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.
The upstairs of the restaurant is a sort of balcony that enables us to look down on the shop below at the small selection of baked goods laid out like insects in display cases, the likes of which I’ve seen nowhere else but the Natural History Museum.
We follow Andy back through the place de la Independence to a small street at the back of Isoraka packed with strange curio shops – mostly closed this early in the day. One in particular is amazingly sparse - there are only about 7 or 8 pieces of furniture all hand carved from trees, the outer shell of which forms the sides of a chair for example twisting and curving into shapes which are brightly painted chameleons, lemurs sit at the settee’s shoulder height. Absolutely gorgeous. We hand over our email addresses, almost like hard currency in Madagascar and are promised catalogues and everlasting friendship.
At the bottom of the stairs off Place de La Independence is the main market. Set beneath pavilions it is very much local trade – row on row of wooden shuttered stalls being opened for the day. Wedding dresses, buttons, shoe laces, shoes, spices, rice, cow’s heads, small men with pinched faces and women dragging children by their hands. It smells like raw meat in places, like sewerage in another and like perfume at the far end. Music belts out over a grey loudspeaker tannoy strapped to a pole at one end.
We take a taxi – a clapped out old Renault 4 – to the Marche Artisanal, about 2kms out of town. Of course this is far enough to necessitate topping up with petrol. Rob notes that the alarming sensation of slipping back and forth on the tyres seems to be a feature of most Malagasy vehicles. Andy says nothing.
I cannot open my door and the driver keeps having to come over to do it for me. Even when it’s closed I can see the ground rushing by in the crack between the rubber and the metal.
The market is enormous: about a straight kilometre of small wooden huts containing every single type of souvenir you could possibly want – except of course a wooden whale! It looks out on a red brown river cutting through the green fields. Fishermen wander past, rods over their shoulders.
Stall holders outnumber the customers by around 20 to 1. We walk through one after the next and I pick up taxi brousse after taxi brousse until I find just the right one. By which point I feel so guilty about all the people we’ve passed without buying anything that I’m talked into buying a handmade paper carrier bag at a ridiculously over inflated price. The woman has explained the whole processes of making handmade paper and pressed flowers and in French, with actions, and I haven’t understood a word but can’t help thinking she should have some recompense for her efforts!
Rob buys a bag for Nicky and some t-shirts. We go back to the hotel to off load and head for a restaurant Andy recommends down on Avenue de la Independence.
Unfortunately it’s full so we end up in a place next door which is much ropier and has enough table dancing areas, CCV cameras and horrible lighting to make you wonder what exactly does go on there at night. I decide it’s inadvisable to eat meat given the proximity of the cow head market stall and then land up furious with myself for eating pizza.
Afterwards I look for a map in the bookshops on the main street. They’re large and dusty but not in a Charing Cross antique way – more like a stationery store in a frontier town. It’s all school books and bespectacled women. The exercise books are printed on jotter paper in blue ink like the roneo copies we got at primary school.
We spend the afternoon on Rob’s walking tour, up through the back of Isoraka, winding up hill on the steep roads some newly tarred past tiny cafes stuck between the houses, sweaty sweets in glass cases.
At the top is a breezy kind of pillared square with a commemorative plaque – this is where the real super bitch queen Ranavalona would throw Christian from the cliffs. It’s called the Eglise of Ambonimanpamarinana. Ha ha! Everything in Mad has too many syllables. If you’re in doubt just repeat a syllable – Antananarivo, Ariary etc, etc.
Popped in at the Musee Andafivarata after that. Former palace of the Prime Minister now housing a small and informative display of portraits of the old rulers – supplemented with bits of history, it was fascinatingly bloody. The building itself was absolutely gorgeous - enormously high ceiling which looked like it might be bamboo in a very bad state of disrepair unfortunately.
The Rova on the top of the hill is, I think the old Queen’s palace. Recently gutted by fire (1995) no progress whatsoever has been made on its restoration – well that my critical eye could detect. Rob found my instance of hell – a large wooden building absolutely dripping in enormous spiders.
Amazing views around the Rova. On the way back we stopped in a small cafe for a coke and to get out of the rain. The cafe/restaurant had white plastic furniture and fake snow drops stuck on the window frames.
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