Daraina

I went to another volunteer's site last week to check out an ecotourism project that she was doing, and had a hilariously interesting time while I was there (hilarious if you're used to Madagascar, I suppose). The only transportation to the town was in the back of a pickup, and we ended up walking several times because the road was so bad that even the high-clearance 4x4 was bottoming out with the extra weight (and with or without the people weight, it spent a good part of the trip fishtailing in mud). The kicker is, the town I was visiting is located on the ONLY ROAD OUT OF MY REGION. The road is so bad that is sometimes takes 20 hours to cover 150 kilometers (about 100 miles). And that's why my site is a fly site. The next day, we went out to the reserve the volunteer works with, and came back to a truck with a flat tire and no battery. And the jack was broken. Solution? Have six people sit on a branch resting on an overturned rice mortar and lift the truck up while a guy changes the tire (and fiddles around under the truck, and hope that the branch doesn't snap). Then create a new circuit for the battery by pulling nails out of a nearby park bench and pounding them into the car battery. That same day, someone in the nearby town brought the researchers at the NGO a young dwarf lemur that someone had picked up in the forest. It was wary of its surrounding for a few minutes, then started to jump in the laps of everyone sitting around the table, walk over our computers, bite our thumbs, eat bananas, and eventually jumped down one of the researcher's pants. He yelped and ran out of the room to drop his pants in peace. More evidence that lemurs had a different evolutionary path than a lot of the world's animals--no ingrained fear of humans. The lemur's fate is uncertain because it would be very difficult to identify his family group, without which he won't survive in the wild. Anyway, here are some pictures!