Two weeks in Mayotte is quite enough, though some people are known to have lived there for many years. Not a place for the shoestring cruiser. I have enough of the place, the novelty of expensive imported french food is wearing off. Time to go, with minimum stock up.
There's not much about the passage that I can write about. Wind, no wind, cloud, sails, no sails, engine on, arrival. Boring. Two hundred miles seems so little that I barely tidy up the boat for the two-day passage. We arrive in the first truly foreign country on our cruise so far. Thailand and Malaysia were of course the first countries that had a different culture and a different language. But both were totally covered in tourism, and a yacht anchored up at any island was just another yacht, just another visitor. Well, it's not like Madagascar is a war-zone or anything but it happened to be the first place since leaving Australia where we had to lock the boat. So far, since I bought it in 1998, it has remained wide open day and night.
We motor in, around the southern edge of Nosy Be island, to the harbour of Hellville. We have barely dropped the anchor when Tupak comes along, driving some other poor yachtie's dinghy. He is dressed like a pop star and talks good english. I say: "So you're like a few beers short of a six-pack, just a Two-pack". Stupid joke, but then again, I'm the king of stupid jokes. Shockingly he understands the joke and even laughs at it. Good start.
Hellville harbour view from the deck of Aliisa
Tupak is the King of public relations with very little to offer in the other departments of doing business. Now all the Malagasy people know that a Finnish clown with an Aussie accent has arrived. "I can help you with everything", he says. Sure. "How much?" I ask. "Up to you" he replies, knowing that I'm stupid enough to overpay him.
We spend the rest of the day checking in. Four offices, two of them twice. Lots of paperwork typed carefully with two fingers and a huge 1960's typewriter. To make myself more important, I am equipped with a rubber stamp and lots of fancy looking crew lists. One official, later confirmed to be a fake one anyway, wants to have my original ship's registration. I refuse. After a few moments of arguing, the man gives up and Tupak, Paula and I continue our quest to check in.
Everything is confusing because I'm tired and uninterested in the bureaucratic bullshit. I can't be bothered arguing too much so as long as they only ask for a dollar or two, I gladly pay. Eventually everyone's made a few bucks and passed me another "important" paper. The poor people of Madagascar, or perhaps the generous aid-agencies and foreign governments have sponsored the production of another stack of paperwork to be filed away forever. Tupak gets 5000 Ariari local money for his efforts. Can't be bothered to argue with him either.
The initial culture shock is made worse by the fact that there are two languages and two currencies in Madagascar and I'm not familiar with any of them. One euro equals about 2400 Ariari or 11500 Francs. One "hello" equals "bonjur" or "salama" or "Bola tsara!". We buy ourselves a pocket calculator which I re-name "communicator". Most of our communication with the locals is limited to punching numbers on the calculator until we agree on the price and of course lots of sign language and in some cases pantomime. I like speaking pantomime. (Q: What do you call an Italian with only one arm? A: A speech impediment) No, I'm not an italian.
We spend a few days in Hellville harbour and stock up with local fresh vegetables, bread and local rum. The rum turns out to be cheap, one euro per litre for 63% rum. I conntemplate filling one of our 150 litre water tanks with rum, but settle for 30 litres in jerrycans. Local cigarettes are cheap too and I buy enough to use in the villages for trading and gifts. We make a 20-mile daysail to Nosy Mamoko. All islands here are Nosy-something and many of them are Nosy-so much that I'm having trouble saying the name. Try Nosy Akazoberavina. It's no suprise that the word "Nosy" in Malagasy means "island". (Nosy Be means Big Island)
We anchor among a few other cruising yachts, one of them being Yacht Nemir. We met them briefly in Chagos and again in Mayotte. The New Zealand family, Bob, Joanie, Ryan(19) and Lisa(15) are now becoming our best friends. We feel like part of their family and it becomes hard to be away from them for more than a day. To be honest; they are the loveliest and grooviest family on the planet.
The trading starts. The islands of NW Madagasgar remind me of PNG but the trading items in Nosy Mamoko turn out to be unusual. A half dazed, half drunken man paddles his canoe to Aliisa and offers us some local produce; Marijuana and Rum. He has sampled both himself before paddling out. They seem to be both quite strong. We already got our rum from Hellville and even though I sometimes take a puff from a passing joint, I'm not interested in having any onboard Aliisa. A day later we manage to get some tomatoes. Bob and Joanie from Nemir score some fine coffee beans.
WATERFALL
Across the bay from Nosy Mamoko is a small village. It is in fact only two families on the opposite sides of a small tidal inlet. There is a small waterfall at the end of the inlet and it becomes our main source of water. Many of the villages are nothing more than one extended family, or perhaps two or three or four families forming a group of huts. It is tempting to say that all villages are built on the beach, close to the waterfront. But of course, being a cruising yacht, floating in the ocean, what other type of villages are we likely to see??
The children from the village enthusiastically help us to fill our jerry cans but don't ask for anything in return. Except Karl, a 17-year-old boy who, after much scribbling in a piece of paper with a help of a French-English phrase book, finally approaches me with a carefully written note:
"Salut! Excuse me. I do hope you will excuse me. I wonder if I could ask a small fawour of you. I've got myself into a bit of a scrape to learn English. I need some help."
Along Malagasy, French remains an official language, a reminder of the not-so-old colonial era. Karl is the first and eventually remains the only person we meet who does not want "stuff" but knowledge. The budding tourism industry in Madagascar has increased the need for English language, even though most tourists arrive from France and Italy. The literacy rate in Madagascar is claimed to be 66% but in the villages we tend to meet only those belonging to the remaining 34%.
I donate my old hard-cover 200 page world atlas to Karl and he brings us a large barracuda for dinner. The women receive empty glass jars, a practical and much valued household item for those who don't shop in supermarkets. Some cigarettes to the men and lollies for kids and we're ready to move on. We return some weeks later but Karl has travelled to the mainland to continue school. Good for him!
We venture 40 miles north to the Nosy Mitsio group of islands. The locals there turn out to be very enterprising. The sun has barely risen when we wake up to the owl-like ho-hooing of the locals. Two or three canoes paddle out before dawn and wait eagerly among the few anchored yachts for the first opportunity to do business. I abandon my quiet moment with a cup of coffee in the cockpit at sunrise. Instead I lay low inside the boat. I like the quiet of the mornings.
Yeah, it's a hard life. I feel that this is one thing that sometimes makes travelling so tiring. There's always someone at your face. I like my solitude and quiet time and just having Paula onboard sometimes irritates me. Not because of her, but because sometimes I just want to be alone. I want to meet locals in Madagascar, I really do, but I would like to do it at my convenience. Or at least at a decent time, after ten in the morning perhaps, not at 0530 when I'm just having my best sleep and wicked dreams.
A young boy called Abdi paddles alongside. The brittle rubber of his old fins is giving away under numerous sowed and glued patches. He asks me for a diving mask. After a lot of pantomime and with my best French pronunciation of English words we finally come to an agreement; a kilo of fresh meat for a diving mask. He tries the mask on, to make sure it fits but I insist that the mask stays onboard until the meat is delivered.
Next morning, before dawn (of course!), Abdi knocks on the hull with the whole back half of a skinned goat in his canoe. He brings it on the back deck and asks me for a knife. "Sure" I say. Obviously he needs a knife to cut out the agreed 1kg of meat, after all the back end of the poor animal must weigh at least 3 kg. (yep, it's just a baby goat, whatever the word for that is...) I present Abdi with a kitchen knife and the mask. He puts them both in his canoe, leaves the goat on the deck and paddles away. The price went up by one knife but so did the quantity of goods. I remove the internal organs still hanging under the stomach of the goat, grab the carcass by its hairy little back legs and carve myself and seven other yachties a nice meal for a beach BBQ.
We have also heard stories of a man called Dadilahy (The Grandfather), a much respected village elder in Nosy Komba. I want to meet him as much as the Chameleons and Lemurs that run around the island. We sail back south to Hellville for some fresh supplies, a donation for our rap / con artist friend Tupak and for an easy exit to Nosy Komba.
Nosy Komba has the largest and most westernised village in the area. The buildings, traditional huts with thatched roofs and bamboo walls, are arranged neatly in rows, leaving clean swept sandy alleys between them. Getting lost in the little labyrinth of houses is easy - at least for me - but it doesn't really matter. The village is dotted with small local restaurants and little souvenir shops. Long clothes lines are bending down under the weight of beautifully decorated white table cloths - one of the main produce of the island. Small fires are lit between the huts for cooking and fresh water is piped down to several public taps from distant streams.
We head out towards the local "zoo", behind the village. Old concrete steps lead us past a sign advertising the main attraction on the island; the Lemur park. Ironically the area is not fenced and the Lemurs have long ago moved out of the park, closer to the local banana stalls. Half a dozen local women stand in a row, selling small bunches of over-priced bananas to visitors, while the Lemurs get ready to jump down and provide the ultimate wildlife experience.
It is a truly symbiotic relationship between the local people and the Lemurs. I buy four bananas. I manage to push the other three deep enough in my pockets while two Lemurs, now grasping my head and sitting on my shoulders, try to grab the one in my hand. Piece by piece I hand my fruits out and carefully pat the clean smelling fluffy primates with my right hand while they fight for the banana on the left.
So what is left in the Lemur Park? A man is waiting us at the entrance and collects a $1.00 entry fee. There are three old concrete pens in the park; one with a large old tortoise, one with a group of smaller ones and one with a few young trees hosting three Chameleons. The local boys collect the Chameleons from near by forest and replace them almost weekly as the old ones - removed from the shelter of the forest - fall pray to birds. There is also an empty concrete pit with a boy standing next to it. As we approach, the boy reaches an old rice bag and pulls out two Boa Constrictors. These too are collected from the wild but they are harder to find and after visitors have taken their photos and had their turn in handling them, the snakes are quickly packed away into the sack, saving the staff another day of Boa-hunting.
I've ticked off two out of three. It's time to find Dadilahy and complete our mission. With some local help I am taken to his house. "Hi there" he says in a perfect Chicago accent as he pulls aside the black sarong covering his doorway. Dadilahy (George Smith) is the spitting image of Morgan Freeman. Grown up - just like Morgan - in the cotton fields of Mississippi, he is a grey-haired 67-year-old African American retired to Madagascar.
After four years in Nosy Komba, George's wisdom and charisma has caught the hearts of the locals on the island. He has been given the status of Dadilahy - the Grandfather - a much respected advisor and elder of the community. He is healthy and strong and at the age of 67, he is already twelve years beyond the average life expectancy in Madagascar. Here in the world of taboos and worship of ancestors, he's worthy of some respect by default. "Hang on" he says, "Let me get my hat and I'll come and have a beer with you".
Delighted by the common language with someone who qualifies as a "local", I ask a lot of questions rather than talking about myself and my travels, as usual. At almost every question, George replies: "Let me tell you a story…"
A week later I am still listening to his stories, bathing in his charisma, over a cold beer at a beach front bar. I hear about the German ex-criminals who hide the European law on the island or elsewhere in Madagascar, about the Thai origins of the fabric in the beautiful table cloths and about the way some senior westerners buy themselves a 16-year-old local wife for $100. I hear stories about poverty, corruption and the colonialism that continues to be exercised by private western individuals in Madagascar.
In three months we have barely scraped the surface of a tiny part of a very complex and fascinating country. The pleasure of cruising comes from the ability to move around the world. Sometimes the pain of it comes from having to. The cyclone season is approaching and it's time to move further south, South Africa. Madagascar has proven to be a safe and pleasant cruising destination regardless of what you want from it; Diving, snorkelling, beaches, scenery, fishing, whale watching, culture, religion, history or interacting with a cheerful friendly people. Thank you, I will come again!
