Archive for January, 2009
All in One
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
A quick cross-country dash and we were in the cradle of all crawling, clawing, flying, and fantastic. How so many different creatures coexist harmoniously under the same treetops – I don’t know, but they are all here. All the stench of the taxi-brousse stations, the mystery ingredients of the Chinese soups we’ve become accustomed to here, and the bone breaking roads, it’s all worth it when you are surrounded by trees covered by rose-bush-like thorns, inhabited by skull-faced long-legged spiders and beady eyed bats with their young.
Just by our campsite we found a Madagascan hog-nosed snake finishing off an egret that maybe was a fosa’s early catch. Silly sifacas do yoga on tree branches right above our tent and I can’t resist them. We miss our zoologist, but we did find ourselves some new ones – Madagascan parks are now overflowing with foreign biologists researching everything from mouse lemurs to the colorful reptiles of the big island. This time we met South African researchers looking for tenrecs and spent a night running after them in search of these hedgehog-like animals. The scientists found what they needed, and we found everything else from mushroom-looking spiders to even a crocodile.
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Ifaty
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
Vova left us in paradise. The land of zebu milk and baobab honey – Ifaty. At times, his methods drove me up the wall, so I was surprised to feel a lump in my throat when we said our goodbyes. On the other hand though, if I didn’t feel that way in the end of a four month journey with the guy on what was probably the best part of the trip so far, I would be one cold hearted bitch. We’ll miss him, but the separation is not going to be too long – we’ll meet him in Ethiopia only in two months time.
Travelling with him, half the time I didn’t know whether to call him on his bluff or to start a fan club. On one hand, his life, in his recollection, was one big adventure from an early carrier in catching snakes in Central Asia, to being the lone survivor in a sinking of a Chinese ferry, to buying a Madagascan slave and teaching her enough to get a job as a nature guide. But on the other hand… Hell, who am I to speak? If half of my adventures would have been told to me by somebody else, I wouldn’t believe them. In the long run, what is undeniably true is that we wouldn’t have seen half the things we’ve seen if we didn’t team up with him. We’ve learned a lot, too. I silently remark to myself that this bird that just flew by was not just a wanga, but a scimitar-billed wanga, even though I only saw it for a second. Shurik brings me hissing cockroaches to show and photograph – definitely Vova’s influence. Besides, I rather enjoyed his sarcastic tone and the constant feeling we’ll find or get ourselves into something really interesting really soon.
There was a storm the day he left. And after it, a gorgeous sunset streaked with pink and orange eventually blending into gold. The next morning the beach was full of seaweed and some dead fish. As I walked along the water I picked up a little beached cow-fish. “Poisson de-zebu!” proudly said a local woman walking by.
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