Let's go to the beach, beach

[Lyric from "Starships" by Nicki Minaj-- which is a silly song to be quoting, but it's a favorite among the Sud Est volunteers, so it's very evocative of Peace Corps for me!]

I remember it distinctly, the day during training when we found out where we’d be serving as Peace Corps volunteers: our trainers put blindfolds on us then walked us to the basketball court at the PCTC, where a map of Madgascar had been painted, in order to place us on the map, literally, where we’d be serving. I remember whipping off the blindfold, looking down at where my feet had been placed, and exclaiming “I’m going to the beach!” Being close to the ocean wasn’t something that had been on the top of my priority list for site placement, but when it became my reality, I couldn’t deny my happiness. (Ironically, I had originally wanted to be close to either Tana or Fianar, and had specifically not wanted to be in the Sud Est, but it’s funny how much I now love being here, and do not like the Tana/Fianar regions!) A couple of our trainers that week were Sud Est volunteers, and they both told me how awesome my town was, and that it was about 10km from the ocean. And so ever since I got to site, I had wanted to find out exactly how to get there from my house. Sure, I go to the beach all the time when I’m in Farafangana or Manakara, but with the Indian Ocean so temptingly close to my actual home, I was dying to explore how to get there. My friend Matt was in Vangaindrano a couple weeks ago helping me with my painting project, and when I suggested we take the afternoon off from painting in order to go explore how to get to the ocean, he was game.

To get to the Indian Ocean from Vangaindrano, you essentially just follow the Mananara River, which forms the northern border of my town, all the way as it winds its way eastward and spills out into the ocean. So we set off in the direction of the river and followed alongside it as best we could. At first this took us on what was little more than a cow path, but soon it opened up and became an actual road. We kept riding east as the river hugged the tanam-bary, crossing rickety wooden bridges and traversing rock-studded roads. As we went we’d keep asking people “aiza ny ranomasina?” (where is the ocean?), and they’d keep pointing us in the right direction. After about 45 minutes of biking the road began to close up, lushly vegetated on either side by thick clusters of banana trees. And soon after that, I cried out “I see the horizon!”

The road spills into the small village of Ampatsinakoho, dead-ending at the small ravinala huts that fringe the shore. Crowds of small children encircled us and our bikes as we introduced ourselves and asked the name of the town where we were. And then I looked past the huts and saw it: the Indian Ocean, at last. Even though I’d seen it multiple times already, this felt like my beach, in my town, and so it took on an even more special meaning. The beach was crowned with rows up rows of wooden lakanas (canoes) used for fishing, and we had the good fortune to be able to watch a craftsman working on carving a new lakana out of a tree. In order to get in a bit of swimming we hopped back on our bikes and headed south along the shore, biking on top of a grassy knoll that framed the sandy beach below. After a quick jump in the water to cool off after an hour-long bike ride, jumping around in the now-familiar massive Indian Ocean waves, Matt and I sat on a dessicated tree to soak up the absolute peacefulness that this beautiful, deserted spot offered us. I sat and watched the horizon line off in the distance, trying to figure out why there were waves breaking so far off shore. I finally wondered out loud, and then to our astonishment, we realized that what we were looking at was not waves: we were seeing humpback whales, cresting out of the ocean and landing back in the water with a splash to rival the biggest wave out there.

We sat there for a little while longer as I tried to absorb everything around me. I luxuriated in the calm satisfaction of finally reaching my goal of finding the beach from my town, and in the magnificent reward the journey brought me. And I reflected gleefully, with an innate sense of wonder, just how lucky I am to live here. I don’t think it will ever get old.

Ambani-volo adventure

A couple days ago I found myself at a crossroads, literally. I was embarking on my first “business trip”, Peace Corps-style, and was due to go out to the ambani-volo (rural countryside) town of Masianaka to work with the clove farmers. My counterpart and I made plans to take a morning taxi-brousse on Wednesday, work on Thursday, and head back on Friday. As this was to my first time working directly with the farmers, and the start of a new sustainability project that I’m rather excited about, I was nervously anticipating the trip.

But things, as often happens in Peace Corps, didn’t go according to plan. I was sitting on the brousse waiting for my counterpart to show up and meet me, when suddenly my phone rang: it was him, saying that he was stuck working in the office but that I should go, and that he would meet me in Masianaka the next day. So I went, and bounced along the backcountry roads for 2 hours when an idea popped into my head: if my counterpart wouldn’t be joining me until Thursday mid-morning, it would be incredibly boring to be in a small town alone for 24 hours with nothing to do. My friend Leo’s site, Matanga, is somewhat close to Masianaka, and I’ve been trying to go see his site for ages. Certainly, if I just went straight to Masianaka I’d have plenty of time to get my work done in preparation for the presentation to farmers, as well as some time to explore the area and see the ocean. But on the other hand, I’d be alone in an unfamiliar (albeit tiny) town. Perhaps it would be safer for me to spend the night in Matanga at Leo’s house? And I’d been trying to meet up with Leo to catch up for ages, and like 2 ships passing in the night, we just keep missing each other, either when he’s in my town or I’m in our banking town. Plus I happened to be carrying a letter for him that arrived at our shared PO box in Vangaindrano, so it would be good for me to deliver his mail. And so I made the split decision to go to Matanga, which marked my fifth attempt to go visit Leo—but in this case, the fifth time’s the charm!

When we got to the fork in the road where you can either go to Matanga or Masianaka, I abruptly told the brousse driver that I’d changed my plans and wanted to get off there. Somewhat bewildered, he nevertheless stopped the brousse and helped me unload my bike from the roof, which I’d brought because I was planning to bike back to Vangaindrano from Masianaka (about 35km.) So I strapped on my helmet, saddlebags, and backpack and set off on the 10km towards Matanga, with a plan that I would surprise Leo, spend the night there, and then set off for Masianaka early in the morning, which would allow me to be there in time to meet my counterpart.

Instantly I was treated with a taste of the road conditions to come: the first stretch of road was an incredibly rocky downhill slope. But then the road forked again, and although there was a sign, it didn’t say “Matanga this way”—it said something in Malagasy that I didn’t understand. I asked a passerby which way to go, and he said right, so once again, off I went, and was met by even more challenging rocky downhills. My bike was misbehaving and kept fishtailing due to the weight of my saddlebags, which made it even more of a difficult ride. I stopped to pump more air into my tires and wondered to myself, did I just make an incredibly stupid decision? Here I was biking on a bad road with no cell phone reception, going to a town with no cell phone reception, and only the brousse driver and the other passengers heard me say I was going to Matanga. But, the deed was gone, so I kept going, all the while cursing myself as I kept being faced with more and more challenging stretches of road: rock-studded uphills, incredibly rutted downhills, and just generally terrible conditions: this is officially the worst road I have ever seen in my life. Every time I was greeted with another impossible rocky hill I swore out loud and hopped off my bike to walk up it, in a bid to save my tires as well as my hips. Of course, the benefit of all those hills is that they afforded absolutely gorgeous vistas, so I did in fact stop to smell the roses. But every passing minute made me more and more angry with the ride, which was definitely longer than 10km-- although there were no route markers so I had no way of knowing, which was incredibly maddening. My head was a boiling kettle of anger and frustration, which only intensified when passersby would tell me I still wasn’t near Matanga yet.

Finally, 2 sweaty hours later, the road opened up into an actual, somewhat developed town, and when I saw the sign for a school that read “Matanga” I just about passed out from the relief. After asking a few people for directions, I found the right house, and by exclaiming “surprise!”, woke a very confused Leo up from a midafternoon nap.

After I recounted my journey and my commitment to never, ever do that bike ride again, Leo figured out what had happened. “Ohhhh you took the bad road!”, he said. Apparently it doesn’t actually need to take 2 hours to go about 14km—there is, in fact, a better road that is actually 10km to Matanga—it was the other road at the second fork. And the sign that I couldn’t understand? It says “don’t take this road unless you have a 4x4!” Um, yeah, that’s quite a warning. I was furious with myself for not taking the other route, but it made for a good story when Leo was introducing me around town. We spent the day hanging out, cooking dinner, and just generally catching up, before turning into bed early—I was planning to head out at 6:30am to do the 25km ride to Masianaka, but this time on the “good” road!

And so the next day, after some mofo balls and coffee, I took off in the cool morning air. My first challenge was the “bridge” (or should I say, lack thereof) just outside of town. Leo surmised that the kid giving me directions probably told me to go the way he did because the bridge on the “good” road is broken, and is only passable by walking a bike over it. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but followed Leo’s instructions to dismount, walk my bags across, and then come back for my bike. As I carried my bags over walking on a single plank, my fear of heights resurfaced, and I was terrified at the thought of both having to cross over it again, as well as carry my bike across it and cross it one more time. Thankfully, a nice man saw me struggling and carried my bike across in a 5 second trip, making me feel quite untalented. And so once again, I set off, and although there were definitely some rocky hills that I needed to walk up, I made much better time: it took me about an hour to do the 10km to the fork in the road, and then another hour to ride the 13km south to Masianaka. The second section of road was mostly blissfully flat, and a few kilometers south of the fork it becomes the town of Nosy Omby (“Cow Island”, though it’s more of an inlet than an island) with gorgeous views in the distance of the Indian Ocean, sun twinkling off the water in all its glory.

I arrived in Masianaka mid-morning and found a place to rent a bungalow for the night. Masianaka is a very small town, and most of its reason for being is the fact that it’s home to a ferry crossing that anyone driving south to Ft. Dauphin needs to take. With only a few hotelys and one epicerie, there isn’t much going on. There’s no electricity, no cell phone reception, and no water pumps anywhere in town. And so when I asked the proprietress if there was anywhere I could take a bucket bath, she said there was a place “over there” and pointed off in the distance. Her daughter offered to take me, and off we went along with 2 other girls. What I thought might be a quick trip ended up being a 20-minute walk through the tanam-bary (rice fields) and towards the ocean: the “place to bathe” is actually a natural freshwater pool on the beach. It was a beautiful walk and I was thrilled to be standing on the beach, but I declined to bathe there after seeing two of the girls pull down their pants and pee directly in the water.

I went back to my tiny little hut and managed to clean enough of the biking grime off of me using baby wipes that I’d luckily brought (thanks to Bridget and Shelly for sending them—you have no idea how useful they were!), and after changing into “work” clothes, I finished writing notes for the talk I wantd to give the farmers. And then I set about waiting for my counterpart. And waiting. And waiting. I luckily had a book with me, and spent the better part of a day sitting around outside reading and looking at any arriving car or taxi-brousse to see if he was on it. Sadly, he never showed. I was ready to give up and get a ride back to Vangaindrano when it started to get dark, and I actually saw a car with 2 of my TIAVO coworkers pass through town. When I told them what happened they offered to give me a ride home, but when I said that I had a bike with me, they realized they had no way to strap it to the car. Damn. So night fell and after eating another rice-and-fish meal, I went back to my bungalow to turn in for the night, praying that it was not a place that rats liked to frequent. 

I fell asleep listening to the sound of the waves crashing on the beach, and luckily didn’t hear any rat activity. I woke up early today and after downing 6 small bananas, set off on the road to Vangaindrano. It was a pleasant ride, probably the more so because I was so happy to be getting home, and I covered about 34km (on a fairly bad road) in approximately 2 hours and 45 minutes. The best part of the ride was the fact that I beat the pickup truck that was leaving Masianaka around the same time and had offered me a ride, which I declined because a) I fixed the issue with my bike, and b) the driver was being an condescending, misogynistic d-bag by implying that I couldn’t possible know what to do with a bike because I was a girl. (The best feeling was when I zoomed past him and gave him a big “eff you” smile in the process.)

The first thing I did when I got to Vangaindrano was stop at the office to find my counterpart and ask, essentially, why the hell did he leave me out there alone? He said that instead of going to Masianaka on Thursday morning as he’d said on the phone, he ended up going Wednesday afternoon. And when he got there and asked around, people told him that I’d gone to Matanga, so he assumed I wasn’t coming and went to a different town to do work. He said he passed through Masianaka on Thursday and people said I wasn’t there, but that doesn’t make sense to me because I was there from 9am onwards. (I could have been misunderstanding him though, because I’m still working with a language barrier.) When I got home, I was a heady mix of emotions: happiness and relief to be back at my house, anger and frustration at the fact that I had wasted 3 days and a lot of money, disappointment that I went all the way out there for nothing, but also pride in the fact that I conquered that road by bike. I’m not sure when I’m go back out to Masianaka, but it’ll probably have to be soon because the project needs to get started. Whenever it is, though, next time I am not going alone!

Biker chick

Several years ago I had the esteemed fortune to be visiting London and staying with my friend Jon, whose favorite hobby is riding his motorcycle. Even more fortunate was the fact that Jon invited me to take a motorcycle tour of London. So I hopped on the back, put on a helmet, and off we went for the better part of an hour, before ending at a tapas bar in Islington to get dinner with another friend. When we got off the bike, Jon told me just why he likes riding a motorcycle so much: “it clears the cobwebs out”, he said.

This is an epithet that’s stuck with me ever since, because it’s such a perfect description for the sensation of mental cleansing you feel after speeding through the open air. And recently it’s popped into my head again because that’s exactly the way I feel when I am zipping down one of the local roads on my bicycle.

I’d heard that Peace Corps gives Madagascar volunteers bikes, but didn’t think much of it until I got to site and realized just how vital a bike is, especially in the Sud Est. My house is about a 30 minute walk from the center of town (and therefore the market, the post office, the office where I work, and the taxi-brousse station). But on a bike, it takes a mere 10 minutes. And when I go to my banking town, Farafangana, I always take my bike so that I can make the quick trip to the beach for a splash in the Indian Ocean. Plus, the towns down here in the southeast are all so spread out, so not having a bike makes getting around town much more difficult.

But more than just a simple mode of transportation, I’ve realized how much joy I find in riding my bike. Maybe that it brings out a childlike sense of adventure, reminiscent of when my set of wheels was pink and had streamers on the handlebars, or maybe it’s that it provides me a vehicle for one of my favorite activities—exploring—but whatever it is, I find that I always look forward to getting in the saddle.

Recently I’ve been trying to push myself on longer and longer rides to both get in shape as well as find a fun weekend activity. My recent accomplishment involved biking 25km roundtrip on a back road to find the beach, and then biking 55km roundtrip the next day on a little jaunt with my friend Matt. I arrived home after this ride—my longest to date—feeling a sense of pleasant exhaustion and proud self-accomplishment.  The road leading out of my town, the Route Nationale 12, is paved but extremely hilly, so although it offers beautiful vistas and views of the ocean off in the distance, it’s a punishing ride. But on this trip, I managed to bike up every single hill, without stopping to walk once. (Ok sure, I had to crank the gears all the way down to make it up, but I’d rather go in ‘granny gear’ than walk.) Biking here in Madagascar, especially the southeast, has also brought some uniques challenges that I've proud to have conquered: I've had to become mahay (skilled) at adventurous routes that include biking up sandy hills and down rocky ones. To get to my house I have to bike up an extremely sandy hill, which I'm able to make it up about 60-70% of the time without stopping-- and whenever I do, it feels like a little victory.

My ultimate goal is to be able to bike 100km in one day, and I have a little more work to do to get in shape for this. But I’ve been enjoying using biking as a mode of exercise, because my hip is still messed up from marathon training and I can’t run like I used to be able to. And even more than just a form of exercise, I relish the chance the clear out the cobwebs.