Despite having enjoyed the friendliness and hospitality of the people of Jordan and the amazing visit to Petra, we were ready to move on. Especially after almost a week in a cockroach riddled (Dan averaged 6 kills per day) and (too late we realized) bedbug infested room ( 36 bites on one leg must be a record of some kind?!). Hey at least it was cheap!!!
We arrived in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagscar without having any real idea what to expect. We were pleasantly surprised by the bright coloured houses that seemed to dominate this country! This was a stark contrast to the brown mudhouses we had got used to in Amman! Undeniably Madagascar is a very poor country, but admirably the people make the best of what they have and are generally vivacious and smiley! Very rarely have we encountered such enthusiasm from kids who spotted us 'Vazahas' miles away and yelled their hellos! ('Vazaha' is a term for white/ foreign people based on the name of a tree with flaky/ peeling bark from too much sun! Very appropriate!) We of course didn't want to disappoint the children and leave them thinking that 'Vazahas' are arrogant, so we made sure to wave frantically left and right.
Another interesting, but challenging aspect of Madagascar is the lack of proper roads in many parts of the country. This has been compensated by alternative means of transport such as pirogues (= a dugout canoe), zebu-carts and shared vans (called taxi-brousses) to help ease travelling around. One thing these have in common is that it is extremely slow-going! Dan and I initially joined an organised trip to get to some more 'difficult-to-reach places'. Then we planned to explore the south/middle of the country making use of the excellent taxi-brousse network running along the only highway going south. We knew that this was definitely not the most time-efficient way of getting around, but without question the most budget-friendly!
The taxi-brousses had 14 passenger seats. We were told that new rules limited the driver to overfill the taxi-brousses and that this was strongly enforced by the many police and military check-points along the way. (For awhile we believed this to be true until we later on got squeezed into a taxi-brousse with 28 people, including us+ a chicken :)). We were also told that the drivers were not allowed to drive at night either due to bandits or because of bad roads....never worked out what was the real reason. Either way, with this information we were set to endevour on our first taxi-brousse ride.
We arrived early at the taxi-brousse station. We knew that the taxi-brousse wouldn't leave until it was full, but we anticipated that it wouldn't take that long considering that it was already "full" when we bought our tickets. All they had to do was to load stuff onto the roof of the taxi-brousse. Three hours later we were still watching as they were strapping tables, chairs, ducks and chickens onto the roof. Apparently someone was moving house!!! We had been told that we would reach our destination 600km away in the afternoon around 4pm. It was late morning before we set out so obviously we knew this was optimistic and guessed maybe it would be more like 7 or 8pm (if that was before any night drive ban would come into effect) ! However, after 2 hrs and many, many more stops we had only covered 50km. Considering the banned night driving we now doubted if we would make it to our destination at all that same day. Not much we could do about it so no point in worrying to much about it! Instead Dan and I entertained ourselves by listening to the loud Malagasy music blaring out of the speakers and finding English words for the lyrics that sounded like the Malagasy words. We were particularly fond of the "sundried cheesy" song, which was played fairly frequently and that we cheerfully sang along to! Later we realised that our "cheesy" might actually have been the word for Jesus!! Oops! I'm sure that must be counted as a severe case of blasphemy to call Jesus-"cheesy and sundried" :)
The taxi-brousse journey continued even after dark (at 6pm) so we had our hopes up that maybe we would make it after all. BUT at 9pm it was blatantly obvious that we were in no such luck! Only about 100km from our destination we had stopped along side the road with another 20 taxi-brousses in front of a military check-point and we were not going anywhere.We assumed that this was it for the day and that probably we would continue after sunrise the next morning, which would be the logical thing to expect. We settled in for a night in the freezing taxi-brousse with our 12 co-passengers while listening to Madagascar's version of Elton John! It was very uncomfortable, but we managed to get a few hours of sleep (maybe). At 1 am we woke up and the taxi-brousse was on the move???? What was the point in stopping at all?? That just didn't make sense at all!! It was even more illogical since we reached our final destination at 4am!! The town was deserted and we refused to get out. Instead we stayed inside the taxi-brousse at the taxi-brousse station, desperately trying to stay warm until sunrise. In the morning, looking a bit rough and ragged, we got on the next taxi-brousse, but only after reassessing our plan. We had overnight learnt our lesson and decided to shorten our intended distance between destinations as to avoid another night in the taxi-brousse. At least after this we truly came to understand the meaning of the favorite Malagasy expression "Mora mora" which means slowly slowly!!
We arrived in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagscar without having any real idea what to expect. We were pleasantly surprised by the bright coloured houses that seemed to dominate this country! This was a stark contrast to the brown mudhouses we had got used to in Amman! Undeniably Madagascar is a very poor country, but admirably the people make the best of what they have and are generally vivacious and smiley! Very rarely have we encountered such enthusiasm from kids who spotted us 'Vazahas' miles away and yelled their hellos! ('Vazaha' is a term for white/ foreign people based on the name of a tree with flaky/ peeling bark from too much sun! Very appropriate!) We of course didn't want to disappoint the children and leave them thinking that 'Vazahas' are arrogant, so we made sure to wave frantically left and right.
Another interesting, but challenging aspect of Madagascar is the lack of proper roads in many parts of the country. This has been compensated by alternative means of transport such as pirogues (= a dugout canoe), zebu-carts and shared vans (called taxi-brousses) to help ease travelling around. One thing these have in common is that it is extremely slow-going! Dan and I initially joined an organised trip to get to some more 'difficult-to-reach places'. Then we planned to explore the south/middle of the country making use of the excellent taxi-brousse network running along the only highway going south. We knew that this was definitely not the most time-efficient way of getting around, but without question the most budget-friendly!
The taxi-brousses had 14 passenger seats. We were told that new rules limited the driver to overfill the taxi-brousses and that this was strongly enforced by the many police and military check-points along the way. (For awhile we believed this to be true until we later on got squeezed into a taxi-brousse with 28 people, including us+ a chicken :)). We were also told that the drivers were not allowed to drive at night either due to bandits or because of bad roads....never worked out what was the real reason. Either way, with this information we were set to endevour on our first taxi-brousse ride.
We arrived early at the taxi-brousse station. We knew that the taxi-brousse wouldn't leave until it was full, but we anticipated that it wouldn't take that long considering that it was already "full" when we bought our tickets. All they had to do was to load stuff onto the roof of the taxi-brousse. Three hours later we were still watching as they were strapping tables, chairs, ducks and chickens onto the roof. Apparently someone was moving house!!! We had been told that we would reach our destination 600km away in the afternoon around 4pm. It was late morning before we set out so obviously we knew this was optimistic and guessed maybe it would be more like 7 or 8pm (if that was before any night drive ban would come into effect) ! However, after 2 hrs and many, many more stops we had only covered 50km. Considering the banned night driving we now doubted if we would make it to our destination at all that same day. Not much we could do about it so no point in worrying to much about it! Instead Dan and I entertained ourselves by listening to the loud Malagasy music blaring out of the speakers and finding English words for the lyrics that sounded like the Malagasy words. We were particularly fond of the "sundried cheesy" song, which was played fairly frequently and that we cheerfully sang along to! Later we realised that our "cheesy" might actually have been the word for Jesus!! Oops! I'm sure that must be counted as a severe case of blasphemy to call Jesus-"cheesy and sundried" :)
The taxi-brousse journey continued even after dark (at 6pm) so we had our hopes up that maybe we would make it after all. BUT at 9pm it was blatantly obvious that we were in no such luck! Only about 100km from our destination we had stopped along side the road with another 20 taxi-brousses in front of a military check-point and we were not going anywhere.We assumed that this was it for the day and that probably we would continue after sunrise the next morning, which would be the logical thing to expect. We settled in for a night in the freezing taxi-brousse with our 12 co-passengers while listening to Madagascar's version of Elton John! It was very uncomfortable, but we managed to get a few hours of sleep (maybe). At 1 am we woke up and the taxi-brousse was on the move???? What was the point in stopping at all?? That just didn't make sense at all!! It was even more illogical since we reached our final destination at 4am!! The town was deserted and we refused to get out. Instead we stayed inside the taxi-brousse at the taxi-brousse station, desperately trying to stay warm until sunrise. In the morning, looking a bit rough and ragged, we got on the next taxi-brousse, but only after reassessing our plan. We had overnight learnt our lesson and decided to shorten our intended distance between destinations as to avoid another night in the taxi-brousse. At least after this we truly came to understand the meaning of the favorite Malagasy expression "Mora mora" which means slowly slowly!!
No comments:
Post a Comment