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.
There is also the addition of a conductor of sorts who opens the door with a screwdriver – the handle being broken and whistles a series of notes to indicate to the driver when to stop and when to set off again. There is uproarious laughter when he stops the driver for no reason and much waving of hands from the front seat. I have a window behind my back and the combination of sun and warm humid air makes it feel like someone is breathing on the back of my neck.
We stopover twenty times just on the way to Maramanga. The woman opposite gets off and all the sacks and plants are loaded off and dumped unceremoniously at the side of the road by our long legged conductor. He stands for most of the journey, bent double, hanging onto the windows. We rattle on past villagers standing and waving, the wind in our hair and the roar of the diesel engine.
At Moramanga things aren’t quite as ‘romantic’. We find the relevant ‘Tana’ vendors but a lack of French means we can’t understand why they won’t sell us a ticket and it seems that the next one isn’t leaving until 11:30 – it’s only 9:00 and already boiling hot. I sit down under a tin shelter on the edge of a drain (slightly iffy) to write and Rob and Andy go off to find some breakfast returning with pain au raisins and bananas.
We am surrounded by chaos. A taxi brousse pulls up and there’s a mad rush to the vendors window women and men scrabbling to get tickets. They load up the mini bus with a good fourteen passengers, four or five bags of rice or wheat – I don’t know but it looks heavy – luggage and a bicycle all go on the roof under a large gray tarpaulin. A man clambers around tying it all down and finally threading the rope through the weave of a basket of ducks who are loudly protesting their cramped conditions.
At the neighbouring vendor a woman is clutching a tiny mewing kitten. About 50 children of all ages and sizes clamour at the ticket window. The turquoise blue walls are black and brown around the edges of the window with all the years of pressing fingers.
Rob and Andy stand in the queue for awhile. The people in front of him are pressed together, their noses in each other’s necks, hands waving around each other’s waists – just like Africa – no sense of personal space – it’s not for lack of room so what then? To express a sense of urgency? Eventually, still unable to work out any more than the prices of various types of vehicles (which are written into the back of my book by a very helpful man at the back window) we give up and bargain a taxi driver into 20000FMG to Tana.
And off we go immediately after reconfirming the price three or four times. And then we are all mysteriously squeezed into the back - shortly explained by a stop to pick up the girlfriend who leaps in bearing mobile phones and grinning broadly at the achieved price. The driver hops out and extracts a wrench out of the boot which he then uses to tighten the nuts on the wheels, stamping on it with his foot.
Next stop is the petrol station where we’re surprised to note that the petrol tank consists of a plastic bottle precariously strapped in beside the driver’s feet (which the attendant fills up without batting an eyelid) and a spare bottle which is stored in the boot. Rob notes how useful it is not to need a petrol gauge. I’m somewhat relieved to note that our driver is a non-smoker although there are some tell tale burns in the plastic of the door.
And then off we go again stopping periodically to tighten the nuts on what later turns out to be the hub caps and change over the petrol jars. Every hour or so the driver attempts an English sentence to which we reply ‘oui, oui’ encouragingly and that’s it.
We stop outside a house on the outskirts of Moramanga and the driver hoots and hoots outside the gate. Eventually an elderly woman appears with a baby on her hip. There is an animated discussion and then we set off again in a cloud of black smoke.
The road between Tana and Moramanga is about 150kms of narrow, low grade tarmac winding through semi-mountainous terrain. The turns are sharp and the downhills steep. Our driver conserves his sparse fuel supply by shutting off the engine on the downhills. The wheels screech alarmingly as we round the corners. All of this precludes sleep or dozing though keeping one’s eyes closed would, in some ways, be the preferable option.
We stop twice to fill the juice jars and once when a series of trucks have blocked the road the breaks are called into question as we veer off the road to the right of the obstruction narrowly avoiding driving straight into the rather solid looking back of a truck.
At one point we round a bend in the road and there’s a tree the middle of the road - not a whole tree but several large branches. Our driver stamps tentatively on the breaks which squeal their protest – he acquiesces and lifts his foot.
We veer out into the left hand lane, leaves brushing the passenger door and from this new perspective get a clear view of not only the oncoming traffic but also the broken down truck that the tree had obviously been warning us of. I’m glad to be sitting in the middle with an unobstructed path straight through the windscreen so that when we do eventually collide with something (as surely we must) I will die an instant, painless death rather than suffer what would surely be an agonising remainder of the trip to hospital by road.
Outside the scenery - and particularly the houses - changes from wooden bungalows to mud huts with the same banana leaf roofs. There are no more coconuts piled up at stalls and the air is less humid. As we swing round corners into the shadowed nook of a valley, blasts of cool air wash out of the trees and into the windows.
I do not see or remember the entry into Tana because we’re engaged in an argument with the driver about where we will be dropped off. We have asked for Isoraka and he has indicated his dissatisfaction by shaking his head, dangerously letting go of the steering wheel with one hand and saying ‘traffic’. Andy takes control of dictating that we will not be dropped off at the taxi brousse station without reducing the fare. The girlfriend now joins in in Malagasy raising her voice and sounding angry. ‘Deux sank mille Isoraka’ I say adding to the general confusion and Andy writes 180 000 on a bit of paper passing it to the driver saying taxi brousse station.
So suddenly we are in Tana surrounded by cream coloured Renaults and Citroen CV2s belching their way up hills cobbled with large square grey stones. There are people everywhere: milling on pavements spilling out of doorways, dodging between the cars. The Hotel Isoraka is fantastic – wood floored, yellow walled with a thumping, squeaking fan on one wall. Our room is on the corner looking out over the main road through Isoraka with a balcony on both sides. We stand out on it for awhile staring down at the chaos below.
We go off to the bank and find it refreshingly simple to change $100 – in fact the cashier encourages us to change more and merrily wishes us a Happy New Year. When we walk in everyone is clustered into the centre having three minutes of silence for the Tsunami victims.
Round the corner and down a side street we find an empty restaurant for a late lunch and coke. They have tin models of 2CVs on display where the boot opens and the whole engine is visible. They are exquisite and enormous and I immediately want one.
Afterwards we walk up to the Place de la Independence (or something like that). It’s full of Jacaranda trees (dripping), couples strolling and lolling about on benches, girls arm in arm beneath pink umbrellas. The views out of over the city are amazing. At the far end are a set of broad concrete stairs that sweep down to the Rue de la Independence where I’ve read people get robbed.
We pick our way down between the children pushing fold out plastic clad flower cards at us, waving them, kids with baskets of litchis and three small boys drumming and singing, and empty hat in front of them.
The sides of the stairs are lined with women selling souvenirs – wooden cars and colourfully painted tin taxi brousses with people inside (shoulders and heads only glued to the seats) and ‘baggage’ on the roof – an assortment of plastic objects glued onto cardboard.
Men ply hand carved rubber stamps with wooden handles, passing you sticky books of blue and black chameleons stamped over and over, dolphins, hammocks swinging between palm trees.
Towards the bottom on the left we find a centre in which we buy beautiful postcards – you have to pay in the photography shop across the way which is jammed with people jostling to identify themselves in the piles of photographs and negatives laid out on the counter and being tediously sorted by sales assistants. After three people have pushed past us and been served by waving their slips and cash we follow suit.
We also explore the area around the hotel – the streets drop off rapidly and the taxis come chugging up them, straining in first gear. We find a souvenir shop which is over flowing with beautifully made wood carvings – in loud colours and what not. Rob is wowed. There’s a scrabble board for $26 with all the wooden letters.
I’m exhausted after two nights of camping and go back to the hotel to sleep. Instead I lie awake on the sagging mattress, doors to the balcony thrown open for some air.
Later we fetch Andy and go for a drink at the pavilion in the centre of Place de la Independence. We’re eaten alive by mosquitoes and children who dangle trails of postcards through the railings imploring us to produce bon bons and eventually resorting to careful sentences specifically devised to evoke an empathetic response such as ‘give me money’. We are overwhelmed by the continuous aroma of vanilla – if only the mosquitoes hated it – which they wave at us – sticks of it bundled up and shrink wrapped.
We drink three different variety of beer so that I can keep the labels and then move inside for pizza when it starts raining too hard to stay out under the umbrellas. The whole bar is built of wood. At times it seems as though the whole of Tana is built of wood.
The usual scenario of prostitutes and fat ugly Frenchmen is playing out at the tables around us. To our left women sit in a row one at each table, backs to the wall facing empty seats. They talk on flick open cell phones and reapply make-up in the bathroom mirror. A man downs his beer and walks over. He’s wearing shorts and is fat and old. When he sits down his shirt rides up and a roll of his hairy belly is exposed, the buttons pull tight. Of course I can’t understand a word they’re saying but you can read so much from gestures. He picks up her foot under the table to examine her shoe – holds it by the ankle. She stares out over his shoulder and doesn’t smile. There’s no flirting.
Rob and I have pastry from the cafe across from our hotel before bed. We don’t sleep very well because of the dent in the middle.
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