Mini Vaca in Ifaty

Last week Sophie and I took a trip to Ifaty.  It was a fantastic substitute for going to Morondava.  We left on Wednesday evening, equipped with sunscreen, snorkels, books, and cards.  We got to the taxi brousse station at 5 :30 to load our bags, but of course didn’t leave until like 7 :30.  The brousse wasn’t all the way full, and Sophie and I had the seats behind the driver, which have a little more legroom.  Stopping in various towns along the way to add/drop people, things seemed to be going fine.   An hour or so past Fianar, the road is super straight, which makes trying to doze a little easier.  However, around 3AM, a few hours short of Tulear (the city on the coast we were going to), we stopped.  Everyone got out, and there seemed to be a problem, although I couldn’t quite ascertain what it was.  Sophie explained we had run out of gas.  What to do…  3 other taxi brousses stopped where we were at as well to rest a little and to make sure they arrived in Tulear when it was light out.   The solution was that each of these already full taxi-brousses took a few of us, making for a very cramped end of the trip.  Once we got to Toliara, we took a taxi to the north brousse station there, and hopped into one of the coastal taxi-brousses for the hour or so ride to Ifaty.  Because the road is very bad and sandy along the coast, the brousses are more like trucks/buses, and are even more cramped than regular taxi-brousses.  Along the way we stopped once for the driver to change the tire. 

The hotel we chose was located North of Ifaty near the small town of Mangily, and was about a kilometer away from the main road.  We didn’t really know what to expect of the hotel, as it was cheap, but we were pleasantly surprised.  We had our own bungalow with 2 beds, and the bathroom and shower were only like 20 feet away.  The hotel was on the ocean, with a beautiful, clean, unbusy beach just underneath. 

 

looking down from the hotel

 

After such a long ride, we went down to the beach to relax and play in the water, and generally had a lazy day.  3 guys approached us introducing themselves as pirogue guides/captains asking us if we’d like to do a pirogue trip.  The price seemed good, so we said we’d do it the next morning.  A  fishing pirogue (dugout canoe) landed on the beach and Sophie wandered over to see what they had.  When she saw that they had caught a smallish lobster and only wanted 5000 Ar for it, she immediately bought it and asked the hotel to cook it up for us at dinner time.  I was not super in favor of getting it, as it still had eggs on it’s tail and therefore probably shouldn’t have been caught in the first place. 

i am going to environmentalist hell

The owner of the hotel confirmed that it was forbidden to catch lobsters at the moment because of breeding, but since it was there they agreed to cook it for us as an appetizer at dinner (it wasn’t really that big).

....it was pretty damned good though...

The restaurant at the hotel had lots of great seafood, and Gaston, the barman arranged the napkins in the glasses to look like birds.  On the menu one night was this little jeu de mot :

this is only going to be funny to francophiles... basically though, mister is pronounced the same as mystère, which means mystery. pêcher is fisherman. so it's like a mystery dish where you get a mix of whatever was caught.

 Gaston told us that the hotel did pirogue trips as well, and we decided to ask him if the guys we talked to in the morning were legit.  The answer was maybe.  It sounded like there are a lot of guys with pirogues that don’t necessarily know the sea that well, or that are running a scam to steal cameras etc.  We immediatley decided to take Gaston’s offer, as it was much more secure.  There’s an organization called Reef Doctor that is rehabilitating part of the reef in the lagon there, and there’s a protected marine reserve where you can snorkel. 

 

canale de mozambique sunset

 

i told you i would use my hammock in madagascar - not such a silly purchase? :)

The pirogue trip was excellent.  We first sailed around for a little while, and then made our way over to the reef area.  I jumped right in and snorkeled around for awhile looking at the fish, but Sophie was too scared.  She doesn’t really swim, and even with a life jacket chickened out. 

the water was deep but clear. the coral was pretty bland, but there were many schools of tropical fish, and a funny fish that was the shape of a ruler. i want to say needlefish or something looking back to my nature program memories.

 

here you can see how the mast of sailing pirogues is at a 45º angle to the mast rather than 90 like most sailboats back home. to 'come about', you just lift up the sail and put it on the other side of you. for a rudder, a guy sits on the back with a paddle.

They took us over to the fishing village of Ifaty, and gave us a tour of town, and then we headed down the beach aways to a nice clean area (around the village the beach was pretty gross),  and they cooked a picnic of fresh grilled fish, rice, and bananas.  It was delicious.  After eating, we discovered that one of the pretty shells we had collected was escaping (didn’t realize there was still an animal in it..), so we took it down to the water.

our picnic fresh fish lunch

 

patrick sure had good balance...i'd have fallen in after about 20 seconds of sitting like that, but he rode there most of the trip.

 

my shell collection, complete with (i think?) a shark's tooth.

 

he looks just like sandpipers back home...

 

don't you guys have your furnaces on in MI and WI???

 

 

 

 

The next day, we took a zebu cart to the Reniala reserve on the edge of Mangily.  We took a guided 2 hour walk through it, and although it was too hot to see very many birds, the baobabs there were absolutely awesome !  There were tons of them, and they’re all different shapes.  The biggest one is around 1300 years old !  They grow very slowly, so even smallish ones are easily 1 or 2 hundred years old.  There’s an area where there are a few tortises, and we also saw lots of little lizards, as well as a snake.

 

eventually these guys will likely grow together

if you look to this one's right, you'll see why they call it the coffeepot baobab.

 

 

finally - proof that they're another species - with latin name underneath to boot!

 

the snake we saw

at least sophie can't eat this one...

 

 

honestly, we could just about have walked faster - but that would have been less fun.

 The last night at La Voile Rouge (the name of our hotel, and also the hotel pirogue), the owners organized a traditional music concert during dinner.  The girls voices were so strong and loud!  If I tried to sing like them, I’d have nodes after half a song.  I have a short video clip that I can’t figure out how to format right to post, so hopefully I can get that up later.  The instruments were really simple.  The bass was square and had only one string (all the songs were in the same key consequently), there was one modern guitar, and a smaller square traditional guitar, and a djembe-type drum.

 

traditional (southern) malagasy music at La Voile Rouge

 

their instruments

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last day of the trip we spent in Toliara so that we could leave early from there on Monday to come back home.  Toliara was HOT !  Even though it’s on the sea, within the town there’s not always a breeze, and the sun was very strong.  It’s flat, so there are pousse pousses (rickshaws) everywhere.  Despite my general aversion to taking them (if someone can run pulling me in a pousse pousse, it means wherever we’re going I could easily walk), we took them a few times at Sophie’s request.  I would never use one alone, as I think I would just feel too colonial.

there are pousse pousses all over the place in Toliara - practical since it's flat.

at the fish market in tulear, sophie bought a dried octopus. there were flies everywhere...i thought it was pretty gross.

The ride back was uneventful, but it was really nice to do the trip during the day and see the countryside.  As soon as you get away from the coast, everything is very dry and not that vegetated other than grass and the occasional small baobab or other tree.  It seems very isolated, and for a good few hours it just seemed we were in the middle of nowhere. 

 

countryside between Toliara and Isalo

Continuing north, we passed through Isalo National Park, where it was still dry, but there were intersting rocky formations.  After Isalo, things start getting hilly, and the terrain gradually morphs into that of the Haut Plateau region of Fianar.  Other than the driver changing the tire at one of our stops, all went very smoothly for the trip home.   Arriving back in the Old City, it didn’t take me too long to feel relaxed after such a long ride.  However, I wasn’t really looking that forward to getting up at 5 to head down to the train station in the morning to head off on the field visit that we scheduled during the success stories workshop.