Mmmmm, Food!

1 July 2012

I saw a tenrec today. Bark Bark the KAFS dog brought it in but we were able to rescue it and it seemed unharmed. It was a three striped tenrec, with soft spines like a hedgehog and a long narrow snout with whiskers. The whole animal looked kind of improbable somehow, like it was made from a bunch of random parts. We set it free in the bushes with a good head start from the dog.

It gets dark early in the tropical winter, maybe 5:30 or 6. There is no electricity so you have a choice of candles, head torches, or darkness. There is often a card game by candlelight after dinner but people rarely stay up much past eight. It is just as well, since we have to get up early to leave by 6:30.

We spent most of the afternoon playing Uno. It is a very complicated game and you need great reflexes to play your card before someone else beats you to it. We agreed that it was such a stressful and competitive game that you need a rest afterwards. I hope I can get people to play spades again. That was the last fad and it might be the most fun card game I know.

It is Saturday night and Wednesday and Saturday are supposed to be pasta night. We were all waiting eagerly for the best meal of the week, spagetti topped with oil, carrots, and green beans. I bought a jar of real tomato sauce last time I was in Fianarantsoa and it was going to be a real feast. Everyone looked so disappointed when the cook brought out plates of rice and salty carrots. I was warned the food was mostly rice and beans andd veg, but the beans are all too rare and the rice is invariably burned. We have quite reasonable ingredients and I could make a good meal with what we have, but we seldom get anything palatable. We were too disappointed to even feel like playing cards after dinner.

There are two little shops within a five minute walk and I'm sure the KAFS volunteers are a big source of revenue for them. You can get little packets of crunchy corn-based rings called Cracky. Sometimes they have Saltos, which may be the world's best soda crackers, or maybe I have just never been so hungry. We went into Kianjavato last night for Sheila's birthday and we got rum and coke and the hotel's entire supply of Saltos. We always thought that it was 4km to Kianjavato, but somebody recently told us it is only 3km, so the walk home from the bar is now one third shorter.

Prolemur simus is very cute but not very active. One day last week we followed the same animal all day. We found him just before 8 and sat down under his tree. Five hours later we got up and walked back to the road to get picked up. For all I know he might still be in the same tree. Yes, we are sure he is not dead: he was grooming himself briefly.

One of our animals unfortunately is dead though. It was probably killed by a fosa. We found the body easily because the radio collar was still working. There was not much left but part of the skull and some bedraggled fur and the big fluffy tail. That is nature for you but if I met that fosa I would like to punch it in the face. I was pretty mad that the stupid fosa picked the only animal in that group whose radio collar still worked. Now we can't find that group anymore without searching their entire terrritory, and unless we get very lucky that will take days of grueling effort. The upside is that the boss finally took notice of the deteriorating radio collar situation that we have been asking about for months. The dart team should be coming out to tranquilize some of the animals and replace the collars in July.

2 July 2012

Today was the first serious rain we have had since I got here. Drizzle and showers have been pretty common but today was the first real downpour. The animals tend not to move very much when it rains so we stood there and got soaked while they slept. I was told it would be hot here so I packed for hot rainy weather, but not much for cold rainy weather. Nothing dries properly here and it is really going to suck putting on my wet clothes tomorrow morning when it is about ten degrees outside. At least dinner was good.

It's weird: here I am in the Madagascar rainforest, this exotic place that I have always wanted to see, spending my days with one of the world's most endangered primates, but most of my thoughts revolve around food. It is a topic we can discuss every single day and we keep finding more to say. Rice pudding featured prominently today, not on the menu of course but in conversation. You can make a fair substitute by putting sweetened condensed milk and nutmeg on the breakfast rice. My Grandad talks about his field work, and having only spam and strawberry jam to eat. Those are luxury items here, totally worth the five hour taxi brousse ride to Fianarantsoa.

7 July 2012

We left early this morning for Fianar and got the fastest taxi brousse ever, about three and a half hours. The guy drove safely too, he just didn't keep stopping all the time. We got here in time for lunch and I have eaten a double cheeseburger, fresh pineapple smoothie, chocolate cake, lemon ice cream, processed cheese, mint candies, and half a custard bun. Dinner is in an hour or two so I have to stop and make room. I got sweet chili sauce and jam to put on the rice back at camp, probably not together. It is a good day.

Still Alive!

Just a quick note to let everyone know I'm in town again. The internet has finally started working, right before we have to leave again, so we are madly trying to do everything. I will try and write something more next time!

Two weeks at KAFS

Rice fields on the way to Kianjavato

 Hello again! It has only been two weeks but it feels like I've been here forever. I am in Fianarantsoa now, the city where we come to upload our data. The hotel is pretty nice and they have ice cream here. The ice cream was totally worth the six hour taxi brousse ride. It is usually four hours but our taxi brousse had a flat tire. And needed more oil. And ran out of gas. And the starter didn't work. The driver tried to stop on hills but we had to push it twice to start the engine. The trip is probably less than 200 km but the road is all hairpin turns and huge potholes and several places are only one lane wide because the other lane washed away in a cyclone a few years ago.


The people who have been here a few months just drool over everything, but I don't think I have been here long enough. Food is a popular topic of conversation at KAFS. They feed us rice at almost every meal and a little bit of something healthy like beans or meat or veg, but mostly rice. Everyone has condiments to put with it to make it edible, like soy sauce or ketchup or sweetened condensed milk. I got some chicken stock cubes and vinegar in town today and I have high hopes for it. Sometimes there is salad and the vinegar from it really improves the rice. We talk about food a lot, the things we miss from home, and I dreamed about pot roast the other night.

I was going to take some pictures but I keep leaving my camera at the top. KAFS is built on a hill, with the main buildings at the bottom and the tent platforms scattered across the slope. Mine is almost at the top, so if I forget something it is a bit of a trek back up. The tent platforms have a wooden floor and a ravinala roof with room for clotheslines underneath as well as your tent. My tent is great. It has lots of mesh for ventilation and I brought a full twin-size air mattress so I have a real bed. It is winter here so it gets cold at night and I am really glad I brought my warm sleeping bag. It is really nice and cosy in there and sometimes I don't want to get up in the mornings, but when I do the view is amazing. In the mornings I wake up to the mist rolling across intensely green hills of rainforest dotted with the huge fans of the ravinala trees. There are a few houses and farms but they look very picturesque from a distance. Closer up you see the inescapable poverty: the houses are shacks and the kids and chickens and dogs are all too skinny. Everybody seems very friendly though.

A pomegranate tree in Tana

The rainforest is really something. There are large trees but also a lot of small saplings and a lot of bamboo. My impression might be biased though because my study animals spend most of their time in bamboo areas. The big bamboo is tree-sized, about 10 cm thick and maybe 20 m tall. The lemurs eat all the parts of the bamboo plant, and they make quite a racket eating the large woody stems. They also like fruit. One of the fantastic things about the tropics is the progression of amazing fruits. I missed lychee season, sadly, but I arrived near the end of orange season and near the beginning of pineapple season. Soon the jackfruits will be ripe and I am looking forward to trying that. A jackfruit is bigger than your head and they dangle from the tree branches on stems about a foot long. They are kind of yellowish with little blunt points all over the outside. The lemurs are eating them now but people have to wait a bit longer for them to be ripe. Oh, and a few jackfruits went mouldy at an early stage of development and they look an awful lot like a dead mouse.

George is not too sure about the spider tortoises...

On Sunday night there was a big party at the hotely in Kianjatvo so we went into the village. I never liked rum at home but the rum here is really good, especially with coke. It is also ridiculously cheap, one or two dollars for a 300 mL bottle. There was a live band and everyone was dancing. The roosters were crowing when we left and it slowly went from dark to light out on the walk home. We were late for breakfast and slept most of the day, since it was a holiday. I don't know what the holiday was but they have a lot of holidays here, several every month. People don't get paid very much but at least they get lots of time off.

Just a quick note to let you know I will be leaving early in the morning for Kianjavao, the field site where I will be joining the Prolemur simus team. That means no internet for probably a month, and no internet means no google so any information that is not in my brain or in a book there I will have to do without.

I am looking forward to getting out of the city and into the rainforest. Tana has terrible heartbreaking poverty and the acrid exhaust fumes hurt my throat whenever we leave our little rich people's compound. I see people without shoes and people picking discarded vegetable scraps out of the trash and it just makes me want to cry. It is not all bad though: most people seem quite cheerful and friendly. People are amazing in their ability to adapt to different situations and they are just going about their lives. It doesn't make the unfairness of it all OK though. This is something everyone should see, something I will never forget. If you live in a proper house and have enough to eat today, you are lucky. I know I will never feel poor again.

Love,

Sarah

Madagascar!

I got to Madagascar ok and I have already seen lemurs! We can't go to the field site at Kianjavato until Tuesday but we were able to tag along on a trip to Andosibe National Park, and I saw the common brown lemur, the diademed sifaka, and the indiri, the largest lemur species. The indiris made a loud singing territorial call. It is a beautiful, unearthly sound.  The sifakas were very pretty, brown and white and black, and at least one had a collar because they are being monitored by Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership, the same organization I will be working with. We got up early this morning and there was mist on the river, with the rainforest canopy looming on the opposite bank.

The roads in Madagascar are something else. It was over 2 hrs each way to Andosibe, a little over 100 km, and the road was never straight for more than 200 m. The traffic was pretty diverse, a lot of people walking or bicycling, some trucks and minibus taxis, rickshaws in one town, and carts pulled by cattle. There were also a few homemade vehicles that might have been the remains of a motorcycle converted into a one-wheeled thing that can pull an ox cart, and is steered with a sort of tiller. I also saw something like the first prototype of the Jamaican bobsled from Cool Runnings, being used to move some rocks down the mountain. I don't know how they will get it back up, there was no engine. We were in one of the few safe vehicles though, a newish Toyota Hilux. I am very glad I won't have to drive here because the rules are very different: right of way seems to go to the larger vehicle and the horn is appropriate for any occasion.

I am in Tana now, at MBP's home base. It is a nice house with very little furniture and tortoises everywhere. The tortoises were seized from smugglers and MBP is taking care of them until they can be released. There are over a hundred small ones, about the size of a grapefruit, and maybe a dozen big ones that would just fit in a bushel basket. The big ones have the run of the compound and they are wrecking the garden. They look at you curiously but don't pull into their shells if you come close. The little ones are contained in a couple of pens so they don't get stepped on.

I can't wait to get out to Kianjavato and get started with what I came to do. The trip on Tuesday will not be fun: it takes ten hours and the road is even more twisty than the one we took today.

Moving on

Hello from Cape Town! I just arrived today and I have been ever so lazy since leaving Lajuma. I spent my last days there catching up on all the stuff I hadn’t got around to in the last five months. I took pictures of the baboons and finally got some good ones, and Pete made me a DVD of some of his baboon videos. The videos are supposed to be for identification of individuals, but sometimes they are quite cute and funny too.

 Saturday I was going to follow the baboons for the last time but they went somewhere we couldn’t go, so I climbed Mt Lajuma, the highest peak in the Soutpansberg Mountains. Actually it is not that high, somewhat over 1400m I think. It took less than two hours to get up and down, and that included hanging around to enjoy the view. There were pink proteas blooming at the top, very pretty alien-looking flowers. People say you can see Zimbabwe from up there, but it is so far that the details get lost in the haze. I never did get to Zimbabwe because nobody wanted to come with me and it’s not the kind of place you want to go by yourself. I have seen money from there, including a hundred trillion dollar bill that probably wasn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Saturday afternoon we had the scavenger hunt. I deliberately hid the prizes in places that I thought would be easy to find, but people still had trouble. Most people stay on the roads and the official trails so they don’t know the place like I do. The baboon people have to know the secret trails and the places where you can cut across country without facing a sheer cliff or an impenetrable thicket. All the teams ended up joining together to keep from getting lost in the wilderness that I navigated every day, but everyone had fun and that was the point. Many of the prizes were water pistols so naturally there was a water fight afterwards.

We had a braii for my going away party. I made the fire and it was the best one I ever did. That’s one thing I have learned in Africa: how to make fire. The secret is to make a structure that has as much air in it as wood, and to not keep poking at it every minute or two. We didn’t have an axe so I built it out of logs six inches thick and stuffed the inside with sticks and cardboard and these magic fire lighting chemical cubes they have here. We sat around it half the night, talking and watching the fire and listening to the bushbabies and the bats and the sexy owls (I don’t know what kind of owls they really are but everyone who hears it agrees that their “who-HOO” call has kind of a sexy sound to it). I was drinking Amarula most of the night, and if you’re going to have too much to drink, I would recommend something other than a cream liqueur. It does taste lovely though, kind of like Baileys but a bit fruity too.

The trip from Lajuma to Pretoria was uneventful. Limpopo province is mostly bushveld, which sounds exotic but it all looks the same when you see it for six straight hours. The land was mostly flat, flatter than the prairies, flatter than anything I have ever seen. Much of the time nothing obstructs your view but the curvature of the earth. Occasionally there are small mountains that seem dropped on the landscape; they rise abruptly out of the plain with no intervening foothills like the Rockies.

The brochures say there is lots to do in Pretoria and Johannesburg, but I was only there for a day and did nothing but lounge around. The hostel was great, with a nice garden and a pool and a sad-eyed spaniel called Sherlock Bones. That was yesterday, and I flew to Cape Town today and did nothing much here either. I want to go to the waterfront tomorrow and see the ocean, and I have booked a great white shark tour on Friday. The water is not as clear this time of year but you can still see the sharks. I will let you know how that goes, and hopefully find a better computer to upload pictures!

All good things come to an end

Nothing lasts. I'm moving on again, to Capetown next week and then back to Canada in March. It is terribly sad to leave all the people I have met here but it is time. I have been here longer than anyone else in the barn. People have gotten the idea that I know what's going on and sometimes I actually do: I know the best places to swim, how to light the water heater, what is jumping on the roof (bushbabies have the night shift, and samangoes take over during the day with a little help from the baboons), and how to bake on a gas camping stove. I am hoping to get some decent baboon pictures before I go, but these are the best so far.

One of the samangoes. Whenever monkeys sit like this, I have a cartoonish urge to pull their tails.

Sadly, one of my favourite baboons has probably died. Klink was the oldest male in the troop and looked ancient and frail for years, so it was not unexpected. I never saw him pick a fight, unusual in a baboon, and he was so old and harmless that none of the other males bothered to threaten him. We saw him one day, feeding and keeping up with the others, and then we didn't see him the next day. It has been four days now so we don't expect to see him again. Our baboons actually have pretty good lives here: very few predators bother them and there is so much food that they all have little pot bellies.

I think this is Knight, one of the older juvenile males.

I have been very busy with following baboons, looking for jobs, packing, and training my replacements. There were three new people to replace me, but one of them quit already because she was scared of snakes. It's a good thing she wasn't with me this morning, because I saw the biggest snake I have seen here yet. It was at least 3m long, so it must have been a black mamba because they are the only snake here that gets that big. I don't know for certain that it was even alive, because it did not react at all and I got within 2m before I saw it. I think it was alive though, and just lying in the sun to get warm after a cold night. 

I liked the symmetry of the two grooming pairs here. In the background you can see the brai area (South African BBQ) and an early prototype of the baboon weighing platform (the triangular thing).

I am organizing a treasure hunt. Monday I got some toys in town and yesterday I hid them while I was out with the baboons. I'm going to give everyone the GPS coordinates and see how long it takes them to find the prizes. I tried to put the treasures near pretty views or interesting rock formations. Only the baboon people ever go off the trails so this will be a good opportunity for everyone else to see some new territory. 

Samangoes are territorial and try to drive the baboons away. Baboons are much bigger and not territorial, and they interpret the samangoes' threats as an invitation to play. The one on the left is a samango, on the right is a very young baboon, and I'm not sure what the one at the top is.