Travel Writing

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The real blog post:

I read a number of books about Madagascar before coming here, and very rarely did they describe experiences I would come to have in country. In part that’s because most of them were research-focused; in part that’s because only the very best travel books are well enough written to describe other peoples’ experiences.

One of the books I read was Dervla Murphy’s ‘Muddling Through in Madagascar’. At the time, I thought the author was wearing rose-colored glasses; now I think she was being purposefully naïve. PCV Audrey just read the same book and she sums it up more eloquently than I can:

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I started reading Dervla Murphy's Muddling Through in Madagascar, a dusty hardbound copy that had been lost behind a stack of other books at the Meva in Diego. It was written in 1986, so I was willing to put up with a certain amount of: “...one explores the capital's laughter-filled streets where children play exuberantly and greet the vazaha warmly, good manners curbing their curiosity.” Yea, right. But then I got to this next one, closed the book and have moved on to better things: “The adolescent girls moved with marvelous grace but too many wore European-style clothing, garish and ill-cut. How much lovelier they would look wearing traditional skirts and shawls!” If I ever write a sentence like that, y'all have permission to forcibly separate me from my computer. This is one book that probably should have remained lost.

Travel books written by myopics wearing rose-colored glasses. But I think a lot of us commit a similar sin. We decide we want to go on vacation. We look through magazines and travel books and read up on all the neat things to see and do in a particular place. We fall in love with the pictures of the beautiful rocks, of the interesting buildings, of the colorful people. Before we set foot on the plane or drive away in the car, we already have a picture in our heads of what the place will be like. When we arrive, we see what we expect to see, or we don't, and, upon our return, when we're asked if we had a good time, our answer will depend on the degree to which the place matched that picture we brought with us in our heads.

We see what we want to see. We find interesting what we've been told to find interesting. A man drives us around in a bus, points at things with a stick and tells us to be amazed. And we come home feeling just the slightest bit empty. What's missing? A genuine sense of discovery. The thrill of finding something new and unexpected. The satisfaction of surviving a trip through uncharted territory. It's the difference between reading in a textbook about Washington's crossing of the Potomac, and getting in a boat in the dead of winter and rowing yourself across.

So here's an exercise for y'all: Open up a book of maps. Flip to a random page. Close your eyes and point. Drive there, or fly there, or take the train or the bus there, but – this is the important part – don't do any research before you go. Stay for a couple days. Wander around. See what there is to see, without the benefit of someone else's rose-colored glasses. You might very well find “laughter-filled streets,” but then again you might find something much, much more interesting.

OK, so what do I have to add to this? Absolutely nothing profound. But I do realize that most of you won’t be able to visit Madagascar and have to depend on armchair travel, so I will share that I recently read a pretty decent travel book about Madagascar and frequently found myself laughing and nodding because I had many similar experiences. So here are a few funny or true excerpts from Mark Eveleigh’s ‘Maverick in Madagascar’:

“I was soon to come to the conclusion that a Malagasy bureaucrat is judged primarily by the amount of rubber stamps that he has hanging from the little tree in the center of his desk. This was a twelve-stamp délégué”

“If there is anyway to avoid it, a polite Malagasy will never answer ‘no’ to a question.” [This extends to directions—a polite Malagasy will give you fake directions rather than admit they don’t know where your destination is. So I always ask about five people and ignore anyone who hesitates before giving directions.]

“Under the eaves of the concrete government office three glassy-eyed youths were chewing their way through a large basket of leaves. This was qat, a narcotic plant, something like betel nut in that it is a mild tranquillizer with no great effect other that the stimulation of vast quantities of bitter-tasting saliva.”

“On a sloping paddock to my right, three men were chasing 25 zebu round in circles. As they chased the cattle, a hundred scrabbling hooves chopped up the earth so that the center of the field was already muddy brown in contrast to its verdant corners. This was ploughing in its most basic form.” [This is how they plough rice fields in my area.]

“In some parts of Madagascar, even today, there remains a suspicion that vazaha are mpakafo—zombies who come to the island to steal the healthy internal organs of the Malgasy.” [In my area, parents will tell small children that the white foreigners will steal and eat them if they don’t behave—I’ve had children run screaming at the sight of me.]

“Wherever you go in the Third World, veteran travelers almost seem to queue up to tell you: ‘You should have seen this thirty years ago—there was nothing!’ In Madagascar, you often feel that you’ve traveled back in time, against the natural current of progress. In the eastern rainforests I saw a majestic colonial railway station falling into ruin, where now no line even exists. On the west coast I saw the remains of a once important port, now hopelessly silted up and isolated five months out of the year by impassable dirt tracks.”

“Rich Western travelers (and almost all of us can be considered rich) cruise the undeveloped world in search of the ‘picturesque’: and in most cases poverty and hunger lie in its shadow. The inhabitants of these little huts, woven from branches and covered in mud, would gladly have traded instantly for a concrete box with a television aerial.” [This is why I’m so grateful for my concrete house: it’s by no means comfy, but unlike my neighbors’ bamboo houses it is sturdy, roomy, and secure.]

“I was to see deforestation and burning on a small rural scale throughout all my travels in Madagascar, and even in the most uninhabited areas the denuded landscape bore the deep scars of ancient erosion. Yet I was never fully able to comprehend the awful truth of what it means when seventy-five percent of the world’s fourth-largest island is officially classified as ‘severely degraded’ and an estimated twenty-five percent is deliberately burnt off every year for rice or to provide a ‘green bite’ for cattle.”

“[The nun] had done this [taxi brousse] trip before and knew every trick in the book for maximizing her comfort. Every time an unexpected bump caught me unawares and launched me into the air she shamelessly shifted her buttocks over to grab an extra few centimeters of the seat. If I leaned out of the window to look at something she would instantly jam her body up against my back to gain yet another precious centimeter. Then she would steadfastly refuse to relinquish her ill-gotten gains when I tried to pull my head back into the car. If, perhaps an hour later, she inadvertently slid back on one of the steep right-hand cambers I would recover my precious position and she would dig her bony elbows into my ribs, shoot me and angry glare, and sigh loudly at my lack of respect.”