24 May – Monsters (Tuléar)

This is such a great country full of one-of-a-kind stuff.  I had a late, slow, big breakfast in the garden of Chez Alain and then went to see more uniquity.

I have to thank Totsie for this one because she and Winn were in town the weekend I left and she asked me to take a photo of a coelacanth for her while I was here.  A coelacanth is a really primitive, mostly fish animal presumed extinct and known only from fossils until some fishermen off the coast of Madagascar pulled one up several years ago.  Turns out that one’s here in Tuléar, so I got in the littlest Renault an American could fit into and crossed town to the Musée de la Mer to see it. 

In fact, the ride itself was fun with a perky little driver playing reggae and afrobeat music though an mp3 player hanging out of the cigarette lighter while shifting gears every 5-15 seconds because of all the pousse-pousses (hand-pulled rickshaws).  He didn’t speak a lot of French, but what he lacked in grammar and vocabulary he made up for in personality and volume.

When we got to the Musée, I discovered that it wasn’t what I expected but what I should have expected.  There was a kinda cool whale skeleton outside, and as I went in the door, I was greeted by a friendly woman manning the ever-present ticket counter.  Five bucks.  The museum looks like it might have been a fish-processing location at one point: a large rectangular room with an inner rectangular room outfitted with built-in cement tables covered with white tile.  As part of the museum-ification of the fish abattoir, they had moved in big, hardwood shelves that were filled with specimens in bottles of formaldehyde along with some display case for dry specimens.  Of course, Lou would have swooned at seeing this place.

There were a lot of lumpy, wavy, crusty things in the jars and display cases, and they didn’t mean much to me.  Nor, for that matter, did the signs, which I wouldn’t have understood even if they’d been in English.  The back hall, though, had some stuff I recognized like big, ugly fish and some very specimen-ized birds.

The crown jewel coelacanth was locked in the inner sanctum, and the minder opened the door for me and even let me take some photos in exchange for a tip.  I’d expected the coelacanth to be in formaldehyde, so I was surprised to find that there were not one but several specimens on view there.  In the last few years, researchers have pulled more coelacanths up, freeze-dried them and put them on display, so I saw 3-4 specimens, though I still liked the formaldehyde one the most. 

And I learned several cool things about them.  For one, they have primitive lungs.  For another, though they use egg reproduction like fish, they carry their young.  And if you don’t believe this, you can see a couple of coelacanth babies in formaldehyde right there, babies that were removed from a pregnant female who was caught.

Thanks for putting me on to this, Totsie!

The rest of the day was just travel details.  Hung around the hotel til the reggae Renault guy picked me up and dropped me off at the airport for the flight to Tana.  Wow!  Where did all those tourists come from? 

The flight was, er, unusual.  For one, there are no seat reservations, a fact that some of the German visitors didn’t seem to be able to understand.  I didn’t get it either until I got to the back of the plane (my boarding pass listed the last row as my seat) and the flight attendant told me to sit wherever.  So I sat down beside something I’d never seen before: a stretcher set across the window seats of three rows with a very ill man on it and a very distraught wife beside.  We soon found the intercom didn’t work, so for the safety instructions, a steward walked up and down the aisle waving the paper from the seat back with the emergency and safety procedures.  The flight went just fine, but I was a little surprised that the seat belt sign didn’t come on when we hit some pretty substantial turbulence; I had visions of the pilot struggling to control the aircraft and so not being able to alert us in the back.  I was also glad that the ill gentleman had been secured to his stretcher.

Arrival was fine, and I was back at the Sakamanga pretty quickly.