Loving Lemurs in Madagascar

Madagascar is possibly my favorite of the places I’ve gone, and at this point I think I can say that’s saying a lot. The country is fascinating, the land beautiful and altogether distinctive. The sky is incredibly expressive, like it’s trying to communicate something profound through the drama of light and shadows. The constant overcast puts everything into deeper contrast, the greens of the rice paddies are impossibly green, and everything seems to have nuance, as well as a good dose of the chaotic. The capital Antananarivo is perched high on a mountain, so driving is constant undulation, latitudinally and laterally, straight lines rare and fleeting. The roads are also narrow, forcing vehicles to share with pedestrians and all manners of conveyance (people pushing carts, zebu pulling carts, people pushing zebu). They’re really more like rivers of humanity than anything conventionally called a road. It takes an absurd amount of time to go very short distances, but there’s so much to see in the unending, inscrutable procession.

In my short experience, Madagascar seemed a magical place full of the unexpected. The country is an enormous island off the Southeast coast of Africa, but the majority of its people are of Indonesian descent (with impossibly long names), along with Africans, Indians and Chinese. The sheer diversity of the land also seems impossible, and we only saw a relatively small part of it. Over the weekend, we hired a driver to take us three hours to a place colloquially called “Lemur Island.” It was the sort of trip that the phrase, “the journey is just as important as the destination,” was created to describe. We drove out of the bustling city, through villages selling vegetables on train tracks that send people scurrying when the occasional train actually comes. We drove past enormous castles of bricks being dried in the open air and sun, topped with people in various parts of the assembly line turning mud to brick.

The landscape changed from the vibrant, wet green of rice paddies to jutting rock cliffs, to rolling shrub covered hills to deciduous forests whose leaves were the reds and golds of fall splendor I’d expect to see in the Midwest or Northeast, and finally to the exotic, oversized flora of the jungle.

 And to top all of that off, our driver shared so much with us about his country and his own life; it

was a fascinating glimpse into the culture which we don’t usually get on such short stays. On our journey, we drove past exhumation and circumcision rituals, both of which are celebrated with parties, large crowds, and fanfare. Exhumations rituals occur every five years, in which a loved one’s bones are dug up and brought (still wrapped) to the party where the memory of that person is celebrated. So say your uncle was a big fan of Jack Daniels, you would bring him a bottle and honor him. While the very physical application of “Never forget the dead” is initially shocking to Western sensibilities, I love the concept behind it. It also serves the practical purpose of rotating bodies and making space available for the soon to depart.

More light-heartedly, he also shared with us the Malagasy tradition of stealing Zebu (their humped, horned bovines) to prove manhood before marriage. (And to impress in-laws?) I find myself wishing I had asked more questions about this, such as how exactly does one go about stealing a zebu and what does one do with it afterward? We learned some great Malagasy vocabulary – “Mora Mora” is the slow, quiet way of doing things, and the fun to say “Malala” is love, coining our phrase of the trip, “Lemur Malala.”

Now, have you ever gazed into a lemur’s soulful eyes? Or had a troupe of hungry lemurs advance soundlessly out of the fog, greedily ogling the bananas you hold? Well, add that to your bucket list. It’s an equally unnerving and awesome experience. When we finally made it to Lemur Island, it was everything we had dreamed of and more… The lodge was surrounded by huge, pre-historic looking plants that made it feel like driving into Jurassic Park, and combined with the heavy morning fog the place was otherworldly. The property has an island that serves as a home for tame lemurs that can’t survive in the wild because they were rescued or surrendered by people who kept them as pets. You get to the island by crossing a small moat with a canoe, and immediately, the lemurs approach out of the wood line. It’s a tremendously unsettling sight at first, they’re not small creatures, they move fast, and don’t hesitate to jump directly at you if you happen to be holding a banana. Luckily, they also happen to be extremely light and fluffy, so after the shock of the first lunge I was able to enjoy their antics. It was such a frantic, funny little episode, all these nervous tourists holding bananas, the trees full of jumping lemurs happy to trade a picture for a treat. Also, it was only the 10,000th time I’ve thought while overseas, “Yeah, this would never happen in America.”