Flavian pointed out some of the factories as we passed, the soap factory, milk factory, tobacco factory and the cement factory to add to the brewery that we passed yesterday.
Favian showed the car as we passed a celebration of the ancestors. Three bodies had been removed from the grave and were being paraded down the street to the accompaniment of music and dancing. We passed a number of these ancestral houses yesterday, all well constructed with brick or cement blocks and all featuring a cross on the top. How they resolve the dissonance between ancestral worship and Christianity I'm not sure.
House are made of brick not wood like the old days. John told us that wood meant life and stone, death so you didn't want your house made of stone. Stone is what's used for the tomb houses. That said almost every house we've seen on this trip has been made odd brick.
We passed a couple of fat where the bones of the ancestors are removed from the grave, rewrapped in a fresh shroud inand returned to the grave. At the same time celebrations take place and depending on the wealth of the family, these festivities can go on for a week.
Plow the fields with zebu and pound out some of the chunks with a sledge hammer.
Flavian tells me that 90% of malagasies cook with charcoal.
Bought a bunch of carvings at Ambrosia. Kind of went crazy. There were a number of tall skinny ones standing together of various heights. Without exaggerating, I must have knocked over about 50. As one tumbled, it knocked over another and so on and so forth.
Except for a lunch stop just after buying the wood carvings we drove straight through to about 4:30. A long time. Lunch featured more folk dancers performing for a bunch of gringos. (Sorry, wrong country.) We traveled through miles and miles of denuded landscape that had one featured virgin forest. Now it's restricted to a few national parks. Our guide for the next day ups us that they had to pay part of our entrance fees to the tribe who would otherwise have engaged in slush and burn if it wasn't there.
We passed through town after town exibiting various levels of extreme poverty. As we were going through one of these villages or nostrils were assaulted with a very sweet smell. Our driver said that the people were burning begonia flowers from which they extract the oil and sell it to the French. We stopped at a small farm where this was taking place and the driver held up some leaves to our noses. Same smell that had accosted us on the road. A huge drum was being used to heat the leaves and petals. I hope the French are paying them a decent price but from the look of their home it doesn't look like.
We met or guide as soon as we arrived in Ranomafana, the location of the national park. His name was something like Angelo but we were nor quite sure. He's quite a short guy with a wife and three kids, the oldest one being 14. Their names were Angela, Angelique and the boy’s name was Angelmo. We were to go on a night tour right away. We drove up the road a ways where there were lots of other "whites" looking into the trees at the side of the road guided by the light of their guide's flashlight beam. Our first sighting was a snub nosed chameleon, just a little longer than your thumb nail and a green that perfectly matched the leaf it lay on. Th we crossed the road to see a mouse lemur, hiding in the trees and darting back and forth as it tried to avoid the flash light beams and the flashes from the cameras. Over the next hour and a half, we would see a O’Shaunnessey’s chameleon, perhaps the one that most resembles our stereotypical perception of what a chameleon should look like. We also saw the sidestriped chameleon, a blue lipped frog and one other frog.
Then, it was back to our hotel where I had the shrimp and Nicola had the duck which in the big picture of things wouldn't matter in the least if I hadn't suffered from food poisoning for the rest of the night. I believe it's called Mally Belly which is more prominent here that any other country since Nepal.
Favian showed the car as we passed a celebration of the ancestors. Three bodies had been removed from the grave and were being paraded down the street to the accompaniment of music and dancing. We passed a number of these ancestral houses yesterday, all well constructed with brick or cement blocks and all featuring a cross on the top. How they resolve the dissonance between ancestral worship and Christianity I'm not sure.
House are made of brick not wood like the old days. John told us that wood meant life and stone, death so you didn't want your house made of stone. Stone is what's used for the tomb houses. That said almost every house we've seen on this trip has been made odd brick.
We passed a couple of fat where the bones of the ancestors are removed from the grave, rewrapped in a fresh shroud inand returned to the grave. At the same time celebrations take place and depending on the wealth of the family, these festivities can go on for a week.
Plow the fields with zebu and pound out some of the chunks with a sledge hammer.
Flavian tells me that 90% of malagasies cook with charcoal.
Bought a bunch of carvings at Ambrosia. Kind of went crazy. There were a number of tall skinny ones standing together of various heights. Without exaggerating, I must have knocked over about 50. As one tumbled, it knocked over another and so on and so forth.
Except for a lunch stop just after buying the wood carvings we drove straight through to about 4:30. A long time. Lunch featured more folk dancers performing for a bunch of gringos. (Sorry, wrong country.) We traveled through miles and miles of denuded landscape that had one featured virgin forest. Now it's restricted to a few national parks. Our guide for the next day ups us that they had to pay part of our entrance fees to the tribe who would otherwise have engaged in slush and burn if it wasn't there.
We passed through town after town exibiting various levels of extreme poverty. As we were going through one of these villages or nostrils were assaulted with a very sweet smell. Our driver said that the people were burning begonia flowers from which they extract the oil and sell it to the French. We stopped at a small farm where this was taking place and the driver held up some leaves to our noses. Same smell that had accosted us on the road. A huge drum was being used to heat the leaves and petals. I hope the French are paying them a decent price but from the look of their home it doesn't look like.
We met or guide as soon as we arrived in Ranomafana, the location of the national park. His name was something like Angelo but we were nor quite sure. He's quite a short guy with a wife and three kids, the oldest one being 14. Their names were Angela, Angelique and the boy’s name was Angelmo. We were to go on a night tour right away. We drove up the road a ways where there were lots of other "whites" looking into the trees at the side of the road guided by the light of their guide's flashlight beam. Our first sighting was a snub nosed chameleon, just a little longer than your thumb nail and a green that perfectly matched the leaf it lay on. Th we crossed the road to see a mouse lemur, hiding in the trees and darting back and forth as it tried to avoid the flash light beams and the flashes from the cameras. Over the next hour and a half, we would see a O’Shaunnessey’s chameleon, perhaps the one that most resembles our stereotypical perception of what a chameleon should look like. We also saw the sidestriped chameleon, a blue lipped frog and one other frog.
Then, it was back to our hotel where I had the shrimp and Nicola had the duck which in the big picture of things wouldn't matter in the least if I hadn't suffered from food poisoning for the rest of the night. I believe it's called Mally Belly which is more prominent here that any other country since Nepal.
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