Madagascar – At home and abroad

Mad world

September 18, 2026jdewyze1 Comment

Steve and I wanted to go to Madagascar because it sounded extraordinary. It’s not merely one of the planet’s biggest islands but so different from the nearest continent (Africa) it almost qualifies for continental status of its own. I knew that many of the native forests had been cut down, but I half expected the remaining landscape to look like something drawn by Dr. Seuss. In this I was disappointed.

Everywhere we went I saw old friends — plants that thrive in San Diego County: eucalyptus and jacaranda and bougainvilleas and prickly pear cactus and other exotics imported to replace the natives that lived here once. What I should have been prepared for (but wasn’t) was sights like these:

Much of Madagascar’s population descends from people who made their way thousands of years ago from Borneo in Indonesia. They were rice-growing peoples who cut down the Malagasy forests and cleared the land to create floodable fields. Rice paddies today stud the urban canvas of the capital city.

Jigsawed terraces make parts of the countryside resemble Peru (except they cradle not potatoes but emerald rice shoots.)

Malagasies even grow rice in the arid southwest, though there they get only two harvests per year instead of three. All these paddies require irrigation systems so complex we couldn’t begin to comprehend how they worked.

The folks who tend them live mainly in the central highlands but could blend in on the streets of Jakarta. African (Bantu) features are found more frequently on Madagascar’s coasts. Remarkably, everyone speaks the same language (Malagasy), and it’s related most closely to the family of languages still spoken in Borneo.

The Malagasy people we interacted with most (our guides) were warm and thoughtful and seemed extremely intelligent. I kept thinking they’d be college professors, had they been born in America. They all still seemed to be reeling from the political coup that unfolded here 11 months ago. Frustrated by Antantanarivo’s chronic shortages of water and electricity, college students and other desperate residents took to the streets last October (2025) demanding change. The military finally joined their side and the president — a one-time DJ who’d been backed by the French to take power 16 years earlier — fled the country (having accrued a personal fortune reputed to be $200 million). No election has since been held. The colonel who’s in charge says one is being organized that will take place next year. Will life improve then? Our guides shrugged when we asked them. What can they do but hope?

Throughout our 12-day stay, Steve and I kept asking each other: were we having fun? Glad we came? Clearly the answer to the first was: not always. Madagascar’s road system is awful. Billionaires may be able to charter helicopters to fly them to the natural wonders, but everyone else has no choice but to endure hour upon hour of truly life-threatening passing and jouncing and crater-dodging. Here’s a glimpse. Multiply this video a thousand-fold to imagine how we spent a large chunk of our time.

Note that’s a highly flammable fuel truck we’re passing by inches.

And yet. What we encountered along the way made it seem worth it. In the Southwest we drove through a mining town where scrawny, leathery gun-toting Malagasies panned for sapphires in a setting as savage as any from America’s wild past.

In the dripping rainforests, we gaped not only at the lovable lemurs, but other fantastic creatures.

We had experiences I’ve never had anywhere else and will never forget. Let me wrap this up by describing just a few.

Our program called for a stop along the main highway south out of Tana at an aluminum-recycling operation. I was braced for a tourist trap where we’d be offered shiny silver trinkets. I wasn’t prepared for the hellish Dickensian tableau into which we walked.

There were trinkets on the table, recycled from the scrap aluminum…

We watched some guys create an aluminum cooking pot using sand molds.

I’ll never think of recycling in quite the same way.

The almost-finished product; the rough edges still needing to be smoothed. The guys told us they can make 25 of these per day.

Further south, we spent two nights just outside Isalo National Park, an area where Jurassic-era sandstone has eroded into canyons, gorges, and other natural sculptures interlaced with cascades, pools, and riverine forests.

We hiked for half a day with a marvelous Malagasy naturalist named Peter. He pointed out an anthill that locals had broken into to collect the inhabitants. Apparently they’re good for fattening up chickens.

The ant hill after being raided by villagers.

Peter said members of his tribe, known as the Bara, make a tea from these flowers and apply it to the heads of their newborns; it makes the baby’s fontanel close up faster.

Most fascinating to me was Peter’s explanation of the Bara people’s funeral practices. Like most Malagasy, the Bara believe life only really begins after death. Assuming your offspring treat you right, you become a revered ancestor who watches over your relatives, protecting or punishing the living. Even in Tana, treating the dead right means placing them in family tombs and celebrating their arrival there with elaborate parties.

In Bara country, this goes to extremes. First people let the the corpse of a loved one dry out for a couple of weeks in a nearby cave. They then prepare the skeleton by cutting it into pieces that can be packaged in a portable box. A funeral party hauls the box up steep bluffsides to a remote cave close to the sky, where family members never return to visit it. Then back at home, the family invites the entire extended community to a raucous celebration that lasts for days. The more zebu the family can butcher (to feed the partiers), the more the respect they pay to the deceased. (Zebu are the humped cattle emblematic of Madagascar.)

Peter wasn’t telling us about some arcane practice from the past. He said this happens every time one of his fellow villagers dies.

Peter also pointed out this bunch of zebu, being directed by local boys to stomp around on a rice paddy, breaking up the ground.

“Malagasy people are very superstitious,” said Andry, the guide assigned to show us around Tana for our last two days in the country. A native of Tana deeply knowledgeable about everything from endemic bird calls to ancient archeological findings, Andry walked us for hours around the middle and lower sections of the city. After lunch, we drove to the upper town where Madagascar’s kings and queens lived for centuries.

View from the middle city down to the lower town.

That’s the upper city in the distance, the longtime home of Malagasy kings and queens.

The wooden core of the palace built between 1839 and 1841 by the infamous Queen Ranavalona I burned to ashes about 30 years ago. I knew that interminable work had gone on to restore it, and I was thrilled to learn the restoration had finally finished. So we could go in.

Steve and Andry and I hired a Queen’s Palace guide to show us around, a young, very charming guy named Elias. When the palace burned down local people saved many of the contents; these are now displayed in the reconstruction. Elias led us around the exhibits, explaining them all. Then we walked onto the balcony where he gestured to the gate through which visitors gained access to the royal compound. The eagle on the top was a symbol of power. Next to it was a stone phallus that Elias pointed out was circumcised.

“In order to come through the gates, every man had to be circumcised. And do you know: they checked!” he exclaimed, cackling.

He elaborated. Circumcision was a big deal extending way back in Malagasy culture. Even today, circumcision is pretty much mandatory for every male born in the country. “If you’re not circumcised, you can never marry!” Elias said. “Other men will make fun of you.” You can’t be buried in the family tomb but will be condemned to wander forever as a ghost.

Elias and Andry were both laughing, but it was clear this was serious stuff. They said even today boys undergo circumcision between the ages of 1 and 5, and each boy’s grandfather is required to swallow the foreskin — whole and wrapped in banana.

“Just think!” Elias exclaimed. “When we’re grandfathers we’ll have to do that.” Andry laughed again, but he nodded sheepishly. It was true.

We’re standing just outside the royal gate. The circumcised phallic symbol can be seen on top of the arch, directly over my head.

***

On the last day of our road trip, we worried about arriving at the Tuliar airport late and missing our flight back to Tana. So we left Isalo very early and wound up with a bit of extra time. Haja drove us to a garden close to the airport. We ate the box lunches we had brought with us, then Steve and I walked around the gardens with yet another local guide.

He explained that a Swiss amateur botanist had come to Madagascar decades ago, acquired a piece of land, and traveled all over collecting native plant species. He’d fenced the property, a degraded grassland, and started planting the natives.

Today more than 900 plant species, more than 90% of them indigenous to the region, are flourishing in the space. Wandering along the pathways, I realized with a jolt: THIS was the landscape I’d hoped to find, eerily alien.

So what if it was re-created by a crazy Swiss guy? He’d recognized some of what’s lovable about Madagascar and worked to keep it alive. Better to have gotten at least this glimpse rather than never have seen it at all.

This is the oldest native baobab tree in the garden. It’s about 150 years old. The ones in the photo at the beginning of these post (which we saw growing alongside the highway) are many hundreds of years older.

Lemur love

September 16, 2026jdewyze1 Comment

Lemurs aren’t the only thing that draws tourists to Madagascar. The abundant avian variety (including more than 100 species found nowhere else) attracts birders. French folks flock to the Gallic hotels and resorts, but at least according to our driver/guide, they aren’t interested in nature. They come to soak up the sun and recapture some of their past glory as colonial overlords. The magnet for the vast majority of other visitors is probably the lemurs, but that wasn’t the case for Steve and me.

I never disliked them, and I’m sure Steve didn’t either. Who could? I just never paid them much attention, even though I’ve seen at least a few in the San Diego Zoo. In the course of our 9-day road trip, however, two things happened: I saw way more lemurs than I expected. And I was smitten.

Before we got here, I wasn’t sure what we’d find. From the other side of the world, the plight of these guys — unique primates that evolved and live only in Madagascar — sounds dismal. Although the island once teemed with them, lemurs now rank as the planet’s most endangered mammals, with all but 3 or 4 of the more than 110 species threatened or in danger of extinction, many critically. Poachers hunt them (to eat or sell as pets), but the biggest threat is the massive amount of habitat they’ve lost as humans have replaced trees with rice fields or cut down old growth forests for the hardwood — or to make charcoal.

I think Malagasy travel outfitters all just assume tourists are desperate to see lemurs. Guides try very hard to deliver, and for us they succeeded splendidly. Here’s some of what they led us to in dripping rain forests and rocky, dramatic dryscapes.

Brown lemurs range fairly widely and their babies mature quickly.

They allowed us to get amazingly close, making it easy to take in their mash-up of parts: dog-like snouts narrowing down to end in wet noses on a body that looks and moves like a monkey’s.

This lady’s baby — can you spot it? — was so young it still clung to her belly, close to the milk supply.

Mouse lemurs — the world’s smallest primates — are nocturnal and solitary. We felt lucky when William got a shot of this one in the rain. (I flipped it. The subject was upside-down in the original image.)

Sifakas are known as “dancing lemurs” for their elegant sideways leaps.

After three to six months, lemur babies switch to riding on their moms’ backs, clinging like miniature jockeys.

We chatted with our guides as we tracked and observed all those animals, and on the endless drives from one stop to the next I often used my iPhone to ask AIs other lemurian questions. The result is that I now know quite a bit about lemurs. I find it riveting, but I won’t try to share most of it; I’m aware that not everyone has succumbed to lemur love. Two things dazzled me so thoroughly, however, I can’t restrain myself.

The Sex Lives of Ring-tailed Lemurs

First, in most lemur societies (unlike the vast majority of mammals), females run the show. Moreover, ring-tailed groups each have an alpha female. She and all her fellow lady lemurs only go into estrus and become receptive to mating for a 24- to 36-hour window that comes once a year — typically all within days of each other! Imagine what this does to the males.

But who could imagine what my AI pals described? The male ring-tails, flooded with testosterone, undergo an amazing transformation. The sweat glands on their chests and wrists stop emitting their normal bitter, leathery odor and begin pumping out a fruity, flowery perfume (“suggestive of ripe pears.”) The guys rub their gorgeous tales on their enticing scents and wave them around the females — “stink-flirting,” the scientists call this. The courtship can degenerate into vicious “stink-fighting battles,” the winners of which get selected by one or more lemur ladies.

We saw nothing of this, of course. It takes place in April. I’m almost tempted to come back then to try to see it. (At the very least, it is the first thing I will search for on Youtube when I get home.)

If the sex only happens once a year, the evidence of its result was everywhere.

This girl didn’t seem the least bit nervous I might move in and steal her delicious fig.

The Call of the Indri

Indris are the biggest of all lemurs, and they live only in the wild. Humans have tried to keep them in zoos, but the indris won’t have it. In captivity they just die. Critically endangered, the ones that survive in Madagascar inhabit the patches of rainforest down the escarpment several hours east of Antantanarivo.

On the second morning of our road trip, a wonderful guide named William who’s been studying the forests around Andasibe for 25 of his 50 years led Steve and me straight to an indri family breakfasting in the foliage overhead.

William leading us through the rain forest.

My first sight of one made me cry out in wonder. An indri looks “like a child in fluffy pyjamas,” in the words of John Gimlette, author of the one of the best travel books I’ve ever read (The Gardens of Mars: Madagascar, an Island Story, 2021). This largest lemur “never goes anywhere, never adapts, and never eats anything but leaves.”

William pointed out a baby, just weeks old, clinging to the back of its mom. We watched the family members leap amazing distances as they grazed. Then the unthinkable happened: they indris began emitting some of the loudest sounds I’ve heard from any living creature. Gimlette compares it to an air raid siren, but it reminded me of whale song, amplified and arboreal. They do it to mark their territory, the scientists say. It seems so foolhardy — how could you make it any easier for a hunter to find you? The indris don’t care. Their days may be numbered; their homeland shrinking. Every morning they sing their songs, spine-tingling, defiant. You must pay attention.

Sick on the road

September 12, 2026jdewyze2 Comments

My usual reaction to getting sick on the road is, initially, denial. When I felt the subtle tightness in my upper chest more than two weeks ago, I dismissed it as irritation caused by the dust churned up on Uganda’s unpaved roads. My occasional coughs the next day had to be merely my body’s attempt to expel the residue, I told myself. But the coughs increased in frequency; Steve began coughing with me.

I switched to optimism. If this was a virus, surely it would be one of those quick-moving upper-respiratory squalls — here one day and gone the next! Our hacking intensified; worsened. Neither Steve nor I ever spiked a fever, and our throats and noses seemed fine. By the time we landed in Johannesburg, however, I was coughing so hard I could imagine cracking a rib. My torso ached from the unrelenting battering.

At the South African hotel, after getting our key-card and the password for wifi, I asked the desk clerk (between coughs) if she could recommend a nearby pharmacy. She advised that if we dropped our bags quickly in our rooms and dashed out the door, we could make it to a branch of Click’s just minutes away.

I’m telling you all this not because I think my minor medical issues are interesting. They’re not. But getting sick on the road does have one significant upside: the experience can give you insights into how folks handle such problems outside the US. At the Click’s, I was happy to find only two people in line before me at the pharmacy. In minutes I was standing before a young pharmacist who seemed both sympathetic and confident she could fix me up. She fetched a bottle of effervescent expectorant tablets (to break up the chest mucus) and a bottle of codeine-based cough syrup. The two of them cost just under $8.

After bagging up the drugs, the pharmacist locks them in something resembling a hamster cage. Then the customer takes the cage up to the cashier to pay.

I’ve long been a fan of codeine in cough syrup, though I rarely score any at home, now that a doctor’s visit and a prescription and probably pre-enrollment in Narcotics Anonymous is required. I also can dependably rely on the placebo effect. So by every right, I should have bounced back to robust health after I downed my teaspoon of Tussilinct Linctus cough syrup and got a halfway decent sleep that night.

Sadly, I still felt awful the next morning.

I even considered skipping our planned excursion to Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum, the main item on my To Do list for this trip to the city. We went, but spent only about an hour. Had we felt better, we could easily have lingered for several.

The next day, the narrow-bodied Embraer jet that carried us from Joburg to Madagascar’s capital (Antantanarivo, aka Tana) enabled Steve and me to sit together without a third passenger squeezed in between us. This was good because by this point our coughs were so ear-shattering and frequent other passengers were eyeing us with concern, if not loathing. At times my bronchial passages seemed to be seizing up. This freaked me out: I was poised to head out into the Malagasy hinterland. Would some freak asthma attack finish me off there? I worried about this through Sunday night and when Steve awoke I broke the news: I thought we should try to see a doctor before hitting the road. He agreed.

An hour or two later, we met (for the first time) the man who would be our driver/guide for nine days on the road, an unflappable 45-year-old Tana native named Haja (pronounced “Hazza”). Haja has a charming French accent (French is ubiquitous here.) But his English comprehension was excellent. I felt bad disrupting our program for the day. Our schedule had called for us to drive east for about 5 hours to Andasibe, where we were supposed to hunt for lemurs in the chilly, dripping rainforest for several hours, then check into our hotel, then go on a “night walk.”

By my count, Haja took about 20 seconds to digest our near-non-stop barking fits. He shifted mental gears and said he’d check with his office to find the best clinic for us. He was back in short order, announcing that one near the center of Tana had said they could fit us in.

Battling morning rush hour traffic into the city center is probably the last thing Haja wanted to do, but he gave no hint he found it other than a splendid idea. Along the way, we encountered streets so constipated we didn’t move an inch for 15 minutes. But we finally arrived at the small private medical center and took seats in a clean but spartan waiting room.

I think we waited about 15 minutes before a very young man wearing a dark jacket over a white tunic and trousers came to lead us to a small private office. A name tag pinned to his chest proclaimed he was Dr. R. E. Randrianamana. He took a seat behind the only significant piece of furniture, an uncluttered desk, then handed me a slip of paper and asked me to fill in my name and date of birth. Using a combination of his limited English and my limited French, I explained our concerns.

He sprang to his feet, picked up a stethoscope and applied it to first my back and then Steve’s. Our lungs were fine, he declared, which I took to mean I didn’t have to worry through the coming night about asthma OR pneumonia.

Dr. R then started typing at a small monitor — prescriptions for both of us for a short course of antibiotics, fizzy zinc/vitamin C pills we could dissolve in water twice a day, pain pills (if we felt the need), Kooks brand expectorant syrup, and two kinds of antihistamines (one drowiness-inducing, one not). He pushed a button and a miniature printer rolled out an impressive list of our prescriptions, including the dosages. He posed for a picture with me, then bade us farewell.

We waited briefly then were told the fee for our medical consultations was 34,000 ariary per person, about $7.85. We couldn’t get the medicines from the health center but had to go to a nearby pharmacy, where the tab to fill everything amounted to $31.18. I calculated that getting checked by Dr. R and picking up the prescriptions took about two hours. We were barreling off to the rainforest well before noon.

Our haul from the pharmacie. It was a challenge to figure out what to take when.

I was impressed. Of course if I had a brain tumor or a stroke or mysterious fainting spells, my first choice would be to go to the UCSD Medical Center, where I’d be treated by some of the best specialists in the world (at staggering cost).But for a nasty cough, I think Dr. R gave us no less than I would have gotten from any American doctor I could have seen back home (for just pennies more than I pay for parking at UCSD.)

It’s now been four days since we left that clinic, and we’ve improved a lot. My bronchial spasms have vanished, and coughs are no longer interrupting our sleeping. We both are still emitting minor chest-clearing coughs every now and then, but I expect those will soon disappear. Then again, I tend to be optimistic about such things.

To the antipode — and beyond!

August 15, 2026jdewyze1 Comment

If I could drill down from my house in San Diego through the center of the earth, penetrating to the other side of the planet, the drill bit would emerge in water — specifically, the Southern Indian Ocean. That point, my home’s antipode (to use the geographer’s term for the diametrically opposite point of any place on the globe), is closest to the tiny islands of Reunion and Mauritius. I will almost certainly never venture to either of them. But in just a few weeks, Steve and I should land in Antantanarivo, the capital of Madagascar, whose eastern coastline lies less than 500 miles from Reunion.

Madagascar is considered to be part of Africa. But some say it should rank as the Earth’s 8th continent. It split off from the African mainland about 160 million years ago. Since then its geological development has been distinctive, and most of the plant and animal life that has evolved doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Lemurs are the superstars. More than 100 different species live on the island, almost all of them threatened with extinction.

I’m sure we’ll see lots of lemurs, but they’re not the only thing drawing us to our antipode. The island’s other flora and fauna will be fascinating. The human history is relatively brief but often wildly exotic and exorbitantly bloody. And I have to admit: we’ve come to appreciate various ends of the earth. What will the vibe be like in this one?

We’ll be taking a long, winding road to Madagascar, leaving Sunday morning and journeying through Paris, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Johannesburg. I’ll report on the details, as I can, along the way.

We won’t cover the whole island. It’s way too big, the fourth biggest in the world (three times the size of Great Britain.) But we’ll be driven through a big swathe of it (very roughly along that red line.)