My Turtle Year

Back on the internet at long last.  I hope all of you back at home had a great Valentine's Day!

For whatever reason, perhaps the usual slump around the middle of any program, I was having a bad week last week.  My inflatable mattress got over 10 holes and still leaked after I tried fixing it.  It was raining non-stop, so all my clothes were wet and I couldn't do laundry.  I had sand all over my tent.

On Tuesday, we were in the forest looking for reptiles and amphibians, which involves raking the leaf layer with a stick and watching for anything that hops out (mostly mosquitos).  I was basically stabbing the ground with a stick, uninterested and tired, having woken up every few hours to blow up my mattress the night before.  Just then, a frog crossed my path.  I didn't think anything of it, but come to find out, that it was a frog that had never been seen in the region.  Of course it was the one day I didn't bring my camera, as proof of my contribution to herpatology.

Since mangos are in season, we decided to make mango wine.  Peel the mangos.  Boil, add sugar, add yeast the next day.  Add sugar partway through the 8-day fermenting process.  But when we got back to the campsite Tuesday, we got a call from the office indicating that we were being evacuated because a cyclone ("Bizinga") was coming through town.  Great.

Of all the preparations we had to do to clear out the campsite, everyone was most concerned about the mango wine.  How were we getting it back?  We divided it into two buckets and the two of us volunteers had to carry it in the 4x4 that took us to Mahatalaky, our transfer point.  At each bump in the road (to say that Madagascar has poor-quality roads is a huge understatement), we had to lift the buckets as a sort of shock absorber, keeping it from spilling on Hanta, our cook, and the bag of flour at my feet.

In Mahatalaky, we transferred to a camion, a huge truck that somehow managed to fit 32 people, all our stuff, and 2 chickens.  Two men sitting next to the wine learned quickly that they had to hold the wine, after one major bump that got a number of people (and the chickens) wet.  After several hours of watching in earnest from the small space I wedged into, we got back to Fort Dauphin with most of the wine intact.

Here's the average day in the bush:

7am: Breakfast - fried dough balls with honey, pineapples or bananas, banana bread

8 am: Build a sustainable stove in the nearest hamlet

12 pm: Lunch - rice and beans

1:30 pm: Malagach language lesson

2 pm: Head out to the nearest forest to study Brown-Collared Lemur behavior (mostly sitting)

6 pm: Dinner - pasta / fresh fish / chicken that I saw running around earlier and then killed

7:30 pm: Walk across 45 minutes of hills and shoddy roads to the other forest fragment to find reptiles & amphibians

Gecko on Pandanus leaf

My favorite tree so far is the Pandanus, a regal tree that collects water and, therefore, lizards and frogs.  It reminds me so much of my mom - providing a comfortable place for reptiles to sit and drink water and protecting them with razor-sharp leaf edges.  And when they die, they leave a gaping hole in the ground.

Leaf-tailed gecko

I'm really enjoying my time here in Madagascar, being decently productive and having lots of downtime as well.  It's an excellent way to put things in perspective and lose myself in my thoughts (because when do we really ever stop to daydream in the western world?)  Four weeks down, four to go.  I can't believe how quickly it's going!

Beach by Sainte Luce

Deforestation around Sainte Luce