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.
No comments:
Post a Comment