13 May—Cold in Antsirabe

Yeah!  On the road today!

My driver for the next 10 days, Solofo, showed up at 7:30 this morning, and we headed out of town, passing by the foot of the Queen’s Palace.  It was impressive from up there, but it was amazingly impressive from the lake at the bottom of the hill.  I’m going to have to take a hike along the lake when I’m back in Tana just to see the palace from that angle.

It was certainly a beautiful drive out of town and through the highlands along a good road.  The road seems to follow a pretty much flat plateau high in the mountains, and the hills along both sides were covered in terraces.  Along the road, the primary crop was rice since the road has been built following the path of a large stream.  And the various rice terraces capture water as it flows down the mountains, too.  With the sun an autumn low in the sky, the angle of the light set off the terraced landscape sharply. 

There are so many jarring contrasts in tropical high altitudes.  Many of the barriers and fence rows between the rice fields had spikey sisal growing in them, and the presence of succulents and cosmos growing wild in fallow fields made me do a double-take several times.  Small changes in altitude affected crops a lot, too.  As we rose just a little higher, the agricultural yields diversified.  One smiling woman waved a kicking rabbit as us as we drove by, and we were soon in stands of apples and avocados.  Crinum lilies grew out of some of the road cuts.  Another region had apparently just finished its carrot harvest, and there were huge mounds of carrots waiting for trucks along the roadsides, some piles with kids throwing buckets of water on them to wash them off.  And the road wound along streams and up and down small hills punctuated by groups of large, three-story, clay houses with thatched roofs.  A pleasant drive through manioc and pineapple.

We were in Antsirabe by lunch, and Solofo wanted to show me a gemstone mall.  I gamely went along, looked at everything from fossils to semi-precious to precious stones, and then suggested we find a hotel.  The Hotel Hasina was hardly the Ritz, but it was cheap, clean and central. And it had internet! (Hasina is the earth energy that flows through the ancestors and into daily life.  I guess it says something about the prevalence of local beliefs that a hotel in this oh-so-Christian land would have this name.)  I checked in, got a grilled chicken breast and some sautéed local veggies, and we headed out of to town to visit a small village, Betafo.

It was a great 20-mile drive out to a small agricultural village though rice paddies stretching out to the foot of the mountains in the distance.  Since they do rice year round here, some people were harvesting, some were turning the soil, and others were collecting the dried stems as thatch. And delicate blue water lilies were pushing their way into the fields wherever they could, the weed of the rice paddy world.  The soil also changed color from the clay that I’m so familiar with in GA to a rich, dark earth that Solof said was due to volcanic activity.  And as we got closer to Betafo, the road filled up with hundreds and hundreds of kids heading back to school after lunch, dressed in little tunics that were the color of their respective schools.  The whole road was pink, blue and kid boisterous.

The village is located on the side of a crater lake, so we paused by the lake and then went up what was probably an old volcanic rim for some scenic photos.  I’d noticed fields of cana lilies on the way down from Tana, and there was a family drying the canas near where we stopped.  We found out they burn the canas (along with some juniper, pine and other scented stems) to use  in homemade soaps.  The canas are apparently more for texture than scent.  A smiling guy also told us you can cut your tobacco with cana to make the tobacco go further, too.  This same guy mentioned that there were some old tombs further up the hill, so we drove to the top and walked around until we found them near the site of a microwave tower.

Ancestral tombs are a bit deal here, and this one had a stone marker dating it from 1800.  One side of the tablet recorded that  Radama I (one of the first Merina kings with a national view), erected the tomb to honor a local king, and you could see subsequent entombments in the mound and in the area around the mound.  The other side of the tablet had a family tree on it tracing the local royal lineage from the first king (his name took two lines of the tablet) to the present day.  Sure enough, the names on the more recent tombs matched the ones on the back of the tablet.  Local history was clearly very alive in this area.

Solof went ahead with the car, and I walked down the hill to the lake.  I passed a group of kids who weren’t in school, and on a hunch, asked them if they were studying.  Sure enough, cramming for a test later in the day.  I talked about history and geography with them for a few minutes and went down to the lake, where I met Solofo.

We did a nice walk around the lake, looking at birds, talking with a couple of fishermen (catch was down because the weather is getting colder), and taking pictures.  We saw a couple of Hammerkopts collecting sticks, and we watched them awhile until we found their pretty obvious nest.  The walk took a little over an hour, and we headed back up the valley among the rice paddies to Antsirabe.

I noticed a little falcon on the way, so we pulled to the side of the road to watch it hunt.  It turned out to be a Madagascar Falcon, and we saw it catch no fewer than three things, one of which was a very large dragonfly that it snatched right out of the air.  We also watched a White Egret for a while before getting back to the urban area.

I could tell I’d gotten more sun than I wanted, so we looked for sun block (I know….what was I thinking when I was packing?). None at the grocery store, so we found some 50 SPF at the pharmacy.  Quite a chuckle when I got back to the hotel and discovered it was tinted.

The food choices weren’t huge near the hotel, and the electricity was off in the neighborhood for a long time.  I ended up with spaghetti bolognaise with no tomato in it, but I was hungry, so that was fine.  It was so cold that I had to sleep with a blanket, and it rained a lot of the night, which only helped me sleep.

Canas Drying

Burning Cana with other Plants for Ash

Cana Work