Some halfway-there thoughts from somewhere in Nairobi.

I’m sitting on a bed in a little hostel somewhere near Nairobi airport inside a giant blue mosquito net that my blurry, rubbish eyes are seeing as a kind of big blue haze. Bewildering, but quite nice. It’s like this room’s way of saying: ooooooooh Nish… isn’t this weird? And it really is, Room. It really is.

Blue Haze

Blue Haze

Things always seem a bit surreal when you arrive in a completely new country; a feeling I thought I really loved until I stepped under a freezing cold shower, scribbled on myself with a microscopic soap slice for a bit and changing my mind. Stupid Nairobi. I can’t wait to get on the connecting flight.

(Offputtingly, we’re watching one of those appalling English-dubbed dramas – the background music is a kind of swelling, over-emotional string orchestra but the dialogue is all delivered in a really unnerving monotone like:

Sandy: Why are your eyes suddenly bulging with anger Mary Violet.

Mary Violet: Because I hate you Sandy. And I am in love with your husband. I will make sure that you die.

Sandy: You are saying words that might affect our friendship.

Which is making me laugh. But anyway. Anywayanyway.)

On the first flight, I ended up sitting next to a man who astonished me by making his way through about twelve cans of Coke – probably enough to paralyse a child or small animal – before the plane had even left the ground. He also felt the need to bellow everything he said to the two friends sitting less than a metre away from him and had no qualms about doing so all throughout the night, non-stop, even when he was the only person on the plane still talking, even when everyone else was pretending to be asleep, even including the people he was talking to. And because he’d started tipping rum into his drinks, he got louder and impossibly louder until he was literally drowning out the engine and everybody around him, sleep-deprived and miserable, imagined as one what it would be like to plummet down into the sea in a ball of flames and never have to hear his voice again. At least though, they thought, at least I’m not sitting right next to him. Not having that consolating thought to fall back on, I just concentrated on not swinging round and punching him in the face until I eventually drifted off to sleep.

Some time later, I felt someone jabbing me in the arm.

Me: Uh?

Bellowing Coke Man: IS MORNING. GOOD MORNING.

Me: (barely conscious) Whu?

Bellowing Coke Man: WE MEET YESTERDAY! SATURDAY. NOW SUNDAY, ISN’T IT!

Me: It is, isn’t it.

I closed my eyes and started to breathe as if I’d fallen asleep again.

Bellowing Coke Man: *jabjabjab* WE MEET YESTERDAY! THEN NIGHT, ISN’T IT?

Me: Then it was the night, yeah.

Bellowing Coke Man: AND THEN? EH?

Me: Then… then it was the morning.

Bellowing Coke Man: (delighted) NOW SUNDAY! AND WE MEET YESTERDAY, ISN’T IT?

Me: We did, didn’t we.

What I wanted to say, of course, of course, was: it’s called THE PASSAGE OF TIME, you utter, utter bell-end, and thanks to you I’ve been acutely, suicide-inducingly aware of it for nearly eight hours. But I didn’t.

I don’t know how Liam and I made it from there to this room somewhere in Nairobi, but I’m so glad we did. I’ve had a very peaceful afternoon of falling asleep, waking up, thinking, argh! I’m in Africa! and then falling asleep again.

Our flight to Madagascar is in a few hours. I wonder what’ll happen when we get there.

Meeting Man With Glasses and Captain Proactive

After our quiet day in a Nairobi hotel, things got a touch complicated. After we were dropped at Nairobi airport we were told that our connecting flight to Madagascar had been cancelled, with no further flights available until Tuesday.

The man who told us this did so with a casual grin, offered us no options and was thoroughly unhelpful. Luckily we had nowhere to go and nothing to lose, so he eventually asked Man With Glasses if he could sort out an indirect flight via Johannesburg.

Since then, the journey has taken a dramatic turn for the good. We were given food, for a start. Nish got a window seat and Johannesburg at night is beautiful from the air- like glitter in a lake. Captain Proactive met us straight after the flight and marched us to a complimentary room in the airport hotel, which is gorgeous, comfy and entirely necessary.

Johannesburg

Johannesburg

We’ve also realised that this means we’ll get to see Madagascar on the approach, as our flight will be during the day instead of at night. Really unexpected and absolutely fantastic. Couldn’t be more excited. :)

A letter of complaint.

Dear Air Kenya,

We are angry. As you may or may not be aware, the island of Madagascar has historically been regarded by the British as a distant, beckoning land of unattainable riches; merchants and sailors during the 17th century even spoke of the ‘dream of Madagascar’, so-called because it was always perceived as slightly out of reach, slightly difficult to get to. That was before the technological ingenuity of air travel. Now, thanks to Air Kenya, it’s literally, literally impossible.

We will never quite understand why we had ‘not been entered into the system’. But as we stood at Gate 30 and watched our second attempt to Madagascar take off and disappear into the ether, an apologetic and powerless air steward asked us a question which sounded like this: ‘Hivya got visas f’Sithifica?’ and it quickly became clear that we were now to get visas for South Africa. (We’ve now amassed a collection of visas, and actually, the only one that seems completely superfluous is the one for Madagascar.)

We were then forced to spend the entire day exploring Johannesburg (or the slightly irritatingly shortened version ‘Jo’burg’ used by people who, like us, find themselves saying the word a lot more than ordinarily necessary). Never mind the fact that only a few hours previously Liam and I had been having a conversation about how much we would absolutely love to explore Johannesburg. Visa-stamped and weary, we came across a driver called Douglas who took us to see the spectacular underground caves at Sterkfontein, one of the most important archeological sites in the Cradle of Humankind. This was an experience so singularly dreadful that we felt moved to take photographs as evidence. You will see us smiling, awe-struck and having a wonderful time in many of these photos. Ignore those.

Later, we found ourselves spending the evening in possibly the most lavish hotel I have ever seen, courtesy of Air Kenya. Given that we have spent many months preparing for life in the third world, imagine our surprise and disgust when we found ourselves ushered to a swanky table, complimentary champagne in one hand, cream-cheese-biscuit-thing in the other, and presented with an unlimited supply of South African red wine and a massive buffet. Particularly offensive was the vast selection of desserts, and I feel able to say that with some authority, having sampled every single one on offer. I would like to make it clear that, as somebody who relishes a challenge and sees the bright side of every situation, I am not normally the sort of person who would write to complain; it is only after half a bottle of wine that I feel able to do so.

At this point, we’re wondering whether we’re destined to ever reach Madagascar. The ‘dream’, so-called, has become the nightmare. I can only express the hope that we do not find ourselves victims of any further errors on the part of Air Kenya, which we can only imagine would lead to a scenario in which we find ourselves swimming with dolphins, sampling a selection of expensive liqueurs and smearing melted chocolate all over our faces while people applaud us and tell us how amazing our hair looks.

Yours sincerely,

Nish and Liam

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Johannesburg

Arriving in Johannesburg, Nish and I were just discussing who was going to keep watch while the other slept in an airport café, when we noticed Captain Proactive talking to a bunch of people just outside our arrival point. As we drew closer a British family grabbed us and told us that we were being put up, free of charge, in a Johannesburg hotel. I must have cried with happiness.

Nish’s face lit up too, when she saw the size of the beds we each had. Before we went to said beds, we had a quick chat about how we would like to have seen the outside of the airport, having come all this way, and that one day we would return to Johannesburg and “do it properly”.

Now, those of you that know me personally will know that fate has a wonderful way of flirting with me. I am, as a general rule, so lucky that raindrops only hit the warm spots on my skin and pickpockets just steal each others’ wristwatches from my pockets. Nish advises me that her luck is somewhat locally renowned too. It will be no surprise to you, then, that the resulting complications gave us a full day in Johannesburg and another free night at an even better hotel, courtesy of Air Kenya.

So after a mushroom panini and some internet browsing, we decided to go to Sterkfontein Caves, an area north west of Johannesburg proper which is noted as being in the “Cradle of Humankind” – a place in which evidence of lots of different early human ancestors has been found. We negotiated with a taxi driver for a bit, who turned out not to be a taxi driver but a random ‘dude’ who lounges about outside Jo’burg airport just to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Think the Fonz, but black, and with awful teeth and unfashionable brown shoes. Anyway, our actual taxi driver came over and accepted the fare that we’d talked about with Bad Teeth Fonzie, then pushed us into a taxi and started driving.

We trusted him implicitly, because, let’s face it, we were on our way to Madagascar to spend 3 months integrating into a community and relying on the kindness of strangers. We had to get used to trusting pretty much everyone. And, despite my lack of sleep at this stage, I think I could have taken him. He was a bit chubby. His name was Douglas, and Douglas drove. And drove. And drove.

We passed Alexandra, the second biggest township in the world, which was stunning against the midday sun. We passed wealth and poverty, fantastic buildings and horrible bleached simple ones, all floating on this strong, light yellow of the South African soil. I only say that now because it’s such an obvious difference now we’re in Madagascar, and the soil is blood-orange red. We passed many signs saying “no picnics”. Right in the middle of the road. Really. Picnics in the middle of a busy road in an ugly dusty yellow waste in the blazing sun are apparently so popular in South Africa that they’ve designed signs warning people that it might be dangerous.

Douglas the taxi driver spent much of the journey chastising us for not spending every waking moment in Johannesburg wandering around in the Apartheid museum, wailing and sobbing. We managed to convince him that we’d go on the way back, in 3 months time, providing that Air Kenya continue to be as reliable and accommodating as they have been so far.

Anyway, we got to Sterkfontein Caves at about 2pm, when the sun was high and mighty. Schoolchildren regarded us with interest. We looked like pale, smelly pirates, and for some reason we were in their country looking at rocks. Or, as the labels called the rocks, “Oldawan technology”. We studied this strange technology, and wondered if it did anything. Other than be a rock. With a slightly smooth face. Or a few slightly smooth faces.

I was just wondering out loud what an Oldawan-period sales pitch would be like -

“Check this out, you’ve got your 110 degree corner there, your 120 here, slightly smoothed side there for all your sanding jobs and a built-in exfoliator… turn it upside-down and BAM! You weren’t expecting us to throw in a slight sharp pointy bit in ABSOLUTELY FREE”

- when our guide arrived and hurried us down into the caves.

…which were quite stunning. It’s amazing to think that these limestone caves were made naturally, and not by some weirdo with dynamite, a chisel, a lot of spare time and a cubism fetish. Big, bold rocks suspended by little more than a tiny corner, and long columns where stalagmites and stalactites joined together centuries ago.

Anyway, check out our photographs, because we love you.

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When we returned to Douglas, two hours later, he was still dutifully waiting there in the carpark as he’d promised. He complained that it wasn’t worth going back, because he’d have hit traffic. He also subtley dropped into conversation that he was due to finish work about now, but we still had around an hour to go before we got to the hotel. Whatever, Douglas.

Anyway, Kenya Airways had EXCELLED themselves. What. A. Hotel.

As we arrived, one of the 20 smiling people at the reception desk checked us in and offered us a free glass of champagne. We totally accepted. Then he offered us biscuits with cheese. We totally accepted those as well. Then he offered us free wine in the foyer, and it was at that point that we knew that this whole Madagascar thing had been A Great Idea, if not, then perhaps The Best Idea We Had Ever Had In Our Entire Lives.

As food was funded by Air Kenya, we helped ourselves to as much of it as possible. The desserts were especially good- and there were about 20 different ones. We had all of them, and our favourite was the lemon meringue pie. Surprisingly, the chocolate sponge was disappointing and cried out for a sauce, but the lychee cocktail washed it down quite nicely.

Johannesburg airport in the day was an interesting mix of functionality and horrific exploitation. A café there was dubbed “the watering hole”, and everywhere were pictures of cartoon zebras, elephants and giraffes. There was even a giant giraffe statue next to our departure, and the chocolate shop sold “zebra dropping” chocolates in horrifically cheesy packaging. I could only imagine western travelers buying said chocolates as a joke to show their friends how cheesy and exploitative the airport was… which just goes to show how easy it is to create a market out of nothing, really.

Our personal favourite was a small baby suit which had a dancing elephant and the words “my baby loves to boogie” on the front.

WE’RE IN MADAGASCAR! NOUS SOMMES EN MADAGASCAR!

An utterly ludicrous day. We found our way to the airport and were met by a very friendly lady called something that sounded a bit like Tina, who took us to the capital, Antananarivo (Tana) in an antiquated white Peugeot with no seatbelts. Or door handles. Driving through there was extraordinary. Tana’s covered in a kind of deep terracotta-coloured mud and smells of petrol so – a hot, red, shambolic sort of place, dead chickens hanging around street corners – I’m sure I could think of a way to phrase that that didn’t sound like groups of dead chickens gathered together looking shifty on street corners, but I’m too exhausted – and children carrying babies and asking us for money. Traumatic times.

We eventually ended up at a welcome lunch with about twelve of the Dodwell team, which was awkward. The Malagasy seem shy and over-friendly at the same time, and we don’t want to offend anyone or say or do anything wrong, so they bend over backwards to make us feel welcome without actually telling us anything helpful and meanwhile we’re too polite and bewildered and busy saying ‘thank you’ to actually ask anything helpful. Like, after some frenzied Malagasy discussion one of them turned to us and said ‘Do you like pineapple? Ananas? Yes?’ and brought us two slabs of pineapple on a saucer, which we were to eat with a teaspoon while listening to obscure bits of Madagascar-related information that will never, ever be useful for us. Then they took us to the supermarket, where we obediently bought jam.

Tomorrow, we’re going to travel for eight hours on a taxi-pousse to Vatomandry, which is coastal and apparently beautiful but – OHNO! – we might not have an internet connection there. When I say ‘might not’, what I mean is that we’re going to be living in a wooden house with leaves instead of a roof. (Though, incredibly, Liam is still quietly confident that we’ll be continuing to update the blog. Liam achieves levels of optimism I never even thought possible for the human mind.) Meanwhile, we have a lot of absolutely redundant South African rand which no bank in the whole of Madagascar will change into local currency (ariary), and we’re still wearing the clothes that we put on in England on Saturday. Eww.

No pictures yet – there’s a lot of political unrest in Tana and it’s really not the sort of place to be slinging a massive, expensive camera about. There’s so, so much more to say about this and I have about a million thoughts I want to write down but we have to get to the internet cafe before it gets dark and late (and the messsage from the Dodwell team seems to be that Malagasy people are ever so friendly and welcoming but if you’re unusual-looking they will definitely steal everything you own and set fire to you.) I’ll be more coherent at some later point. I hope I don’t sound at all anxious or upset, because I’m not – I’m ridiculously excited and I can’t believe I get to live here for so long.

Liam’s thoughts to follow. In Vatomandry, apparently.

Impressions of Tana

Approaching Madagascar, the terracotta soil was a shocking dusty red, nothing like South Africa or anything we’ve seen so far. The pilot dropped suddenly, lurching and dipping at great speed until a thousand or so feet, when he appeared to remember the passengers on board and started to behave himself. He happily told us that it was 30 degrees in Tana, partially cloudy. My transparent skin let out a quiet yelp.

The Tana airport is essentially an airstrip and a warehouse, a shambling, blasted building with heavy but friendly security. Our visa check was slow, but painless- one guard tried flirting with Nish, another did a forward roll on a bench.. presumably just because he could. Everyone smiled and joked around, barely doing their jobs.

After we met our contact in Tana, she helped us into a once-white modified Peugeot. By “modified”, I mean “fatally sabotaged”. The modifications included the removal of unneeded luxuries such as seatbelts, locks and door handles, and behind the steering wheel was a mess of wires. As we drove we experienced the joys of Malagasy traffic.

The Malagasy drive, technically speaking, on the right hand side of the road. This appears to be a rule of thumb rather than a law, as do most traffic regulations. Our driver happily told us that although we were driving down a one-way street, the constant line of oncoming traffic would never be stopped by the police because there were too many of them. Utter madness.

The views outside our windows were jaw-dropping – the outskirts of Tana are awesome in the truest sense of the word. It’s a red-dust botch of a city. There is a post-apocalyptic feel to it, especially near the airport, where children wander the streets  begging for money and buildings look like old seaside shacks made by teenagers before a storm. Various small game hung on outdoor stalls, skinned and ready to buy. The smell of dust, spice, petrol and damp was and is still pleasantly intoxicating.

We stopped briefly, and a child came to my window with a tiny baby on his shoulder. He kept repeating something in Malagasy and knocking on the window, but as I had no currency I was powerless to offer help. Out of my window closer to Tana I spotted men emptying rubbish bins onto the ground and picking through paper for food. Their clothes were in tatters, literally hanging off their bodies in patches and strands.

After we visited a bank, our Dodwell Trust contact took us to the charity’s headquarters, where we were met by so many local people it made it impossible to even consider remembering all of their names, let alone the Malagasy words that they attempted to teach us. They announced our arrival by standing up and nervously singing a traditional song, which we clapped along to so as not to appear too embarrassed. We were then fed a lot of really tasty food, which was attractively presented and cooked with love and attention. There was a handwritten notice thanking us personally for coming, and they had wrapped our volunteer t-shirts in shiny paper as a gift. It was all such a beautiful gesture that I was a little overcome- our arrival was clearly quite an event for these people. Unfortunately after such an epic adventure getting to Tana in the first place, neither of us could take anything in, and we left the meeting knowing very little more than we had done when we entered.

After a visit to the supermarket at about 6pm, it was suddenly dark. Having been fed horror stories of the political climate and the soaring crime rates by everyone we’ve met, we were very careful when visiting the internet café and walking the streets. The city took on an uglier tone, with an army of prostitutes filing out onto the streets, and gangs of men loitering by the sides of the road, watching you while whispering to each other. It’s quite threatening when you don’t know what’s going on… perhaps it would be more threatening if we did. To compound our terror, the Tana accommodation is down the darkest, thinnest, most dangerous-looking blind alleyway I’ve ever seen. But we’ve had no trouble so far, and the whole thing feels a bit like an exercise in fear. There’s nothing more likely to get you mugged than looking like a terrified tourist with something worth taking.

At present we’re the only Dodwell volunteers in the whole of Madagascar, and we will be totally on our own in Vatomandry for the duration of our stay. As a change of plan we’re no longer going to Ambositra (pronounced ‘Am-boo-str’), as we’re more needed in Ampefy on the west coast, which has an IT suite and much more comfortable volunteer lodgings. It apparently also has a beautiful waterfall, a clear lagoon and some nearby rocks we can climb, which means that I’m sold. We’ve been so excited about Ambositra that it was initially a bit of a let down to change our plan, but we’re going to visit it during a weekend in early November instead, so all is good.

I’m aching to take some photographs, but Tana is apparently so volatile at the moment that children are cutting peoples’ pockets open to gather the change and pickpockets are rife. We’re advised to keep nothing of any value on us at all while in the capital, and I’d be gutted to lose my camera so early in the trip, with such amazing things to see later on. I can take some photographs of Tana at the end of the trip, as we’ll need to be back here to catch our plane. That’s assuming that our plane isn’t cancelled and we don’t have to take a connecting flight and a beautiful complimentary hotel in Mauritius… Air Kenya?

Nish and I have settled into our traveling lives quite easily and quickly. Having had to wear the same clothes for four days through Manchester, London, Nairobi, Jo’burg and Tana, we’ve had to tolerate each other even when shattered, smelly, groggy and grumpy. Our easy-going approach feeds each other, and even when things looked their bleakest in Jo’burg we’ve managed to laugh about it all. We’ll both happily sleep anywhere, take risks and rely on our seemingly limitless supply of luck without getting uptight or take ourselves seriously. I really can’t imagine a better person to be traveling with.

Also, walking around with a female friend (however platonic) seems to be really good prostitute-repellant. Much better than our mosquito repellant, which apparently makes us smell like mosquito prostitutes. We’re going to look like pin cushions when we wake up.

Tomorrow we take a taxi-brousse to Vatomandry to start our placement. It will apparently take about 8 hours to get there in the blazing midday heat, in a large vehicle carrying many other passengers. We’ll have all our main luggage with us too, so it’s probably going to be about as comfortable and fun as kissing a floor-level plug socket. I’m a closet claustrophobic, you know, which is a great way of describing it because it sets me up any one of several truly hilarious puns.

I’m loving it here. Although we don’t understand anything, haven’t got a clue what’s going on and are literally wandering around in the third world without a map or a word of the local language, we’re so excited by everything and bizarrely comfortable in our new temporary life that it doesn’t seem to matter. If we can handle this while laughing and smiling, then we can pretty much handle anything. And that idea’s so liberating.

Taxi brousse to Vatomandry

After a near sleepless night being attacked by phantom mosquitos, I wasn’t really looking forward to a 8-hour taxi ride to Vatomandry. I’ll admit that. But I was so unbelievably wrong to worry, as it was absolutely incredible.

We caught a taxi to the taxi brousse station, all held-together with tape and wires. I had to hold my bag to stop it from falling out of the open boot. It was the perfect way to start the morning though, as it helped us to realise how beautiful Tana is during the day. Yes, it’s a post-apocalyptic mess of a semi-shanty town, but in the daylight, from a good angle, you appreciate how the colours, sounds, smells and bustle actually turn into a real city. It’s crazy and awesome.

The Malagasy use a term “Mora Mora”, which apparently means “slowly slowly”. It’s kind of a self-deprecating mantra they repeat, as things move so slowly around here that even the patient Malagasy complain. Things like taxi-brousses don’t seem to have a predictable “departure time” other than “morning”, and a journey to anywhere in the country pretty much takes all day. We arrived at 9am, when it was supposed to leave, and proceeded to wait about an hour and a half before the driver turned up.

The journey progressed at a fast pace through twisted and dusty roads- I seemed to be the only person in the vehicle with a seatbelt, which I dutifully wore for the first half of the journey. Then I realised that if we crashed into a tree or something, I would be the only survivor alone in the Madagascar rainforest, with no working phone or any life skills. I would probably be be eaten alive by a giant insect. Or by several giant insects. So I quietly took my seatbelt off.

We saw the outside progress from dusty, bleak wasteland to a beautiful deep green as the taxi-brousse drove on, revealing tiny paradises on the edge of the rainforest. The soil stays bloody red throughout and the landscape itself is fascinating – giant hills covered in forest which dip into little rivers and farmland. The Malagasy people have managed to get everywhere too – you’ll see their small wood and leaf houses impossibly perched on the roadside and on hills in the distance, and small stalls selling freshly picked mangoes, pineapples and bananas to passing cars literally every mile or so between Tana and Vatomandry (which at a rough guess from the length of our journey may have been about a million miles of road).

To date, it was honestly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. A lovely way to be introduced to Madagascar.

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Taxi brousse to Vatomandry pt 2

So the eight-hour Tana → Vatomandry journey. I had no particular expectations about this, other than that it would probably take about twelve hours. (Mora-mora, they say, ‘slowly-slowly’, beaming affectionately at you as if you’re too simple to understand such a concept – but luckily for me, I’ve been living my whole life in a similarly chaotic vein so I’m perfectly at ease. Equally bizarre, I suppose, is how horrified commuters in London look the tube’s going to be arriving in six minutes instead of the originally estimated four. Different worlds or what?)

Anyway. The drive might have lasted eight hours or it might not. I don’t really know – I haven’t known even roughly what time of day it is since last saturday. It didn’t actually matter in the end – all I remember is that it was an extraordinary journey. Madagascar is magnificent. Magnificent, magnificent. We were travelling really quickly along these roads which snaked crazily around the terrain and at every bend the hedge-growth would curve away to reveal the view behind it, a bit like a French waiter standing at every bend saying ‘et voila!’ and whisking away a top-cloth to uncover the MOST AMAZING LANDSCAPE EVER. At one point it was so beautiful that my mind stopped being able to process how happy it was making me feel and I nearly burst into tears – embarrassing, but true. If I die on this trip, I thought to myself, as articulated lorries slung themselves at us around every bend at horn-blaringly, impossibly tight angles, that would be really annoying at this point because I’ve never been so aware of how much there is to see. Like, I had no idea that Madagascar looked like this. Imagine what other countries might look like! But then our driver changed the cassette, Chris de Burgh started blaring into my right ear, and I thought, sod that. Kill me.

Now we’re in Vatomandry although we’ve only really seen it at night. (In Madagascar, it goes like this: daydaydaysunshinelovelydaybrightsunnydaydaydayNIGHT, BAM. Ohno! QUICK, mosquito spray, quickly quickly, spraysprayspray, choke, pass out.) My impression so far though is that it seems a lot safer, calmer and more relaxed than Tana.. but funnily enough I’m feeling more anxious than usual. Not anxious in the horrible, slightly irrational way that people feel anxious. It’s more a feeling of being restless, or being anxious ‘to’.. I don’t know. See what Vatomandry looks like during the day? Actually teach some children something? BE in Madagascar?

I don’t know. I’m not even sure I’m forming proper sentences anymore, which, it has to be said, doesn’t bode well for my new life as an English teacher. I’ll try to be a bit more coherent in my next attempt at the blog.

Vatomandry

I’m not really sure how to describe where we’re living. Imagine going into some woods, walking for about a million years and eventually stumbling upon an derelict old outhouse. It’s inhabited by some very well-spoken but slightly deranged squatters. One of them is blowing up a balloon for no obvious reason. The other is taking swigs of tea from a vase while rambling about how they’ve been living there for over ten years. They have a hat, two scarecrow puppets, a lot of dry shampoo and not really much else. That’s us. We’re those squatters. If you were to address a letter to me, it would have to read: ‘Someone’s shed, next to some pigs, Vatomandry, Madagascar’ .

A goose stood and watched me brush my teeth this morning. He was about a metre away from me and looked very solemn. I looked at him for a while and thought: wow. This couldn’t be weirder. Then I spat out my toothpaste onto the grass and went back into the ‘kitchen’. When I say ‘kitchen’, what I mean is.. everywhere that isn’t our beds. Actually, a lot of very normal words seem to have become euphemisms. ‘Shower’ means cranking some cold water out of the water pump into a bucket, taking it into a nearby shack and sluicing myself with Radox Green Tea Infusion Wellbeing Shower Gel using a massive cube-sponge thing. ‘Shelves’ means the bizarre contraption Liam made for the ‘kitchen’ out of a cardboard box and some masking tape. ‘Dinner’ means five Salticrax biscuits followed by a Nice biscuit dipped in jam. ‘My hair’ means AARGH. ‘Toilet’ means WHAAAAAT?! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

Simple life my arse. Well, obviously, the Malagasy people have no problems with it. They just go merrily about their daily business, eating their rice and horrific, sub-standard meat, smiling and waving at each other, shooing away the occasional mosquito. We, on the other hand, are completely flummoxed by literally everything. Every tiny act requires a thousand times more consideration. We’re having to be resourceful and ingenious just to figure out how to make a cup of tea. (The process, which takes about half an hour to complete, involves the water pump, a gas canister, a soggy match and some teabags we stole from the transit hotel in Johannesburg. Although actually, this morning we tried some Malagasy tea. Powerful. I’m a big fan.)

Meanwhile, the Dodwell Trust team continue to try to be supportive. They’ve given us about six different bunches of keys so that we can lock and unlock a variety of nearby shacks for absolutely no obvious reason other than it might be quite entertaining. They’ve also given us a box full of ‘useful supplies’, including ketchup, vinegar, spices and iron wool. Christina Dodwell seems to have failed to understand that, in a situation where I barely even have a front door, ketchup is of absolutely no value to me. This morning, Eleo popped around to ‘say hello before she left’, which turned out to mean use our stove to cook some fish, fanny about bit with the water pump, teach us some Malagasy phrases and leave. So now our house smells of fish and every single fly in Madagascar is buzzing around in it, but at least we know how to say ‘I am an English teacher’.

So, today. Feeling that our diet of Salticrax and jam would probably need supplementing at some point, we got up at 5am this morning to get to the market for 6am and achieved two tomatoes, two shallots, some chick peas and a baguette. As for the rest of the day, we plan to go to the beach, do an English club, break into Kenji’s house and use his actual working flushing toilet, find an internet cafe, buy some Malagasy wine, drink it and pass out by about 9pm.

Luckily, we’ve both discovered a talent for improvisational living so we’re perfectly happy with the arrangement. We’ll be here for the next week and all of October so I’m sure by the time we get to Ampefy we’ll be Bear Grylls-like rainforest people, living off insect meat, extracting our orange juice from tree bark and wantonly killing buffalo for sport.

Friday 25th September

What an amaz

I got cut off there because a flying monster that probably doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world just buzzed right at me and I had to do an emergency dive onto my bed so I could peer at it from the safety of my mosquito net. How pathetic. It looked like.. imagine a small chunk of very sparkly emerald, but with wings, and a really stupid face. A bit like that.

Erm. What an amazing place, I was going to say. I thought I’d get used to it really quickly and stop being so astonished by every tiny thing but it looks like there’s no chance of that. I’ve actually had to start keeping a list of ‘things to remember to write about’ because it feels like every five minutes something extraordinary happens. I’ve never seen fireflies before, for example. They also have a giant fruit here, called a word that sounds like ‘Jacques’ or ‘Jack’, that looks like a massive beach ball but with green scaly lizard skin. The fruit inside’s made up of pale yellow fleshy layers which taste like somewhere in between a banana and a mango. A banango! I’m a big fan. A big fango.

ANYWAY. Today we arrived at the Ecole Technique where Liam, startled, was led away and found himself improvising an entire grammar lesson for a room full of blank-faced adults. Liam hasn’t slept for three days. Sad times.

I, meanwhile, had an outrageously fun lesson with the primary school children. I love them. We played the ‘Go To’ game, which I’d improvised in the previous lesson, where I say ‘Go to the door!’ and we all run to the door, or ‘Go to the window!’ and we all run to the window (except that one of them had brought along her two-year-old sister, who just toddled about arbitrarily) but, as I had discovered last time, after ‘chair’ and ‘table’ you realise that there’s literally nothing else in the room. I switched to the ‘How Many?’ Game – but frankly, apart from eight windows, one door, and four walls, there weren’t ‘many’ of anything and it was definitely time for a new game.

Luckily, in my mad pre-leaving-London rush to fling as many Things For Kids into a suitcase as I possibly could, I’d randomly included a bag of Dolly Mixture and some Liquorice Allsorts, so ‘How Many Sweets?’ was born. It was a hit. It’s sweeping the nation. When I lifted the bag of sweets up for everyone to see, pointed at them and said ‘SWEETS’, a reverent hush fell over the room. The baby’s mouth fell open as she pointed and whispered ‘wee’. They were all thinking, as one, so intensely that I was practically reading it from a thought bubble above their heads: ‘Do we dare to hope that if we count enough of the sweets we might, maybe, one day be allowed to eat one?’ I nearly burst into tears and flew them all back to England. But, as Liam and I discussed later, if they were English kids they would have wolfed all the sweets down immediately and wondered why the next bag was taking so long to appear. I also remembered what Dad had said about how once during his childhood in India a foreigner came to visit their village and handed out Italian sweets, and it was probably the most exciting event of the year. Anyway, once 1 to 10 had been duly boshed, I handed out a sweet to each of the children. They were so happy. I felt like Jesus. Now, every single child and parent in Madagascar knows that the daft-looking foreign girl has English sweets and sometimes, if you count them in English, she gives them to you. It couldn’t be better.

After the lesson, we saw the beach for the first time. Vatomandry is basically a quite pretty, mostly dusty shanty town and to be honest I think we thought that the word ‘beach’ would turn out to be another euphemism (like in England). Also, since arriving here we’ve been so busy doing things like working out how to purify water, burn mosquito coils and boil an egg without setting fire to ourselves that it hadn’t really occurred to us to go and have a look. But like Liam said, it’s Amazing Paradise Land. White sand, crashing waves, palm trees. Like Mauritius, but no tourism, so no sunbeds, no Europeans, no merchandise, nothing. Just the beach. Madagascar is outstanding.

So if you can be bothered to get to Antananarivo (via EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD, if you fly with Air Kenya) and then sit in a taxi-brousse for eight hours to Vatomandry there’s a lovely little hotel right near the beach. Come and visit us!

ps. Sorry about these unfocused, tour-de-force posts. We still haven’t found the internet cafe (or we might have, yesterday, but their electricity was down.. I think that’s what they were saying anyway) so there’s a sort of a Things To Tell You backlog. Hopefully the blog will become more readable as we settle down and start to post things more regularly. But probably not.