Salama & Misaotra
Hi, friends. And family. Hi, mom.
“We’re going to Africa!”
Travelers say it like that - often - leaving out the country they're visiting.
It could be that the continent sounds exotic enough without specifics. Or announcing, “We’re going to Lesotho!” comes back with, “Okay, well, enjoy Montana!”
Ultimately, the range of what Africa can mean is just too vast to be left undefined. Flak jackets to safari jackets. War lords to warthogs. A Mecca-forward caliph to a fruit-forward Shiraz.
Nonetheless, we still managed to leave a month for ourselves in the calendar vaguely labeled "AFRICA."
We'd locked in a trip with friends to Madagascar, so we found the cheapest flights there and back that got us weeklong layovers in other countries on the continent.
Our plane just bent in an arc around the stormy teardrop of Mauritius, passed over the tiny Seychelles, and brushed the edge of Madagascar.
An hour-long float over our last month of travels.
Let’s get to it. We’re going to Africa!
Where we’ve been: Madagascar, the Seychelles, Mauritius
How long we’ve been here: 1 month
Hello: Salama (sah-lah-mah)
Thank you: Misaotra (mee-soh-tra)
Where we’re headed next: Iceland, the Faroe Islands
—
“Mack Danold?”
What? McDonald’s? Come on, it’s a fast food chain.
“I don’t understand.”
They sell hamburgers. You eat quickly. You haven’t heard of it?
“No…”
You’ve heard of fast food?
“No…”
What about Pizza Hut?
Pause.
“Yes, we have pizza.”
The exchange with our driver Fano on a pothole-riddled stretch of national highway in Madagascar silenced the car for a twisting minute through the hillside. Partly, it was marking the occasion: we’d never met someone unfamiliar with McDonald’s. Partly, it was curiosity: Fano is not only well-educated and English speaking, but versed in Western tastes. How had fast food eluded him? Or how had he eluded fast food?
But mostly we liked what it said about our destination.
Madagascar is renown for having been cut off from the rest of the planet’s evolution when the continents fractured 88 million years ago. Left to its own devices, the island carved a path for itself free of influence from anywhere else on earth.
A world forged in a vacuum.
As our two weeks rumbling through the countryside in a beat-up 4x4 rolled on - villages, jungles and anachronisms whipping by out the windows - that long history came into focus.
The isolated evolution that makes Madagascar famous didn’t just birth lemurs, baobabs and Darwinian creatures people travel the world over to photograph. It opened a cultural divide as wide as its biological one.
Later, we met an Italian anarchist living on an isolated stretch of beach at the southern edge of the island. He owned a colorful hotel on the water called “Peter Pan,” harbored a crocodile (appropriately) on his property for fun, and had recently hosted a concert where he fired off an AK-47 into the air to kick off his punk show.
“This is… what do you say, the John Wayne…wild wild west?”
Yes, we say the wild, wild west.
“Okay. We are in the wild, wild west.”
The cigarette he was smoking ashed on his leopard-print tights. He ran his fingers through pink hair to brush it out of his eyes, lit another cigarette, and looked out on the dark Mozambique Channel lapping away down the beach. “I love it. I never want to leave.”
—
The creatures that make tourists never want to leave, meanwhile, are incredible.
You don’t sit in a city shooing ring-tailed lemurs off your table - they’re elusive and buried in national parks - but the fact that they exist because history created an alternate reality on an island the size of France hits you when a monkey that isn’t a monkey leaps over your head impossibly to grip a branch with furry, human-looking hands.
We went for something called a “night walk” in the jungle of Ranomafana. Our guide was a happy, quick spirit armed with a Yankees cap and a flashlight he used sparingly to spot things in the trees.
“There, you see?”
Absolutely not, we didn’t see. He put his finger against the flashlight so it cast a shadow on a branch 20 feet away. Sure enough, a pair of little eyeballs widened and stared at us. A mouse lemur. Within seconds, the flash of a tourist’s camera went off and the tiny primate scattered into the jungle.
“Wait, look at that chameleon!”
What chameleon? Again, 50 feet away, he pointed to an electric green speck in the dark of an electric green forest. We walked closer. A chameleon, a beautiful one. We leaned in; its slowly rotating eyeball clocked toward us, returning our stare with mild interest. Then, at a snail’s pace, the color of its scales twisted to the yellow of our light.
You won’t find much charm in Antananarivo, the island’s capital. It isn’t until your car jettisons the frantic, frightening city center that your heart-rate drops to something reasonable.
But then, quietly, the country’s twisting roadways stretch out straight toward the horizon, the scorched earth of the capital turns a neon burnt orange, and the mud-brick French Colonial houses clustered among the hills exude a charm overshadowed only by the Malagasy kids waving from zebu carts.
A warmth and pleasantness that feel endemic here.
Under the yoke of lingering colonial influence, the Malagasy could be cynical or unwelcoming. The 4x4’s that fly through villages carrying well-heeled tourists to rare animals might elicit sneers over smiles. Deforestation, corruption, or the economic disparity that puts 70% of residents below the poverty line could make the everyday Malagasy hardened.
It just doesn’t.
It buzzes around like a cluster of flies, dismissed with a wave.
We’re bringing home a print from a Malagasy photographer named Pierrot Men. A quiet force - huddled in the back of his studio behind stacks of prints and old photo paper when we arrived - capable of framing great, head-tilting angles on the isolated country. The shot we chose is three men from Fianarantsoa hidden behind carnival balloons they’re inflating on a stoop.
His perspective captures two things we’re excited to have in our house. One is the country’s unique brand of strange.
The other is the reminder that whatever intricate American reality is playing out in San Francisco for us next year - weddings, oil changes, toilet paper, BART, podcasts, government scandals, traffic on Bush - America’s antipode is milling along, still alone, sharing the day in a way we might recognize and never quite fathom.
We were walking along a beach in Anakao renown for child trinket hawkers. Sure enough, cute kids approached selling wooden bracelets, salad tongs, and bowls.
We smiled, declined, and exchanged funny faces to bridge the language gap.
They laughed and followed us. Half mile. Mile. Still with us. Holding hands, playing tag in the water, asking to be in photos.
Eventually their parents’ trinket stalls approached along the shoreline and they snapped back into character. Half-hearted pleas, a weak tug on our arms. The subtext of their looks was transparent: “Just check out our parents’ stuff, then let’s go back to having fun.”
We glanced in the stalls briefly and headed down the beach. The children followed, laughs came out again, and a game of tag resumed.
Back to being kids.
Gabriel Dillon was my randomly assigned freshman year roommate at Wesleyan. It seems likely that we were paired together for the amusement of our RA’s, so that the nameplate on our dorm room door would read “WELCOME TO WESLEYAN PETER GABRIEL!" 18 years have passed, and we're still close.
Mere and I were lucky enough to have Gabe and his girlfriend Nikki come to Madagascar and bring us in from the outside for a bit. We sat at dinners drinking unpalatable, side-of-the-road Malagasy hooch and debating the definition of sport. We planned lives for ourselves in politics, rode the N7 to its end, and watched the countryside roll by in delicious quiet. At one point, the sun went down behind a mountain in a dripping sunset and miraculously reappeared. That’s a good omen.
Gabe and Nikki, thanks for making the wild west feel like home again for a few lovely weeks.
You’re good eggs.
ITINERARY
There’s no Mauritius or Seychelles so far, but not for lack of love. Ultimately, it’s more fun to dig into a single country in these things, Madagascar charmed us, and the pictures of the other two tell a story that befits our experiences there.
As always, if you’re going, we have tips and are happy to share.
SEYCHELLES
Praslin Island
What may be the prettiest beach in the world sits on a private island known as Grande Souer. Owned by the Chateau de Feuilles hotel, it’s an idyll of palm tree clusters, slow-roaming tortoises, bleach white sand, and the pink granite that makes the Seychelles a honeymoon magnet. Chateau de Feuille, for its part, is the cream of the crop. We liked the bartender Avi so much we’re coming home with a bottle of his handmade pineapple-infused rum. For a once-in-a-lifetime trip, this could be the spot.
La Digue
We didn’t go and wish we had. Some disproportionate number of the world’s top-ranked beaches are on La Digue. Word is, you can rent bicycles at the ferry landing and take a picnic to an untouched stretch of sand all your own. Sounds very nice.
Mahe Island
Home to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it capital of the country many choose to blink and miss. Traffic in Victoria clogs up in the mornings, the city is a nest of banks, bodegas and cheap-ish eateries, and unless you have a stake in the shipping industry, there isn’t much here for the average guest.
Beau Vallon, meanwhile, gave us an excellent reason to visit certain readers might appreciate: Trader Vic’s. Having an old-way mai tai inside a Trader Vic’s on an island that actually looks like the restaurant’s drink menu was too meta a possibility to pass up.
The booze was as effective as always.
MADAGASCAR
Madagascar’s crippled infrastructure is a travel deterrent that helps preserve the country’s raw feel. Unmarked roads, police corruption, a national airline with a penchant for canceling flights, and more dirt than asphalt are the norm. We were told the only way to get around was by driver and the bare minimum to explore half the country was two weeks. Both were correct. Our driver was a gentle, kind guy name Fano we couldn’t recommend to others highly enough.
Antananarivo
Run for your lives. Maybe that’s not fair. But it’s not unfair. The throbbing, robbing, 3-million-or-maybe-9-the-last-census-was-in-‘74 Malagasy capital is what many picture dangerous African cities looking like. But then we met a French guy who owned the artsy Niaouly Hotel tucked in the hillside and employed deaf locals to make beautiful handicrafts, and we became fans.
Antsirabe
The invisible radius from Antananarivo that must be crossed for Madagascar to become charming ends at Antsirabe. What the town lacks in sights it makes up for in artisanal crafts: silks, miniatures, and wood carvings. The town’s highlight for us was a pizza place across the street from our haunted colonial hotel called Zandina - cheap, great, packed and worth it.
Ranomafana
A sprawling national park best enjoyed at night. During the day, every tourist you didn’t see along the road is crowded under the trees with telephoto lenses trying to capture an elusive, spring-loaded lemur. The village of Ranomafana, meanwhile, was charismatic Madagascar at its best. Kids playing soccer on dusty pitches, hot springs, ladies washing brightly colored fabrics along the riverbanks. We sat in a cafe and watched the town’s bustle for an hour. Nothing happened. It was wonderful.
Isalo National Park
The Malagasy answer to Arches National Park is arid, rocky and beautiful. Gabe and Nikki went for a morning hike through canyon oases, made it up to a “window rock” for sunset and came back raving. The fanciest place you can find in Madagascar - Isalo Rock Lodge - looks like a spa in Scottsdale with less golf and more lemurs.
Anakao
Getting to this remote stretch of coast involves an hour-long water taxi from the grimy center of Tulear. We rode a zebu cart to our boat, followed a fleet of fishermen navigating the reef, and arrived in the most remote stretch of paradise we’ve ever known. There are too many good things to say about Lalandaka Hotel - thatch-roof bungalows in the sand, cozy nooks in the sun, a dog named Gia who likes her belly scratched, hermit crabs in conch-sized shells, water the color of jewels and a $30/night price tag. We’ll take it. Go to Peter Pan for raw fish and a chat with the chain-smoking, punk-rocking, alligator-corralling owner.
MAURITIUS
The North
An autobahn-level highway bisects this tiny island, taking you bottom to top in just over an hour. We drove north through the sagging, industrial capital of Port Louis, passed acres of wet sugar plantations and landed in the tourist town of Grande Baie. Don’t do that. All-inclusive resorts, an over-photographed beachside church, small restaurants and boats eager to take your rupees are the main attractions. The rain was consistent for our week in Mauritius, but even sun-soaked, we’d have a hard time recommending the long fight here to anyone from the States. The most endearing moment happened on our last night, when we joined a woman named Rani at her house and ate too much local food off of a banana leaf.
The South
A haven for water sports - windsurfing, kitesurfing, surfing surfing. It feels mellow and real, less resort-riddled. The main tourist attraction is something called the Seven Colored Earths, which is seven on a sunny day and 2.5 when it’s pouring. Our hike up the tallest mountain in Mauritius gave us sweeping views of the inside of a raincloud and might have been the best thing we did all week. When the clouds cleared briefly, the beauty of the island peeked out for a second.
Everybody reading gets a hug. Soon, maybe. We’re headed to Iceland and the Faroe Islands for two weeks then land on American soil for the first time in 6 months.
Next is an icy installment, then it’s time to dig into America on an old fashioned road trip.
Excited to be home for a bit in a bit.
Lots of love.
-Pete & Mere
