after 11am. Everything is quiet and shut up. The boulangerie is open – Rob buys éclairs and I get a fruit bun for later. We sit on the harbour wall while Rob eats and then I need to go back to the hotel.
Later in the afternoon we walk up to an old church on a hill. From somewhere nearby singing drifts out over the trees – harmonious and beautiful. Behind the church is a cemetery overlooking the bar. We walk out pat the causeway along the coast road and eventually reach a beautiful hotel with a long jetty out to an island off the coast – ‘Sacre’ says a big sign. An old woman in a bathing cap beckons us into the water – “le plonge, le plonge”.
We walk back into town past crumbling houses and a disco for teenagers and children. ‘Final HIP HOP’ says the sign. Children hang out of the windows and yell greetings: “Sallee”. We also explore around the industrial harbour – the great rusting hulks of something lie in the water just off shore. An anchor stood up next to the an office is so rusted it is shedding its outer layer like skin. A woman and a girl sit on a dolphin statue staring out across the bay. We have a coke at a hotel in town and then head home for another lie down.
Malagasy Proverbs
Hit two things at once like the kick of a donkey.
This is only half a pot of honey but my heart fills it up
Oxen are trapped by their horns, men by their words.
You can’t catch a louse with one finger.
The night brings wisdom
If you are just a dung beetle, don’t try to move mountain.
Words are like a parcel, if you tie lots of knots, you will have to undo them.
Before we set out to dinner Geoffrey comes to pay a visit. Carrying his umbrella and taking off his shoes at the door. We make stilted conversation for half an hour. I get the impression he’s just as uncomfortable as we are. Eventually he asks for our addresses and then heads off to the hotel for work.
We eat at another restaurant on the edge of the bay – Le Banane having left a ringingly bad taste in the mouth.
After breakfast we get a boat transfer back to Isle St Marie and then began the walk back towards the airport. A truck jammed with passengers came past and picked us up at the first junction: an old woman with baskets of fruit, a young man. We stop for a grandmother and a child in a brightly coloured skirt, hair tied back, shy blinking eyes. And we stop again and again - first picking up another woman (her small boy whose head bumps against my shoulder softly after she lifts him into her lap) and then a man and three boys, one wearing a San Diego t-shirt with some baseball player on the front. The girl in the skirt falls asleep against her grandmother’s arm. It takes about half an hour to drive the twelve kilometres to ‘Le Ville’ weaving round the puddles and potholes, pulling up to check out young girls, stopping for passengers.
The town is just a more concentrated group of houses clustered around the bay. There is a closed petrol station with a shiny red and yellow sign, people on bicycles and cows being herded down the main street. The roads are lined with wooden grocery stores built up on stills, the wares on shelves along the back wall, just visible in the darkness. We get off and pay up. All the notes are in odd multiples of 5000 like 25000FMG – but nothing is even rounded to the nearest 10000FMG so we are always waiting for change.
We wander down the main road past several hotels – one with polished tile floors and tantalising views through the main hall over the veranda of the sea. We walk down a side road and everyone smiles. Waves. Says bonjour or Sallee. On our right we pass an old war memorial, the vague remnants of a chain fence and garden barely discernable through the wild growth beneath it. Later we see men playing basketball in the stamped flat courtyard beside, between two mouldy grey walls. We walk up this road and down another – stop to look at a hotel we don’t like (stained mattress, small rooms) – it’s R20 each a night. The price of four chocolates. We feel guilty that is not to ‘spec’ and have a soft drink in the hot lounge. A woman brings her baby to show us and tries out her English.
Finally we settle on Le Bigorne – it has a small wooden restaurant set back from the sea with dark wooden cabins and fans and hot water. There is a woman who can speak English and we later learn is descended from pirates!
We hire bicycles for the rest of the day and cycle back to town to buy ferry tickets back to Soanieran-Ivongo from the Zannia Hotel on the harbour front in Ambodifototra. Apparently the ferry will leave at 5am. This is certainly good news after the seeds of fear sewn by Ant last night.
We cycled out to the SE of the town back along the causeway which seals off an enormous inland harbour by connecting a small island to the mainland with two concrete strips – so potholed and broken it’s is amazing they can hold cars. The sea water on our right is a beautiful, inviting blue that you can see about 10m down into sparkling with fish. Just off the causeway we turn left and are immediately stopped by a two young men and so know we’re on the right track to the pirate cemetery.
They say they will be our guides for free and we can pay them what we think is fair at the end. We trust them. It’s a good twenty minute walk over iron railway tracks laid sideways and full of water. Past bungalows on stilts and wood fires. It’ a beautiful day, baking hot. Then over a bridge and up a short hill and at the top there is a view of the bay and the small island where the pirates lived. Our guide says that his friend went there last year to look for treasure but found nothing. The graves are grey and weathered and he reads what they say – names, dates of birth dates of death. There were a lot in 1875 thanks to a plague of malaria. The largest gravestones are for the captains. There is an enormous memorial to Captain Kidd who is not buried here but frequented these waters. A pirate’s wife, a pirate’s daughter (4). Also sea captains who worked for the tribal rulers – unlike the pirates who worked for themselves. There is one grave flat on the ground with a skull and cross bone on it – can’t remember the name of the pirate – with lots of burned candle ends on top of it. The last line of the texts asks the visitor to pray for them. Our guide says on the 1st of November, his descendants resident in the village have been remembering him.
On the way back they meet a friend who is chopping the ends off large green coconuts. He passes them round to drink the milk. Then he hacks them in half and cuts a small scooper from the outer shell which he uses to scrape out the soft flesh inside. It’s white and slimy like soap, without much flavour.
The modern day piracy kicks in as soon as we reach the bikes where it turns out there is a minimum charge of 30000 per person – outrageous. We complain and moan and lecture and eventually dole out 50000 + 5000 for the boy who has been watching the bikes. Of course it’s nothing to us but it the principal of the thing we explain – probably making it worse.
We have to go back to the hotel and get more money before setting off again on the rutted road up the north coast. We pass lots of smiling children but only two ask for bon bons. A woman sits bare breasted in a stream her back to the road, bathing. The road is lined with houses made of reed and wood and in between large swathes of forest, a waterfall, a quarry. There are women carrying plastic packets full of bottles, baskets on their heads. One of the hotels is partially washed away.
We stop at the next one we find and order dejeune on the veranda looking out towards the mainland where it’s raining. Pirogues and sailboards drift past. A black puppy tugs at the buckles on my sandals and a skinny white Siamese meows incessantly as we eat our food. They only have poulet – I have mine in sauce, Rob’s is grilled. It takes over an hour to come.
Further up the coast curves back on itself and we have a tremendous view of the forested shore. In some areas it’s been chopped back. All the trees left to lie – so not for wood? Telephone poles are being erected. There’s an old concrete bridge across a river. We see hummingbirds and another with a red beak and a tufted head, a snake shoots off into the grass.
We stop to swim at a long empty beach and when it starts to rain, take shelter under the roof of a locked up house. Before long a man arrives by bicycle. He says it is his ‘comrades’ house. We stand and make to go. Another man appears, quite drunk and by way of a long and very complicated explanation involving months and counting informs us that it is the 31st of December. He tells us how to say ‘Hello’ in Malagasy but the phrase is so long and there’s so much giggling and agreeing going on that we’re sure he must be taking the piss.
Back at La Bigorene and the evening is already settled. It starts to rain again and we stop as everyone else does beneath a palm tree and wait out the worse of it. Little girls pass with umbrellas – four in a row - washing their feet in the puddles. Everyone is out on the verandas, waving, smiling, and calling greetings. An enormous amount of hairdressing is going on: women with combs and beads sit in groups beneath roofs, plaiting, all the heads being done at once. Men sit wrapped in towels while another man clips carefully at their hair with silver scissors.
We have a beer on the veranda of the only hotel in town in which we have seen other foreigners. There’s only one enormous set menu on offer and the waiter says 80 000 but later it turns out to be 180 000 – 360 000 for dinner! I pay in Euro – 27. Unbelievable. The meal includes a glass of rum punch which tastes like pure alcohol and has lumps of banana floating it -all the other fruit has sunk. Later we have banana flavoured rum. We can choose from lots of flavours – hibiscus, ginger (Geremie brings a hunk of it from the kitchen to explain). It tastes nothing like banana.
The first course is small pieces of bread with pieces of raw fish – possibly smoked tuna – and mayonnaise with some garlic and foie gras. Rob tries one but I can’t make myself. There are two terrines – with more bread - sort of fish pates one with lime on and the other tuna? I’m not sure as I’m already feeling quite full and drunk. The main is a seafood bake but the seafood is chewy and not very fresh. It is curried but still very fishy. Pomme frites included. Finally there is supposed to be cheese but we decline and then desert – a sort of chocolate bread pudding. After this I’m stuffed. I dream of this endless series of courses in a nightmare later – except that there are mussels added.
After dinner we’re moved to a smaller table to allow space for more diners. Here we meet Geoffrey – a toothless man who smiles a lot and speaks perfect English. He’s being a security guard for the hotel although it’s not clear what this entails. We’re delighted and spend the rest of the evening talking to him. He reminds us that the pirate’s name was Joseph Pierre. Later two shy women turn up and drink a bottle of fanta between them. Then it’s New Year and everyone is on their feet kissing all round the room – three kisses on alternate cheeks. “Bonne Anee, Bonne Annee”. We head off to bed shortly afterwards.
Rob is sick in the night and I have a dodgy stomach in the morning – the alcohol or the seafood terrine? We feel so terrible the next morning that we spend the majority of it in bed only wandering out to get water after 11am. Everything is quiet and shut up. The boulangerie is open – Rob buys éclairs and I get a fruit bun for later. We sit on the harbour wall while Rob eats and then I need to go back to the hotel.
Later in the afternoon we walk up to an old church on a hill. From somewhere nearby singing drifts out over the trees – harmonious and beautiful. Behind the church is a cemetery overlooking the bar. We walk out pat the causeway along the coast road and eventually reach a beautiful hotel with a long jetty out to an island off the coast – ‘Sacre’ says a big sign. An old woman in a bathing cap beckons us into the water – “le plonge, le plonge”.
We walk back into town past crumbling houses and a disco for teenagers and children. ‘Final HIP HOP’ says the sign. Children hang out of the windows and yell greetings: “Sallee”. We also explore around the industrial harbour – the great rusting hulks of something lie in the water just off shore. An anchor stood up next to the an office is so rusted it is shedding its outer layer like skin. A woman and a girl sit on a dolphin statue staring out across the bay. We have a coke at a hotel in town and then head home for another lie down.
Malagasy Proverbs
Hit two things at once like the kick of a donkey.
This is only half a pot of honey but my heart fills it up
Oxen are trapped by their horns, men by their words.
You can’t catch a louse with one finger.
The night brings wisdom
If you are just a dung beetle, don’t try to move mountain.
Words are like a parcel, if you tie lots of knots, you will have to undo them.
Before we set out to dinner Geoffrey comes to pay a visit. Carrying his umbrella and taking off his shoes at the door. We make stilted conversation for half an hour. I get the impression he’s just as uncomfortable as we are. Eventually he asks for our addresses and then heads off to the hotel for work.
We eat at another restaurant on the edge of the bay – Le Banane having left a ringingly bad taste in the mouth.
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