I just got back to Cape Town after traveling through Madagascar with some best friends here, Rachel and Paige. Wow is all I can say. Never in my life have I been to a place that is so untouched by westernized civilization or modern culture. It was an incredibly humbly experience that I foresee myself pulling from for a really long time. I wanted to check in and share my experience with you all!!! Thanks Paige for help with this post ;)
As the fourth largest island in the world, Madagascar is an isolated country to the east of Africa and somewhere I figured I would never be able to travel back to in my life. We flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town to Antananarivo, Madagascar and the total travel time was about 6 hours, around the time it takes for me to travel from home school.
It has SUCH a unique culture and history. It is a blend of African, European as well as Asian cultures. It was primarily influenced by the French who were the original colonizers of the island, but its Asian and African cultures strongly prevail. Malagasy, the national language, derives from French. Most people are short like Asians, yet have black skin. The diverse people were only a fraction of the life on the island because 90% of all animals and wildlife found on Madagascar do not exist anywhere else in the world. 90%! Vanilla is also their largest export and it is supposedly the best on Earth. Brought you home some fam!! Hope it lasts. Their currency is Ariary and an average meal is 15,000 Ariary, which is about $4.00 so that was really crazy! Oh and on their 1,000 Ariary bill they have LEEMURS!
Knowing all that from my research beforehand, I knew I was going to be exploring somewhere totally different than any other place I’d been. I knew that it was going to be underdeveloped, but I did not foresee the country to neglect the use of street signs, stop lights or paved roads. There were ONLY dirt roads for miles and miles. Luckily, we knew from our other friends who went, to hire a driver and we got crazy lucky with Hasima. He is a local to Antananarivo and rated number one on lonely planet J He brought us from place to place, as well completely culturally enhancing our experience. Within just the first car ride, from the capital Antananarivo (or "Tana" as the locals call it) to Antsirabe (a small town 4 hours away) , I picked Hasima’s brain with a million questions. He explained to me that the Madagascan flag's green represents rice since they grow and eat so much of it, red represents the fraternity of the nation, and white represents water. As I spoke to him more, I truly perceived the presence of French and Asian influences and the absence of an African influence. He reacted to my observation in explaining that natives tend to not feel a necessarily strong connection to Africa; most have never even been to the continent. They feel more of a connection with Asia than with Africa but feel that they are considered as part of Africa solely because it is geographically closer. He ranted about how the movie Madagascar (I've never seen it) is obviously so inaccurate and that none of the Big Five (lions, leopards, elephants, rhino, water buffalo) who are characters in the movie even live there. Being of course so fascinated by health, he shared with me that most Malagasy people only life to around age 60, you pay cash and visit a doctors’ home (more like their hut) if you’re sick and can afford it and there are extremely low obesity rates as they eat a non-westernized diet of barely any processed food!
Other observations mine from out the window during that first car ride: Madagascar is absurdly beautiful. It is so untouched and vastly uninhibited by mass socialization and consumerism that most of it is earth it is original state. There are giant puddles of water, basically small lakes, everywhere and it's a land of hills continuing on for miles. Women actually walk down dirt roads with huge baskets balanced on their heads, just as you would imagine in a film about tribal Africa. The variety and abundance of trees are absolutely jaw-dropping, I fell in love with Baobab trees, which are these beautiful thick trunked trees local to Madagascar. Herds of Zebu (a combination of cows and camels crowd the streets at all times. Zebu are essentially a combination of cows and camels with a huge hump on their backs) are many people’s mane mode of transportation, food source and income provider. Paige ate a zebu for dinner the first day and loved it to much that she tried it everyday in filet form, in soup, on kabobs, and as a hamburger. (ew), but I’m sure for a meat eater it rocked.
Some more things I learned: Boys often walk two or three hours to school everyday whereas girls do not receive any education at all. F the patriarchy!!! The women get married as early as 15 and start having children around age 20.
Okay craziest thing I learned: every 7 years, the tribes host a huge circumcision ceremony for all the boys ages 2 through 9. This is a cultural right of passage and they don’t use any anesthesia or medication. Afterwards, the grandfather of the boy EATS the foreskin with a banana. (????) Everyone goes through this. How crazy! After engaging in an intense conversation about all of that, I was hit with a shocking realization that if I had been born in Madagascar, which maybe I was in another life, I would now be married, have kids, and my parents would only have ten or so years left to live. Shocking.
After writing just that^ so far, I am so overwhelmed. This journey meant so much to me and I truly do not know how to portray that through just an email. I wish I could sit down with each of you guys and tell you every single detail of all of my experiences!!! It was eye-opening in so many ways. We drove hours on end through dirt roads cutting through small, under-developed villages where people have absolutely nothing. I have seen life in poverty before, but this was just so different than any exposure I have ever received. I feel so lucky for the life I have been blessed with.
Highlights: watching the sunset twice at the Avenue of the Baobabs, this beautiful path of Baobab trees. (see pic below) It was absolutely breathtaking and meditative. We drank local vanilla rum around a beach bonfire along the coast of the Indian Ocean, playing guitar and singing Malagasy songs with Hasim’s friends. We spent a night in a cabin lodge in the middle of the Kirindy Forest, where we went on a night and day exploration with a trained guide, seeing six out of the eight different species of lemurs in Madagascar as well as owls! As we were leaving the forest one of the guides came to our car to say bye to us and of course he was wearing a freaking USC HAT?!?!?!?!? How unreal? HAHAH I’m laughing out loud as I type this because it is crazy- in the most isolated place I could ever be, I see a piece of home. A sign? Supposedly ever year students from USC come to the Kirindy forest to research the diverse animal species that live there. This WORLD wow.
We spent two nights in a bungalow on the beach in Morondava, a small beach town. We watched Madagascan children pound into the ground to polish diamonds under a bridge. I gave a bag of apples to a group of children who haven’t eaten an apple before in their life. We played with chameleons and we watched their skin ACTUALLY change colors depending on what they were touching. I talked to a dad of 6 kids who barely spoke English on the beach, writing how old I was in the sand to overcome the language barrier. We engaged in cultural conversations with our native drivers, diving into the religion, politics, history, and customs of this intriguing country. We thought and we be’d. Still reflecting. So grateful.