You Don't See That Every Day

The other day I spotted some traffic cones around a small hole in the sidewalk. Banff is full of creative and unconventional people, and you see the strangest stuff sometimes, but this was definitely one of the more baffling things. When I got closer there seemed to be a piece of paper in the hole...

 It's a bit hard to see but this was the best picture I could get. Yes, the hole in the sidewalk contained a note: "Hi, I borrowed this brick to complete my house". The whole thing just raises so many questions, like Why?!? It had to take a bit of work to pry it the brick out, and what can you do with just one brick?

 

Then I saw this rare two-headed elk in the river, just two minutes from my house.













Here it is from another angle. Turns out it also has two bodies, very disappointing. You can see Mt Rundle in the background. It's one of Banff's well known mountains and I really want to climb it this summer.

The Great Alberta Flood

Nobody was expecting a flood. It started raining on Wednesday, life went on, and then by Thursday morning we woke up to news of flood warnings, evacuations, roads closed and bridges destroyed. Banff is not as badly affected as some places. The park is flooded and you can't get out of town to the east, and a few buildings near the river are uninhabitable. We still have power and water and everything is open. The news from Canmore and Calgary sounds a lot worse though. Lots of people have had to evacuate and there are houses falling into the river in Canmore. Canmore was cut off completely for a while, but some buses and trucks were getting through yesterday. There were several helicopters circling over Banff, checking out the situation and looking for anyone who needed rescuing.








I'm not really affected by the flooding since I wasn't planning to leave town anytime soon, but it's always a weird feeling when there's a disaster around you. People naturally want to help but there isn't anything to help with at the moment, so all we can do is stand around in the park and gawk at the water.

I don't know why they bother with all the caution tape. If people are too dumb to notice eight inches of water on the path, I don't think a sign is going to to help them.




















This park bench would be a good place to sit for lunch- some other day!

Madagascar Memories

Sadly, I am not in some exotic location right now,
but I wanted to post some more of my photos, so here are a few more of my happy memories.


Lemur on a taxi brousse! This is one of the lemurs on the ride home to KAFS to be fitted with a new radio collar. He spent most of the journey inside a big fabric bag to minimize stress, but I took the picture when they opened the bag quickly to check on him.

A small fraction of the bounty of lychees. Lychees were in season when I left Madagascar and you could get a shopping bag full for about a dollar. They are kind of addictive so when you eat one it's easy to just keep on eating them, like chips.

 This is one of my little gecko friends. There were always a few little green day geckos chasing each other on my tent or stalking insects in the thatch roof. This one is about as long as my hand and he caught a big insect, I think it might have been a dragonfly.

Run away, it's the evil duck! Some of the ducks in Kianjavato were the usual mallards and white domestic ducks, but there was also this black kind with weird red swellings on the face. This particular duck belonged to a family who kept a little store next door to KAFS. The volunteers would go to the store for cake (mmm, mango cake with chocolate icing!) and sandwiches, and this enormous duck was always there hissing at us and snaking its neck. It looked kind of demonic so I called it the evil duck.

 I have fond memories of drinking at Hotely on a Sunday afternoon. Sunday is market day in Kianjavato and everybody goes into town wearing their best clothes, going to see and be seen as much as to shop. Hotely is right in the middle of town and their porch has a great view combined with shelter from the sun or rain, and of course the cold beer. Looking at this picture I can almost hear the rain on the sheet metal roof, taste the Namaki coffee rum and Three Horses Beer, and smell the gutter you have to cross on a little plank bridge between the porch and the street. The street is usually packed solid with people on market day but this day everyone who could was waiting out the worst of the rain under whatever shelter they could find, so there were only a few people and the hotely dog out on the street. Also in the picture is the famous red car, maybe the only car for miles around. You could tell the guys driving it thought they were pretty cool, with Celine Dion blasting from the stereo.

Havana

It is starting to rain more often. The rain is usually sudden and intense, then the weather clears right up. we had a really good rainbow last week, and I like this picture of it with Melanie, one of the other volunteers. The Malagasy word for rainbow is havana, which can also mean family. (The emphasis is on the first syllable, not like the Cuban city.) 

The fruit is starting to be ready, and you can sometimes get mangoes and papaya. The lychees are starting to get red, and I am just realizing how many lychee trees there are around Kianjavato. Hery told me they will be ripe November 23rd, but he might just be saying that so I stop asking him about it. I should get just the start of the lychees and pineapples before I have to leave.

Fruit and Lemurs

We checked into the hotel in Fianarantsoa this afternoon, then proceeded straight to the patisserie. I got quiche, tamarind juice, and profiteroles. The place had a whole menu of ice cream treats, which we read, translated (all menus are in French here), discussed, and considered at length which one to order. Then the waitress informed us that they were out of everything except profiteroles. It wasn't too much of a hardship though. Have you had profiteroles? They are ice cream on pastry, with whipped cream on top. I am pleased to report it is as good as it sounds.

It is getting much warmer here in Madagascar, the days are longer and there is starting to be fruit. I thought of it being tropical here, but we are about 21 degrees south and it is actually quite seasonal. I got a coeur de boeuf, a sort of green fruit about the size of a grapefruit that looks like a cow's heart, or it would if a cow's heart looked like the lumpy green and black thing on the left of the photo. The brighter green things are mangoes. There are also pineapples and green spiky things I have never seen before. The seasons are later in Kianjavato but we should have fruit there soon. There have only been bananas since about June. We are starting to see cucumbers again, and the carrots are new fresh ones, and there are some weird dry little things like a cross between raisins and shrivelled crabapples.

MBP, the organization I am volunteering with, has a chance to get funding if people vote for our project. They talk about the black and white ruffed lemurs and the reforestation efforts, but my bamboo lemurs live in the same forest. Being here I can really see that the project makes a difference. People can see that the lemurs are worth more alive, bringing in researchers and tourists and providing jobs, so they do not eat them anymore. You can vote here if you like.

Last weekend there was a concert in Kianjavato, a guy named Tsiliva. Everyone I know was there and there was a lot of dancing. At one point two masked men, dressed as Michael Jackson and, we think, Osama bin Laden, pretended to attack the singer and he fought them off with a really funny display of karate. I guess this is just one of the things they do here. I am getting used to the idea that I won't understand a large part of the world around me.

I keep trying to photograph the baby lemurs but it is difficult because they are very small, the same colour as the mother, and usually silhouetted against the sky. They get bigger almost by the day though. I think they should attain maximum cuteness in the next month or so, as they will become more independently mobile but still quite tiny and babyish. The one on the left is an adult just finishing a big jump and catching hold of a branch.

Baby Lemur, Baby Lemur!

We would like to congratulate PBC, a Greater Bamboo Lemur, on the birth of her new baby! We do not know yet if it is a boy or a girl. The baby is about the size of a chipmunk, with fur a bit darker than the adult animals. It has a tiny tail hardly bigger than a pencil but it already seems to be using the tail to help it maintain its balance as it clings to the mother's abdomen. It is hard to believe this tiny helpless thing will be leaping through the forest and playing with its friends in just a few months! The baby's older brother, born last September, seems indifferent to his new sibling. He still follows his mother around sometimes but he is more often foraging by himself or playing with the other juveniles.

 There are no baby pictures yet, but here is an unrelated shot of Hercules, one of our dominant males, scent marking. Male simus have large scent glands under their armpits that they like to rub on branches to mark their territory. Sometimes they mark their own tails too and you can really smell the musky scent wafting behind them as they move.

Here is Hercules (left) back in July when we put a new radio collar on him. The eyes are open because of the drug but the animal is still unconscious. He is recovering at this point and is starting to move and hold his head up. He was starting to hold on with the front legs (they have a really strong grip, even asleep) but the rear half of the body was still dead weight at this point.

Another shitty day with the lemurs...

"What is excrement?" Theoluc asks me one day while our lemur is sleeping. My old partner left him a Malagasy-English dictionary and Theoluc is reading it to improve his English, but some of the translations are not clear. Apparently he is up to the letter E.

"Just a sec, I'm upside down." The ground under the sleeping animal's tree is too steep to sit on. I tried to sit, then lie down, then I squirmed around until my head ended up below my feet, a tree root digging into my shoulder and ants crawling on me from somewhere. Theoluc has found a perch that looks much better, and politely says nothing while I struggle upright.

"It means shit."

"As in "The animal is excrementing?""

"No, it's only the noun "shit", not the verb. Like "This is a piece of lemur excrement."" I pick up a bit of old dried lemur poo. Their poo is innocuous: the fresh stuff is like pellets of wet green plant matter and the old stuff looks like hay. It doesn't smell. Theoluc nods understanding and goes back to his dictionary.

I go back to staring lazily into the distance. It is hot, but very pleasant in the shade of the forest and when you are not moving. Insects make a loud background hum, the sort of noise you hardly notice. We are near the edge of the forest so I can look out across a field of tiny knobby trees. They are grown for biodiesel and nobody knows the English name.