Modern Nomad: Morondava and the land of the baobabs

It was when the taxi-brousse headed south from Antsirabe and then made a right turn on the RN35 that I realized I’d never ever gone west in Madagascar. Sure, I’d gone west from Tana, but my occidental travels had only ever put me as far as Miarinarivo—which is basically still right smack dab in the middle of the country. This journey, I suddenly realized, would be taking me to a new frontier.

This new frontier was the town of Morondava, a beach city located on the Mozambique Channel, and the famous baobab trees that live in its surrounding countryside, including the famous “Avenue des Baobabs”. My friend Amy and I had been talking about doing this trip for ages, and after many failed attempts and reschedules, we at last made it happen this past November. I settled into the taxi-brousse and soon drifted off as we made our way towards the west coast through my uncharted territory, illuminated by one of the brightest full moons I’ve ever seen.

What I awoke to the next morning was a landscape unlike anything I’d ever encountered in Madagascar. As the sun rose over the reddened countryside still 50km from the coast, my first thought was that it looked much like South Africa, with its dried-up riverbeds and expanses of barren shrubland. Generally it looked more African than anything else I’d seen in Madagascar, which, of course, would make sense being that it’s closer to the actual continent of Africa; perhaps this part of the island was holding on to a souvenir from when the plates shifted and Madagascar was torn from the mainland all those millions of years ago. And then suddenly, the baobabs appeared, dotting all over the landscape. Admittedly I didn’t know what to really expect when it came to viewing these famous trees, and I suppose I didn’t expect to see them outside the famous avenue. But here they were, everywhere, and I couldn’t stop looking at them. To my just-awoken eyes, they looked like massive, earthly anchors, their branches like roots fixing them to the sky.

We arrived in the actual city of Morondava around 8AM, when the oppressive morning heat had already settled in, and then took a pousse-pousse towards the beach, where we found a hotel right on the ocean for $12 a night. Not too shabby. After a changing into cooler clothes we ventured back into town, which was right in the midst of its annual explosion of mangoes. Although we have mangoes in the southeast, the ones from Morondava are different—they are massive, globular fruits that absolutely burst with juice. And when they are in season, they are everywhere, and because they are everywhere, they are cheap. We bought a small paring knife and stocked up on an armload of mangoes (for 200 AR each, about 10 cents), then proceeded to messily eat them over our hotel sink during the course of our vacation. We also encountered the curiously fuzzy baobab fruit, which I didn’t even know existed, and were able to sample a refreshing glass of baobab jus naturel—definitely a first. Afterwards we returned to our hotel and went for a swim, my first in the Mozambique Channel. The water was warm like a bath, and reminded me of swimming in the balmy Mediterranean Sea in Ashkelon, Israel on a hot August evening in 2009.

Beautiful sunset on the beach outside our hotel.

Not bad for about $12 a night.

And the beachside restaurant gives a fashionable windswept look.

And not only was the water warm, but town itself felt like the hottest place I’d ever been in Madagascar. Here more than anywhere, the afternoon siesta seems to be a necessity. But despite that, Amy and I decided that we really, unequivocally liked the town of Morondava. Everyone was friendly, we never heard shouts of vazaha!, and a lot of people knew and appreciated Peace Corps. Amy bought a silver bracelet from a local jeweler, and when he heard us speaking Malagasy he surmised that we were Peace Corps volunteers, and then regaled us with how much he loved PCVs and insisted that we stay in his large house next time we were in town. But one of the most fun things we did was a favor for Shayla, a Peace Corps volunteer who used to serve in Morondava. After receiving a digital request from her, we stopped by her old house to talk to the local kids and see if they remembered her. They did, and so we took photos with them to send to Shayla as a little ‘hello’ from her old home. She told me that it completely made her day to get those photos, and I can only hope that someone does that for me after I finish my service, when I'll have moments of feeling like I left half of my heart in Vangaindrano.

Our hotel, Les Bouganvilliers, had an alfresco restaurant where you could sit and have breakfast a few meters from the waves, so the next morning I splurged on a pot of their strong coffee (only about $1, but that’s 10 times the price that I usually pay for coffee on the street) and snuck in a bag of street mofo (fried bread) to make it an affordable breakfast. As I sat sipping my coffee I watched giant-sailed schooners off in the distance, foregrounded by Malagasy fishermen in homemade ‘sailboats’- which are really just dugout canoes with plastic sheeting for sails. It was a reminder that the Western world’s luxuries and comfortable realities are still far off, even though I sometimes catch of glimpse of them-- like when a gleaming 4x4 filled with tourists passes my taxi-brousse that’s broken down on the side of the road.

Shortly after I sat down, a waitress from the hotel stopped by to ask if I wanted to order any food. “Oh no thanks”, I said as I hid the bag of mofo balls under the table, “mbola tsy mosare iaho” (I’m not hungry yet). But forgetting that I was hundreds of kilometers away from my town, I’d automatically used the Antesaka word for “hungry” when I should have used the officiel word since I was no longer in the Sud Est. I apologized and repeated myself in officiel, saying that I actually lived in Vangaindrano and spoke Antesaka. The waitress whizzed back to my table and exclaimed “I’m from there! I was born in Vangaindrano!”, before sitting down and chatting with me for the next 10 minutes. So there I was, practically as far away as I could be from my town, yet experiencing that warm connection that can only come from a shared idea of home.

Amy and I arranged a trip to visit the famous Avenue des Baobabs on our last day in Morondava, hiring a driver with an ancient cherry-red Renault to take us there and back. We had another comical language moment when a gendarme stopped the car along the main road and kept saying the word “apelasoa” to us. Neither of us knew what it meant and were beginning to get concerned that he was making some kind of demand, when finally he said it in English (“beautiful woman”) and we realized that he was just another gendarme being creepy. Sigh. Some things don’t change no matter where you go on the island.

We had left the town of Morondava in the late afternoon and arrived soon after at the majestic Avenue des Baobabs, which at that point of the day was simply just another dusty dirt road being traveled by farmers herding cows and kids driving oxen carts. Stopping to take a few photos, we then kept driving and stopping to see the masses of baobab trees all around, including the famous “Lover’s Baobab”, so-called because it is actually two trees intertwined together.

At last, I got the obligatory Peace Corps Madagascar photo at the Avenue des Baobabs.

This kid and his sister were wrangling (abusing) chameleons and trying to get tourists to give them money. Later, some Madagascar National Parks guides told them to stop abusing the animals-- they got a very stern talking to!

Our driver and our chariot for the baobab trip: an old cherry-red Renault.

After making the rounds and seeing probably hundreds of different baobabs, each of them magnificent and reminding me of reading Le Petit Prince in 8^th grade French class, we drove back towards the Avenue and joined the quickly-growing throng of tourists waiting for legendary sunset to begin. I’m not one for touristy things, but I do have to say that this is a spectacle whose fame is well-warranted. The sun sets at just the right spot behind the trees, and the light suddenly changes to transform the Avenue into one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen in my life, a truly otherworldly congregation of sun and sky and land. There is simply nothing else like it. I took photo after photo after photo, each one better than the next, because the scene just kept getting more and more beautiful. Standing in a field adjacent to the baobabs amongst tourists from all over the globe, all of us reverent and awestruck by these mighty trees, it hit me how amazing it was that these trees are powerful enough to draw people from all over the world to visit them. They stand there, unique and mysterious, and truly are, as I once heard them described, mother trees.