There is no horror like the horror of floating back into consciousness after 24 hours on a taxi-brousse, and realizing you still aren't at your destination. For twenty minutes last night, you were able to step into a scummiest of diners for a meal of what ever they have left--they've served hundreds of taxi-brousses just like yours all day. It seems like a hallucination now, with only 100 kilometers left to go, though the landscape shows no signs of urbanization near or far. The north of Madagascar, it turns out, looks just like the central plateau which looks just like the west and east coasts. A different shade of green, sine waves of lush hills mottled by variations of a mud and clay house. I was expecting to be dazzled; I wanted to see Neptune, or at least Mars. I'd settle for the beach.
We wouldn't make this mistake again, though. Erin and I slapped down thick wads of cash at the Air Madagascar office in order to shave about 23 hours off of our return to the capital, and get a free tuna sandwich in the meantime. During the life vest/crash-landing lecture, I dared Erin to raise her hand and yell "tsy mazava!" (that's not clear) in her best impression of our relentlessly confused students, but she refused. Despite the cost, the anxiety of stepping back into a glorified VW van, wallowing in the helpless misery of stale air and cartoonish redundancy of the landscape--it would have necessarily undermined the very purpose of going on vacation: to take off my 'volunteer at your disposal' hat and put on my 'don't bother me I'm a tourist' fanny-pack. A volunteer we met while there goes as far as to refuse to speak Malagasy unless absolutely necessary.
On Christmas morning, the lot of us pitched in to hire a boat and a crew to take us even farther from far away, sailing deep into the bay Diego-Suarez sits upon. There we found Emerald Island jutting out of the water, with half a dozen wooden shacks built for shade and a place to eat arranged on the beach. For the two hours it took to get there, I alternated between hyperventilating (a gross overestimation of my swimming capabilities led to a frightening and humiliating near-death experience) and marveling at how the boat seemed to float on air, the water was so clear. I continually sized up potential contenders for 'shore-to-which-I-could-most-easily-swim,' only to determine I hadn't got a chance. That the crew was drunk and exhausted on the way home did little to assuage my phobia.
More firmly rooted to the ground were the taxis in town, who we quickly found out charge by the person and not the destination. The city planners of Diego astutely put the taxi-brousse station about five kilometers outside of town, guaranteeing taxi-drivers a constant supply of road-weary travelers fatigued-to-the-point-of-tears and unfamiliar with the town. Our introduction to the promised land, and hence to our vacation, was to be suckered into paying three times the normal price for a ride into town. Fortunately, this amounted to roughly two dollars. Given that only the relatively can take a plane to Antananarivo, our final expense in the town was, similarly, being bullied into paying about six dollars each to get a ride to the airport. This time, however, the violence done to one's wallet is actually a town-regulated mugging. For as much as we enjoyed ourselves in and around Diego, the welcoming and departure committee left an indelible bad taste in my mouth.
On the way up from my part of the island towards the capital, before we ever set out in the 25-hour, wheeling death box, we stopped in Antsirabe for a night. I only note it for being one of the last places on the island, perhaps in the world, to customarily use the rickshaw (here, called a 'pousse-pousse'). The humblest form of paid transportation services, it might also be the most thought-provoking. Namely, you wonder for the entire trip--moving at a hair faster than people leisurely strolling beside you--"why didn't I just walk this distance myself?" Unlike the terror of drowning at sea, or careening off the road into a rice paddy, the only danger from a pousse-pousse is from above. In the event of rain, your driver (if he can be called that) might have the luxury feature of attaching a semi-transparent tarp directly over you. Intense humidity, the Chinese water torture of a drip from above, and the detachedness from reality from the simulated blindness and suffocation--all together they accentuate the absurdity of my existence here, wishing I could trade my cross-cultural experience tokens for a bit of apple pie normalcy.
