Ten Ferries to Fort Dauphin: The Story of My Biggest Peace Corps Adventure

Author's note: this is a post that I have been wanting to write for almost 2 years. However, because some of the people involved were still serving as PCVs until now, and because we broke a few Peace Corps rules in doing this, I've been forced to wait a while to write about it. When a classmate of mine asked me 'what was the craziest thing you did in Madagascar?', the story of this adventure was my answer. It remains one of the highlights of my experience in Madagascar, and one of the most rewarding and challenging things I have ever done in my life.

I have always been entranced by maps. I lose myself just staring at them, poring over place names and imagining the adventures they hold. And so when I first learned of my Peace Corps site placement midway through Pre-Service Training, I quickly looked up Vangaindrano on the map at the training center. I pointed at my new town to one of our volunteer trainers, remarking “oh look, I won’t be that far away from Fort Dauphin” [a popular large-ish city on the island’s southeastern tip, located on a beautiful bay]. And then she proceeded to laugh hysterically. 

Map courtesy the Bradt Guide to Madagascar

You see, in Madagascar, sometimes maps lie. In this case, what the map says is a road is actually more of a “road”. It uses the term very loosely. She explained to me that not only is the Route Nationale 12A unpaved, but it’s notoriously treacherous, and just plain mind-bogglingly bad. What’s more, it includes 10 ferry crossings where inland rivers spill out into the Indian Ocean, like the teeth of a zipper. Given how terrible the road has always been, and the vast plains of emptiness that lie between Vangaindrano and Ft. Dauphin, it’s no surprise that bridges have never been built. So as a result, this 230km (143 mile) coastal stretch that should be a straight shot from Vangaindrano to Ft. Dauphin takes at least 2 days in a 4x4, more if you’re in a taxi-brousse (if you can even find one taking the trip.) The paved road heading south from Irondro, the Route Nationale 12, ends in Vangaindrano, giving my site what the Bradt guidebook calls “a frontier town feel”; any road venturing further south is just mud, rocks, and dirt. But on the map it looks like such a straight shot down Madagascar’s arrow-straight east coast. And all throughout the first year of my service, Ft. Dauphin sat on the map on my wall, taunting me, beckoning me. It was so close, yet so far away. I had to find a way to make the trip. And I decided to do it on a bicycle.

But it looks like such a straight shot!

I’ve talked before about how my Peace Corps service turned me into a biking addict, for many reasons including the fact that sometimes it’s way more enjoyable (and often even faster) to bike somewhere versus sit in a cramped, slow taxi-brousse. Biking became my weekend adventure and entertainment, heading to different towns to visit other volunteers, and because biking was so imbued in the Sud Est volunteer culture, I quickly fell into the same behavior. I pushed myself to reach loftier and loftier goals—longer distances, worse road conditions, more brutal hills. And so after about a year of turning myself into a hard-core biker, the idea of biking to Ft. Dauphin became my ultimate goal. In early 2013 I recruited 3 of my other Sud Est volunteer friends—Leo, Nick, and Rory—who were similarly into biking, and we made a plan. We strategized about the best time of year to make the trip (early September, giving the roads about a month to dry out after the rainy season, but not yet into the hot season), and we all began informal training regimens to prepare ourselves. For me, it involved multiple trips to visit Leo at his site in Matanga (about 35km on a terrible road), plus increasing the road distances that I could do in one day on the paved-yet-hilly RN12: first getting to 50km, then 80km, then finally I hit my brass ring of 100km in one day. I also spent a significant amount of time doing research on the route: my work with clove farmers brought me as far south as the first 55km, so I was able to scout that part of the road and talk to locals who were familiar with the rest of the RN12A and the towns that we would find on it. We had to plan strategically to determine our exact mileage for each day to ensure that we’d be able to place ourselves in towns with food and lodging by each evening. And after months of planning and training, the date finally arrived. Since my site was the furthest south, my house became our starting point for the trip, and the guys arrived the night before Day 1 to crash chez moi. The night before, we all sat at my table eating the giant dinner of pasta and ratatouille with garlic bread that I’d cooked, cracking each other up after somehow landing on a hilarious joke pattern surrounding the movie Das Boot, and then headed to bed to rest up for the adventure to come. Leo made sure to charge his satellite phone—our emergency lifeline—because we weren’t sure how many days it would be until we found electricity again.

Day 1: Vangaindrano to Manambondro, 53 kilometers, 1 ferry

We started the day with last-minute bike tune-ups, coffee and mofo from my neighbor’s stand for breakfast, and fresh coconut water from the coconut tree behind my house. I packed up my 2 saddlebags, including bike gear like chain grease, a pump, and extra tubes, and then just like that, we set off. Despite being the dry season, there had been a bit of rain lately, and the first 10km gave us all some lovely mud splatters. I was very familiar with this stretch of the road from my bike trips to visit clove farmers, though I felt anxiety kicking in thanks to the mefloquine that I was still taking at that point. (Was this a terrible idea? Will I make it? There’s no going back…) After 35km we arrived at the first ferry crossing in Masianaka only to find that the ferry was not actually running, so we paid lakana (dugout canoe) operators to paddle us and our bikes across the river, and then stopped for lunch in town. We set off for the final 20km to Manambondro, where we planned to spend the night, and the road became a little worse. I also found myself being chased by a drunk man who was trying to get a ride and jump on the back of my bike—and I experienced the terrible feeling of trying to outrun someone but not being able to due to rutted and hilly roads. It was a scary moment, but Leo distracted him by telling him that he’d dropped his paraky (chewing tobacco), and thankfully he ran off to retrieve it. We were closing in on Manambondro and anticipating taking a nice cold bucket bath and drinking a beer, but about 3km from our destination, just as I was about to head down a hill, I saw a streak of orange fly in the air ahead of me. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the streak of orange was Rory’s t-shirt. His bike wheel had gotten caught in a rut and he’d flown over his handlebars while his bike remained stuck in the ground. Luckily he was unharmed, but the force was great enough for his front wheel to be bent sideways—“taco’ed”, as Nick put it. 

The guys realizing what had just happened to Rory's bike.

After inspecting the damage, we decided the best thing to do was put Rory and his bike on the next passing truck and try and get it repaired in town, while we followed on bikes. I can’t even begin to describe the look of despair and dejection in his eyes: here we were on the trip we had been carefully planning for months, and his bike craps out on the first day. We arrived in town and searched for a repairman, but we weren’t optimistic: this was some pretty serious damage, and this was not exactly a bustling metropolis. But word spread that 4 vazahas on bikes had arrived, and that one of them needed a repair, and in perhaps the biggest stroke of luck and fortitude I have ever experienced, the guy was able to fix it after about an hour of carefully adjusting each spoke until the wheel was straight enough to ride on. I was so thrilled that Rory could still join us on the trip, and we finally got to have our dinner and cold beer. What’s more, it was actually Rosh Hashanah, and I’d brought a little bit of honey with me for the occasion. For lack of apples, we used bananas, but there I was ringing in the new year with 3 great friends on the best adventure of my life, in a middle-of-nowhere town with no electricity or cell phone service.

Nick and Rory with the bike master working his magic.

Day 2: Manambondro to Manantenina, 80 kilometers, 4 ferries

After a solid crash of a night’s sleep, we awoke early the next day and set off on uncharted territory: we were finally biking on roads that I’d never been on. We hit the second ferry right away, which wasn’t running yet since it was only 6:30AM, so once again we paid lakanas to paddle us and our bikes across.  

Nick & Leo with their bikes in the canoe.

Selfie with the mpitondra lakana.

Rory in the canoe with our bikes and gear balanced up front.

This day ended up being perhaps the most trying one of the trip, and definitely one of the most physically taxing days of my life. It started out with rather pleasant tree-lined roads, but after 3 hours we were getting nervous that we hadn’t hit the next ferry. I was dying from the difficulty and exertion—the “road” was basically rock-studded dirt hills. At last, after about 4 hours of biking, we reached the third ferry, in Befasy, and I collapsed out of dehydration and exhaustion onto the floor of the hotely where we’d stopped for lunch. 

Hmm... we could keep going to Ft. D, or we could just take a left and hang out in Sandravinany for the week.

"Bac" is the French word for ferry, and the Malagasy language has borrowed it.

After a bit of a break, lots of rice and beans, and tons of beverages including water, Coke, ranon’ampango (rice “tea”), and some oral rehydration salts, I felt well enough to get back on the bike. The third ferry was operated by shady characters who insisted that we pay them 10,000 Ariary, when in fact all the ferries should be free. We knew it was wrong and illegal, but what could we do? 

On the overpriced ferry.

We had no choice but to pay. The rest of the day’s biking got worse and worse. We were biking through sheer nothingness, and I could understand why there has never been an impetus to build an actual road there. First up was the section of “road” that consisted of a massive sheer rock face going downhill, then uphill, with a stream running through the middle of it. Needless to say, I walked most of that.

Um, yeah, I'm not going to chance this one.

Looking back at the "road" I had just come on. Yikes.

The guys, on one of the better stretches of road.

But after the rock came the sand. We found ourselves biking through grassy plains that were filled with deep sand, and they stretched on forever. It was getting late into the afternoon, foreboding dark clouds were appearing on the horizon, and we absolutely, positively, had to make it across the next ferry, #5, in order to get ourselves to the town of Manantenina for the night, which was the only place in the vicinity with food and shelter. If we missed the last ferry (at sunset), we were screwed. I found myself at my breaking point after trudging my bike up seemingly endless sandy hills, and at one moment I threw my bike into the sand, exasperated and tearful, and shouted “I am so sick of this!” But as Leo reminded me, like our favorite Gui Boratto song, there’s no turning back. At last, we finally made it to the ferry just as it was beginning to get dark, with Manantenina and the promise of food and beds just across the river. Nick and Leo had gotten there first, and as Rory and I rolled up to meet them, Leo congratulated me for making it through some incredibly challenging biking. He then admitted to me that some (unnamed) other volunteers had told him that I would never make it, that there was no way that a girl could do this trip. “You’re proving them wrong, Em”, he told me. And that was all I needed to hear to make the 10 hours of biking worth it. After the ferry arrived and we crossed over, we found a cheap bungalow to rent, and in another stroke of luck, found a little restaurant with incredible food. I’ve had the extreme privilege to dine in some of the most exquisite restaurants in the world, but that meal will probably go down as the best one of my life—because after 10 hours of biking through the worst terrain that nature could throw at you, unsure if you will even make it, there’s nothing like tucking into a cold beer, a huge steaming bowl of nutty and delicious local red rice, and the best fried fish on earth, plucked from the ocean just a stone’s throw away. When all was said and done, we had biked from 6:30AM until 4:30PM—10 solid hours of biking on some of the worst roads in existence—and covered 80km and 4 ferry crossings. Biking 80km on a paved road was already a challenge for me, let alone biking on the kind of terrain we were dealing with. I fell asleep happy, full, and proud of myself—we were about halfway done, and I couldn’t believe I had made it that far.

Keep on keepin' on...

Day 3: Manantenina to Mahatalaky, 70 kilometers, 5 ferry crossings

We woke up the next morning and encountered some seriously bad luck: Nick’s water filtration pump, which we’d been relying on for drinking water thus far, had broken. We tried to fix it but it was no use—it was officially busted. With no ATMs until Fort Dauphin, this meant that we’d need to budget carefully in order to be able to buy enough bottled water, which was going to get expensive considering that the guidance is to drink 1 liter per every hour of physical exertion. What’s more, we weren’t even sure if we would find water for sale along the way, given the vast emptiness of the terrain we’d experienced the day before. We stocked up on as much as we could in Manantenina and then set off, getting a late start due to the unexpected filter issue. Having passed the halfway point it felt a bit like we were in the home stretch, especially because that night we were due to arrive in the town of Mahatalaky and meet up with Sam, another volunteer who lived in the nearby beachside town of Ste. Luce. Although we felt like the biking would have to be easier than the previous day, Sam had warned us that that stretch of road was sandy and rocky. And much to our chagrin, we discovered that she was right. This was perhaps the bleakest stretch of road we encountered the whole trip. We covered 5 ferry crossings that day, and several of them claimed to have run out of petrol (a similar situation to what was featured on the Madagascar episode of BBC’s “World’s Most Dangerous Roads”), so we had to pay teams of local men to hand-paddle the ferry across the river. And although the ferries in the first half of the trip usually were centered around towns that at least had little shops or hotelys where we could get food and drink, we found almost nothing for sale this entire day. We passed through some tiny towns that were so remote and so isolated that there was an eerie sense of danger from the way people looked at us. There were some points where I thought I might get robbed if I didn't bike faster. “Let’s not stop here to rest”, we found ourselves saying fairly often that day. Because we couldn’t find anywhere to sit down to eat rice, our lunch that day consisted of sitting in the desert shrub sharing a can of sardines and packets of Salto crackers among the 4 of us. If we hadn’t bought those in Manantenina, we might not have made it. We all ran out of water shortly after that. We finally came across a house and asked the woman living there if she had any ranon’ampango (boiled rice water, which is safe and sterile to drink) that she could give us. “We don’t have any rice here”, she said. “We only grow cassava.” That was the moment when I realized just how remote of an area we were in. In Madagascar, rice is life. It forms the basis of every single meal. To be living somewhere in Madagascar where you can’t grow rice is the definition of no man’s land. But the woman did offer to get us some water from her well, which we thankfully accepted. With no way to filter it, however, we relied on a double dose of our chlorination drops (which are supposed to be used in combination with a filter), and prayed for the best. We had no other option. Late into the afternoon, the sun was fading and once again we were getting nervous about when we would actually get to Mahatalaky. Plus there was the anticipation of finally getting to see Sam. At long last, we arrived in town as the dark was settling in. I saw Sam standing on the side of the road and was so elated to a) have at last made it to the town and b) get to see my friend that I jumped off my bike, threw it to the ground, and ran over and gave her a huge hug. We had been biking for 9 hours that day—from 8:30AM to 5:30AM—and we were so relieved to see Sam and sit down with her for a jubilant dinner and round of beers. We once again found cheap bungalows to stay in, and after refreshingly cold bucket baths, we all went to bed and crashed hard. The final part of the journey was almost upon us.

So excited to meet up with Sam!!!! (Ignore the thumbs down signs from Nick & Leo; it's just their thing...)

Day 4: Mahatalaky to Ft. Dauphin, 35km, no ferries!

This section truly was the home stretch, and it felt a bit like a victory lap. Sam joined us for the short, relatively flat ride into Ft. Dauphin, and biked along with me, chatting and catching up as we made our leisurely way down the road. I thoroughly enjoyed the pleasant bike ride as well as the female company after spending the previous 90 hours with 3 guys (as much as I loved them). Now that the boys didn’t have to keep an eye on me (they’d decided at the beginning of the trip to make sure that one of them always stayed at pace with me so I would never be biking alone), they zoomed ahead and we caught up with them later, having a pre-celebratory roadside beer at a town along the way. Close to Ft. Dauphin we entered the site of Rio Tinto’s ilmenite mining operation, and as we biked through it, it suddenly felt as if I was in America. After 220km of atrocious roads, all of a sudden the road was paved, with a yellow line down the middle, and it even had stop signs. It was hard to wrap our heads around after our 3+ day ordeal. We biked past the mine, entered the main highway, and then cruised into Ft. Dauphin as the gorgeous bay lay off into the distance. By 11am, we had made it!

WE DID IT!!!!!! (Note: Taolagnaro is the Malagasy name for Ft. Dauphin, but almost everyone uses the French name.)

After taking a photo to mark the occasion, we stopped at a PCV favorite hotely, meeting up with another local volunteer, and devoured an amazing lunch of their famous seafood pasta and homemade raspberry juice. After lunch we found rooms at a local hotel, showered, and collapsed for a bit. But somehow, I rallied enough to go out that night and meet up with other local PCVs at the famous Freedom bar, with its legendary beach sunset views. I don’t think it had really hit me that I’d done it: me, a girl who hadn’t biked much before in her life, spending 4 days traversing 142 miles of some of the world’s worst roads on my bicycle. It would have been an unfathomable adventure before I joined the Peace Corps, and so the accomplishment felt symbolic of everything I loved about my transformation, all rolled into one: I’d become brave, I’d become adventurous, and I’d become tough. In fact, one word stuck in my head throughout the whole trip: mantajaka, which is the Malagasy word for ‘strong’. As we talked to local people during our trip and told them we were biking to Ft. Dauphin, their immediate reaction was always to exclaim “Kaiiii! Matanjaka enareo!” (Wow! You’re strong!) And after returning home to Vangaindrano and telling people that I’d just biked from there to Ft. D, they’d tell me the same thing: matanjaka ianao. You are strong.  

We decided to spend 5 nights enjoying Ft. Dauphin before heading home, and our little vacation was laid-back and fun: hanging out with local volunteers, enjoying the beaches, and eating a lot of incredibly fresh seafood. One highlight involved buying a cageot of beer and strapping it on Nick’s bike to take to the beach. But we unfortunately misjudged the entry point to the beach and spent about an hour dragging our bikes through the sand to get to where the other volunteers already were. And so by the time we arrived, all of our tires were flat. Fortunately, as the evening set in we met a Rio Tinto worker from South Africa who was coming home from work at their nearby port, and he gave us and our bikes a lift into town in the back of his pickup truck. 

It doesn't get much more Sud Est than this.

Accidental THB photobomb... and it's awesome.

When it came time to head back to Vangaindrano, we decided not to bike and instead go in a camion, which turned into an almost equally adventurous trip that’s too long to get into here. But, here’s a little photographic teaser of what our return mode of transportation was like:

We counted 42 people crammed into this camion. Note our bikes strapped to the front.

Looking back on the trip, certain things stick out in my mind as being so emblematic of the experience: the sight of the Indian Ocean off in the distance yet still tantalizingly close, the smell of orange blossoms in the air as we made our way through tree-lined roads going into towns, the thrill of finally coming upon a body of water or a cell phone tower and realizing we’d at last made it to another ferry; relief in our hearts, we’d gleefully cruise down the road as it became lined with trees and sloped downhill towards the river. What I also took with me are the skills of being a better biker, which this trip turned me into. I learned a lot from Nick along the way, and I still remember his advice and guidance as I bike today (albeit in less taxing conditions.)

At the end of my Peace Corps service, I had biked the entire 570km (354 mile) stretch of Madagascar’s southeastern coast, from Mananjary all the way to Ft. Dauphin. Rory is the only other person I know who has done this. A month before my COS date, I still had to complete one last piece of the puzzle: biking from Analavory to Manakara, about 60km south. My beloved Trek was on its last legs, the gears locked up by some unfortunate attempt at bike maintenance, and so I had to make the hilly trip in just one single gear setting (2 and 4, I believe.) But I was due to return my bike in just two weeks’ time, and this was my last chance to complete my “Tour de Sud Est”, so I was determined to make it happen. It was an emotional moment when I finally did return my bike to the Peace Corps office in Fianarantsoa. My bike had become an extension of me, and it represented how far I had come in my Peace Corps experience, from starting out daunted at biking 8km and then being able to tackle one of the worst roads in the world. (Nick, a supremely experienced biker, remarked during our trip that it was about as difficult as mountain biking can possibly get.) It felt wrong to see my bike stacked up against the other used PCV bikes, many of them returned by volunteers who’d barely ever used theirs. Mine, on the other hand, was used and loved every single day, and had experienced more adventures than most mountain bikes ever have. After all, it's what made me  matanjaka.

My trusty steed. 

Postscript: I feel compelled to note that although we knew we were going into a potentially risky situation, and that we knew we were breaking a few Peace Corps rules by doing the trip, we did not enter into this recklessly or with wanton disregard for the rules. We did this trip because we were extremely familiar with the region, very experienced bikers, and had talked to many, many people-- both Peace Corps volunteers and locals-- to make sure that the trip would be safe enough to do. Ultimately, we decided that this would be no more dangerous than any other trip. We also planned extensively, made sure to bring a satellite phone in case we had an emergency along the way, and prepared ourselves with extra bike parts and medical supplies. So although this involved some rule-breaking, we did not do it out of a lack of respect or concern for Peace Corps's safety and security rules. I had, and continue to have, significant respect and appreciation for all the Peace Corps staff who worked hard to keep us safe and healthy during our service, and by no means did this trip represent anything other than a biking adventure that the 4 of us really wanted to do.