From now on, I will skip
the chronology, and rather than following the rollercoaster of my
moods I will try to sum up and convey some of the most important
impressions of the trip, both the immediate impressions based on my
journal and the reflections several weeks later. What I have already
noticed when writing the previous posts is that some memories have
faded away while others have become more intensive and disturbing.
We left Tana early in the
morning, our bags on top of the van, all of us cheerful and full of
expectations. Mami, our guide, told us that on that day we would
drive 170 km through the mountain plateau, which felt tolerable, and
I was anticipating stunning views from travel agent's site. It took
us about two hours to get out of Tana, with the traffic and no
traffic lights, and when we eventually got out, the city just seemed
to go on for ever, one huge slum along the road, expanding every now
and then into a village or town. We stopped at one place to watch
people making clay bricks, the clay dug up from rice fields and dried
in the sun. For the rest of our trip we would see huts made from
these bricks, endless ochre-coloured huts, some quite large,
two-storied; as Mami explained, the ground floor was for storage and
possibly fowl, while families lived in the upper floor. Some of the
huts under constructions, just empty shells. No doors, no windows –
gaping openings. But building, building, building, to provide for
exponentially growing population. To be fair, you could see that some
houses were minimally decorated: a hint of a brick pattern,
occasionally some paint. It made me feel slightly better, that even
in utter misery human beings do not lose the sense of beauty. But
like in many poor countries, rubbish everywhere. The scenery, when visible at all, was dull, not quite mountains, not quite desert.
I had not been prepared
for this. I had been anxious about strenuous walking, but I had not
been prepared for the mental and emotional shock. I hoped once we
left Tana we would be in the middle of nature, but of course there is
very little nature left and rapidly disappearing - the endless
refrain: “It all used to be forest” - and I had not thought about
it at all. We tend to get indignant about deforestation and people
destroying nature, but looking at the endless rice fields you
suddenly realise that people do not destroy nature because they are
evil, but because they are hungry.
My frustration of the
first day was counter-productive. What can you do? Why don't they use
machines in agriculture? Why don't they use solar energy? The
children and young people we met, they must learn, they cannot go on
like that, exploiting nature. So naïve, so imperialistic.
I had seen poverty and
misery, and this was not much worse than the Russian countryside,
while the climate is better – you cannot stay alive in a Russian
winter without doors and windows. (Although my relatives, deported to
Siberia in the '40s, partly survived in clay huts in minus 40C in
winters. There was not much choice, survive or perish). My travel
companions were fascinated, but apparently with my background I saw
something that they didn't see. I simply could not watch it with a
detached attitude; it was too much reminiscent of personal
experience. I was thousands of miles away, but unimaginable squalor seemed to be the same. No electricity? No running water?
When I worked for charity in Russia, in the '90s, we learned that 60%
of maternity hospitals lacked running water. When I was in Moldova,
we learned that 90% of households outside the capital lacked
electricity.
And yet, when we stopped
in villages, for whatever reason, and took a walk, I did not feel
threatened as I had felt in some other places. People were friendly,
cheerful, smiling, trying to make a conversation. They were not sour
Russians in provincial towns; they were not Armenian teenagers
throwing stones at tourists; they were not Moroccan beggars and
annoying vendors. They were not sitting idle along the roads; they
were building, farming, making things. Whenever we stopped, we were
surrounded by people who apparently just wanted to meet us. We felt
welcome, and yet I also felt uncomfortable.
One of my early positive
experiences in the middle of squalor was a sanitary stop along the
road. Public toilets are the best indicator of a country's level of
civilisation. This one was a primitive timber structure on a slope, a
drop hole, but clean and smell-free. There was no door, take it or
leave it. I had no problem with it. Everywhere we went, with one
exception, toilets were fine, as long as you brought your own paper.
Of course, we didn't go to places that might be less civilised. The
endless markets we visited were filthy, with open sewage next to meat
and fruit.
Because of eternal stops
and because of the state of the road (we didn't know yet that the
road was excellent by Malagasy standards), the 170 km took the whole
day. But, I kept telling myself, forty years ago the main road
between Moscow and Leningrad was in the same condition. It's good to
have a frame of reference.
When we arrived at
Antsirabe on that first evening, I was mentally exhausted. Our hotel
was an oasis, literally and symbolically, although by no means
luxurious, a clean and comfortable cabin, where I hid from the misery
of the day while Anton and the rest went for a walk. I was, and still
am, ashamed of my feelings, but it would be dishonest to omit them,
and also they were central to my whole experience of Madagascar, and
my struggle to overcome them was my most important lesson.
Many years ago I went to
St Petersburg with a colleague who had little experience of Eastern
Europe beyond luxury hotels and air-conditioned coaches. It was
during the short span of time after the collapse of the Soviet Union
when informal cultural exchange became possible, but the new
infrastructure hadn't emerged yet. We had come by car via Finland,
and the road from the border was rough (although not worse that
National 7 in Madagascar). The hotel was nice, although shabby, and
my eyes did not register anything extraordinary. But after a couple
of days, my travel companion broke down on Nevsky Avenue, unable to
cope with filth and decay. I hailed a cab and asked the driver to
take us to the posh international hotel where my friend quickly
recovered in the foreign currency bar.
I couldn't help thinking
about this episode when I locked the cabin door in Antsirabe, trying
to escape from depression; I couldn't read, because reading the novel
I had brought felt ridiculous, almost offensive. I read the
guidebook, trying to make sense of what I had seen. I felt unable to
socialise and went back to the cabin after dinner. Anton went out
again, and on return told me that they had talked to rickshaws in the
streets, the most prominent feature of Antsirabe, according to the
guidebook. None of the rickshaws owned their vehicles, but rented
them by the day. Unless they had at least one tourist ride a day,
they were losing money. There were hundreds of them, and only a
handful of tourists. Local rides were cheap. It hurt me watching
barefoot young men, almost boys, pushing carts with people sitting in
them. Too many things hurt too much.
Each day we were given two
three-course meals, far too much for me, but how can you leave half
of the food on the plate when you know that people around you are
starving? The food was excellent, although somewhat repetitive: zebu
steak, zebu stroganoff, zebu stew, grilled zebu. Mami told us that
local people maybe eat zebu once or twice a year. We ate more zebu in
ten days than a family eats in a year. If you thought about it too
much, you would choke on your steak. Breakfasts was continental,
unsuitable for low-carb person like myself, but you could order eggs
at extra cost. Bottled water was also extra charge, but ridiculously
cheap. By the end of the trip, when we came to really dry areas, Mami
asked us to save empty bottles, which he filled with tap water and
gave people along the road. He also asked us to save hotel soaps and
distributed them among children we met, who carefully broke the tiny
soaps into four pieces and shared.
I didn't discuss any of
this with Anton, except when he asked me, as we were walking past a
miserable timber hut: “Can you imagine living in this house during
rain season?” He couldn't. I reminded him, as I kept reminding
myself, that lots of people we knew or had known used to live like
that, and not in a tropical climate.
Of all the places we
stayed at, Toliara, the final point of our trip, was the worst.
Unexpectedly, it was full of beggars and pushy vendors we had not
seen before; it didn't feel safe anymore. It was horrendously filthy;
the mangroves I had been looking forward to see turned out to be a
sewage ditch. Mami had run out of ideas of what to do with us, and we
spent some hours in a “typically Malagasy” bar, drinking beer at
slimy tables covered with flies, with two stray dogs walking around.
The initial itinerary of our tour started from Toliara. I am glad they reversed it because I might have turned and gone straight back home.
To be continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment