Pink Boots and a Machete

by Mireya Mayor

  Larger than California and about the size of Texas or France, Madagascar is the world’s fourth largest island, isolated in the Indian Ocean off the coast of southern Africa. About 70 percent of the estimated 250,000 species of fauna found on the island exist nowhere else on the globe. They are animals that can only be described as evolutionary oddities.

  Madagascar is a scientist’s dream come true.

  This true living laboratory has given rise to creatures reminiscent of something out of Dr. Seuss. The aye-aye is an iconic example. Although a primate, this nocturnal lemur looks like a large cat, boasts ears like a bat, a bushy squirrel-like tail, an elongated extraterrestrial-looking middle finger, and beaver teeth that never stop growing. Once thought to be extinct, the aye-aye was rediscovered in 1961. It remains an endangered species because its habitat is being destroyed and because of native superstition. Ancient Malagasy legend says that the aye-aye is a symbol of death. Some villagers believe its mere appearance predicts your death. I was both excited and terrified to see one.

  Having traveled all over the world, I can attest to the claim that Madagascar is unlike any place on Earth. Entire books have been dedicated to the question of just what caused Madagascar to become so different. Why is it that almost everything that exists in Madagascar exists nowhere else in the world? Some argue that these animals were already there when the land that is now Madagascar drifted away from Africa some 160 million years ago. But animals akin to lemurs didn’t arise until about 58 million years ago, so that throws a huge wrench into that theory. Did they walk, swim, or drift there? Nobody knows. Naturally absent from Madagascar are dogs, rabbits, cats, monkeys, squirrels, gorillas, elephants, pangolins, antelopes, zebras, camels, giraffes, hyenas, lions, cheetahs, monitor lizards, adders, vipers, cobras, pythons, hornbills, woodpeckers, and other animals prevalent in nearby regions of Africa. Why didn’t they come, too? Nobody knows. What we do know is that of the more than 150 mammal species that live on the island, about 90 percent are endemic. To this day no one is sure how they got there. But that’s only one of Madagascar’s unsolved mysteries.

  Madagascar is home to screaming reptiles, hissing giant cockroaches, and a curious beast, the indri, that sings a song of indescribable beauty. Many a day I wished I could have been one of the first people to arrive on the island, when it was a real-life Jurassic Park. How I would have loved to witness giant lemurs the size of gorillas sharing the forest floor with dwarf hippopotamuses and 600-pound tortoises. Flightless elephant birds, standing more than ten feet tall, raced through the island’s forested savannas on legs no smaller than tree trunks carrying their half-ton bodies, laying eggs that could hold the fluid content of about 180 chicken eggs. With a single egg, an entire village could have feasted on omelets for a month. Sadly, those jumbo-size creatures, along with the rest of Madagascar’s aptly named megafauna, went extinct 2,000 years ago.

  But the curious creatures that remain, if more compact, are no less impressive. The giraffe-necked weevil could inspire a Steven Spielberg movie, and I dare say the aye-aye might have been the muse for Gremlins. In the trees, two-foot-long chameleons have tongues that can be longer than their bodies. They extrude their tongues faster than the human eye can follow, at around 26 body lengths per second. They have a bizarre way of moving, in which they slowly rock back and forth between steps, often in time to the rustling of nearby leaves.

  Camouflage is a fashion staple here, and no one wears it better than the geckos. The humbly named fantastic leaf-tailed geckos have a flattened, leaflike tail complete with notches to resemble a decaying leaf. Its close cousin, the fringed leaf-tailed gecko, sports some 300 teeth, more than any other reptile or mammal on earth. And the lemur’s wild nemesis, the fossa (pronounced foosa), is Madagascar’s shorter and stockier version of the puma. Dubbed the pink panthers of Madagascar, fossas are killing machines, eating pretty much anything that moves with powerful jaws filled with canines as big as any guard dog’s and long, retractable claws on both front and hind feet. The coolest thing about the fossa is that their feet are reversed. The biggest toe lies on the outside of the foot rather than the inside, so it can grip trees. What gets most scientists’ attention is the fossa’s penis. An adult fossa is about 3.5 feet long and has a penis of about 7 inches, a sixth of its body length. If a man had the same ratio, he would be 3 feet tall and very smug. These creatures only begin to scratch the surface of Madagascar’s carnival of animals.

  Perhaps it was my own island roots, but when I stepped off the plane in Madagascar, I was struck by a feeling of familiarity and homecoming, almost recognizing the distinctive sights and smells of this peculiar place. Perhaps as a child I had been there in my vivid imagination. I instantly loved how the dust coats every surface, leaving houses and plants and even cows looking dry and reddish, like they’d been colored by a brick-red Crayola.

  Dr. Handsome, the Smithsonian director I’d worked with in Guyana, had come with me. Seems that the sight of my basketball hands there had not scared him off. We were headed to Analamera Special Reserve, a 34,700-hectare nature reserve and the only place in the world where Perrier’s sifakas and most other animals on the island are found. But first we would need food and supplies. The port town of Antsiranana, also known as Diego Suarez, was the jumping-off point for Analamera. Diego Suarez was named for two Portuguese sailors: Diego Diaz, who first landed on Madagascar in August 1500, and Hernan Soarez, who arrived six years later. This slightly decaying but hauntingly picturesque town of 100,000 inhabitants has one of the world’s most beautiful and widest bays. It was hard not to be captivated. The town retains the charm of its French colonial past, with balustrades and columns lending it an elegant and aristocratic air. Important strategically since 1884, the port was used as a naval base by the French until 1973. This would be our only opportunity to buy food and supplies to last us through the expedition.

  The seemingly simple task of shopping in Madagascar’s colorful, open-air markets is an expedition in and of itself, and an exhilarating experience. Walking through the hundreds of rickety wooden stands crowded under a sea of umbrellas, I watched as men hacked big chunks off a side of beef and women stacked fruits and vegetables into tidy pyramids. Despite trying to look like I belonged, I was swarmed by young men offering to act as guards. After repeatedly declining their services, I realized I had been pickpocketed. Luckily, a woman witnessed the crime and screamed at the perpetrator, madly waving her broom and insisting he return my money until he did. I thanked her profusely, completely in awe of her ability to rescue me while carrying a dozen live geese in a woven basket on her head.

  With my money back in my possession and tucked into the very bottom of my backpack, I needed to figure out how to convert the local currency. In my pocket I carried a huge clump of cash, bills far too big to fit in an American wallet, and in denominations starting in the thousands. I had no idea how much a 5,000-unit bill was worth. To make matters more confusing, coins and banknotes were denominated in both Malagasy francs and ariary, with the subunit of the ariary, the iraimbilanja, worth one-fifth of an ariary and equal to a franc. The trouble was, besides the difficulty in telling the difference between the two types of bills, posted prices were arbitrarily given in either ariary or francs. Yes, it was that confusing. With ariary worth five times more than the currency marked Malagasy francs (MFG), on more than one occasion I paid 25,000 MFG when I thought I was paying 5,000.

  One of the more stressful tasks in the market is bargaining—unless, of course, you’ve been trained by the best. And Mima was the best. I had many years under my belt of watching my grandmother score unbeatable prices in Miami flea markets. No salesman at any level of experience was a match for her bargaining skills, and I felt sure I had inherited her shopping genes. But to bargain in Madagascar you have to know what the local price is. Is the equivalent of a dollar too much to pay for a kilo of tomatoes? Am I being taken? Should I try to get my tomatoes for 80 cents? Is it really worth pretending to walk away to save 20
cents? Mima would say yes, so that’s what I did. I came to learn that paying a third of the price you were quoted as a foreigner was fair—more than the locals would pay but fair. When I learned that the average Malagasy yearly income is $200 per family, I felt guilty arguing for those 20 cents (or 437 ariary/2,200 MFG) and made it a point to overpay for my tomatoes thereafter.

  I thought for sure that once we were in country, getting to the field site would be the easy part. However, I discovered that only two trucks in the entire town of Diego Suarez could make the off-road, muddy trek, and both those vehicles were sitting on cement blocks. “The roads are impassable without a good vehicle,” said the hotel owner, who also rented the cars and manned the restaurant. “I may be able to sort you out a truck, but it won’t be ready for another couple of days.” It wasn’t ideal, but it’s not like we could just dial up the local Hertz. We agreed to wait. With that he brought us Madagascar’s beer of choice, Three Horses. Seeing as how I wasn’t going anywhere, I downed several, finding it curious that every bottle tasted different. Perhaps it came down to which horse.

  A week later we were jumping into the back of an old four-wheel drive loaded down with camping gear and enough food to last us a month. The driver took us to the local office of the National Association for the Management of Protected Areas (ANGAP), where we picked up a guide and presented our permits. There we met a short, fit Malagasy ranger in his late 20s, who would lead me and Dr. Handsome to the lemurs and make sure we didn’t make off with any. In truth, he was our babysitter. We then set off for the forest along a dirt road barely wide enough for a bike, getting stuck numerous times en route and trashing the area’s last good truck.

  After several hours we arrived at a spot where fallen trees prevented the vehicle from going farther, so we jumped out and unloaded our gear. We began walking. Where to exactly I had no real clue, but I was happy to be on my way there.

  For days on end we trekked, set up camp, ate, slept, broke down camp, and trekked some more. The area was in large part devoid of trees, and where trees did stand, there were barely enough leaves for shade. Steep cliffs rose in the distance above two rivers. Small streams flowed toward the Irodo River in the north, fracturing the plateau. Rice grew on the Irodo plain, flooded by a reservoir. In the valleys and well-watered areas stood deciduous dry forest, with canopies 50 to 65 feet high. The area looked nothing like the dense jungle vegetation I had grown accustomed to. It was difficult to imagine that anything could survive in this dry and desolate environment.

  The absence of trees made it difficult to escape the sun. That would have been tolerable if we were seeing animals along the way, but we had not set eyes on a single one. It wasn’t just the lemurs we hadn’t seen. I would have been content to spot a snake, or chameleon, or even one of those freaky long-necked weevils. I was beginning to think the island dubbed the “most biologically diverse place on the planet” was a sham. Was it too late? Had all the animals gone extinct already? I asked our ranger to show us where we were on the map. When pressed about where exactly he’d seen the sifakas, he admitted he’d never actually been there before. The man whose job was to protect this critically endangered animal’s territory and on whom we were relying to take us to them had never been there.

  We needed a Plan B.

  Clearly, the guide was less than enthusiastic about the pilgrimage. He did not appreciate the outdoors the way you’d expect a park ranger to. Besides not liking to be there, he pointed out that the area was far too vast for one man to cover. Built like a runner, he did like to do one thing. This man could eat. As a result, we were running out of food two weeks earlier than expected. Where he might eat one bowl of rice in his town, he was eating five bowls of rice with us. The expedition was beginning to rip apart at the seams, and the only man who could help us was hungry and in no mood to do so. His hunger pangs finally prevailed, however, and he agreed we’d take a detour to a village, a three-hour detour, as it turned out.

  The village was small and rudimentary without any electricity or wells, only a few thatched houses and no sign of a market. We could hear thumping like a giant’s footsteps from the huge mortar and pestles villagers use to remove the chaff from the rice. Clotheslines aired tattered yet sparkling white shirts. However lacking in financial means, the Malagasy are very conscious of cleanliness and appearance. Like human washing machines, women beat clothes against rocks by the rivers, often becoming prey for crocodiles. I have yet to figure out how they get muddied clothes to look so clean. I have tried beating my clothes, too, but all I seem to do is injure myself.

  Dr. Handsome and I were immediately besieged by children. Their parents followed. Then the parents’ parents showed up. Soon we were surrounded by no less than a hundred people, none of whom said a word, only stared at us the way zoogoers observe the gorillas mating. I stood there feeling much like an extraterrestrial, wondering whether they were expecting us to break into a song and dance and whether I dared dig to the bottom of my backpack for my last granola bar. The fact that I could say hello in their dialect probably gave them something to talk about all week. It made them laugh for minutes.

  One of the little girls finally broke out of the circle and ran up to me. I stood very still. She reached out, touched my arm, and then ran back to the circle screaming as if she’d pressed her finger to a hot stove. The little girl next to her then ran up and touched my hair. This prompted the rest of the kids to run forward and touch any exposed part of me and then run away howling with laughter. Turns out, this wasn’t some strange Malagasy ritual. This would mark the first time this village had seen a white woman.

  I was a hit. Or so I thought.

  Malagasy in remote areas learn from their folktales that white-skinned vazas, or foreigners—also called mpakafo, meaning “heart-takers”—come to the island to kill them and eat their vital organs, especially those of women and children. I thought perhaps I should eat my granola bar and try to ease their fears.

  I would learn that night that despite their poverty and fear of whites, there is no more generous people. We feasted on an authentic Malagasy meal, a sakafo, consisting of ravitoto, a pork stew with ground cassava leaves, and the ubiquitous rice and washed it all down with ranon ’apango, a watery drink made from burned rice. The latter is an acquired taste. Over the next weeks I would also learn that trekking was only part of the challenge of an expedition. Every visit to a village required a rum-soaked meeting with tribal elders that lasted through the night, occasionally for days. The rum, a home-brewed jungle concoction, burns the throat like jet fuel. So not only was I hiking under a scorching sun for hours on end in my lemur search, I was doing it sporting a king-size hangover.

  From this village we added members to our expedition. Zaralahy was the village elder, with more than 20 grandchildren. A sweet, soft-spoken man weighing no more than 90 pounds, Zara seemed to have more energy than a Duracell bunny. He was also nimble and had a fantastic, toothless grin. He uttered the words we so needed to hear, “I know where those sifakas are,” and, with an elfish laugh, jumped up to gather a few belongings.

  The villagers helped us gather food to take on our journey, and Zara offered his son Bendanalana’s services as camp cook and guard, an offer we happily accepted. Trying to make up for lost time, we rented a zebu cart to help transport our gear and waved goodbye to a group of new folks who had trekked out to see the crazy white people. Seven hours into the forest and not a single animal later, I considered us crazy white people, too.

  My feet were swollen, sore, and close to quitting. I jumped on the back of the zebu cart to give them a break but jumped quickly off; with no suspension, the ride was too hard on the rear end. While my body kept urging me to quit and call off this failing expedition, my stubborn Cuban genes told it to shut up. I asked Zara how far we were from our destination. He pointed to a small clearing on the map between two even smaller forest patches. “Antobiratsy,” he said. I looked up the meaning in the Malagasy dictionary. My heart sank. We wer
e headed, if literal translation was to be believed, to “bad camp.”

  Several hours later, Zara gestured to us to drop our packs, as we had finally arrived at the clearing. No sooner had our bags hit the ground, putting them at the same level as our morale, than little black faces peered through the branches and stared at us like the villagers a day before. Here at last were Perrier’s sifakas! Immediately, I whipped out my camera, before they could disappear into the forest. But they were in no hurry to go; the photo session went on so long, I actually started to get bored.

  I couldn’t understand it. How was it that there were no photographs of these animals, when they were quite clearly not camera shy? Amid beaming smiles around the campfire, I asked Zara how this marvelous place could have been given the name “bad camp.” He explained that villagers came here to mourn the death of a family member. It was considered a holy ground, and many local people believed their ancestors were there in the form of my beloved lemurs. This reincarnation had been the lemurs’ saving grace, as locals deemed it tavy, or taboo, to hunt them. After experiencing generations of mourners, the lemurs in this spot had become habituated to human presence. “Bad camp” was the best camp ever. That night my spirits lifted, and I went in search of chameleons and mouse lemurs. Wouldn’t you know it? They were there, too.

  This wondrous, lemur-filled place, Antobiratsy in Analamera Special Reserve, is protected on paper but still encroached on by villagers, miners, and hunters. Over the next several months in Antobiratsy, passing miners would stop to show me gorgeous sapphires bunched in handkerchiefs from their pockets. Sapphire is my birthstone, and not so long ago I would have leaped to buy one. But having learned that those precious stones are the source of deforestation and the destruction of entire ecosystems, I would tell them to get lost.

  Each day began at 5 a.m. with a bowl of mushy rice doused with sugar, which mimicked the texture and taste of oatmeal, and coffee sifted through Bendanalana’s sock. I convinced myself it was a new, unused sock. After breakfast we would split up into teams. Zara and I would follow one group of sifakas, while Dr. Handsome and the ranger went after another. The goal was to take down as much behavioral data as we could on the various groups. Since forests in that area are sparse and trees often completely devoid of foliage, lemurs have little protection. The area is so dry that the sifakas come down to the forest floor to drink from the river, exposing themselves to predators, especially fossas and birds of prey. Observing this behavior at the river was a scientific first. Each day the lemurs would travel extensively, making our days very long. Often we would not reach camp again until dusk, when the sifakas had finally settled into a sleep tree for the night. By the campfire we would sit and talk, the only other sound our forks scraping against metal plates as we ate to a serenade of frogs and geckos.