27th October 2015. Berenty to Port Dauphin, Madagascar.

Returning from Berenty to Port Dauphin….

Some people, perhaps farms workers, on top of a truck heading in the other direction.   He was asking for water but unfortunately, by the time I worked that out, I was too slow to respond.

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A family in their zebu cart.

I might take this opportunity to quickly summarise a book, In Search of the Red Slave, that I read prior to going to Madagascar.  It uses current on-the-ground research to validate a story first published in 1729 and ghost-written by none other than Daniel Defoe.

The protagonist, Robert Drury, was 15 and returning from India in 1703 when the ship he was in went down on the south coast of Madagascar.  The crew were rescued by a local tribe and well treated but were not free.  They decided to kidnap the local chief as a hostage and made for Port Dauphin, but didn’t make it.  They all ended up killed except for Robert Drury and a couple of other youngsters.  He was taken back to the village and made a slave.  After some years he became a respected warrior and was allowed a wife.

He wasn’t satisfied with this and escaped to a tribe to the west that he had encountered in a joint military campaign.  He was welcomed there but after a few more years he was taken in battle by another tribe further to the north.  Initially he was enslaved again but after some time became relatively free again.  Word of his survival had made it back to London and eventually he was rescued by a ship sent out to look for him.  At this stage he had effectively forgotten how to speak English.  He spent some years in London where Defoe wrote up his journal.  This was widely dismissed as fiction in the following years but this book demonstrates how details can only have been authentic.  Ironically, he became dissatisfied with life in London and returned to Madagascar – but this time not as a slave but as a slave trader.

The book is well worth reading for its account of tribal life at the time and the harshness and perils of life there today.  The area in the South where Drury lived are much further to the west, much more remote and much drier than where I visited.

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A very overloaded taxi brousse.

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Back at the river, where we passed by on the way out.

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Just past the bridge and the river, we are passing through the town of Ambossary Sud.

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Obviously out of town now, passing a village.

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Not far from Port Dauphin now and a herd of zebu on the road.

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Inside Port Dauphin and an enterprising bicycle rider.

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24th October 2015. Port Dauphin to Berenty, Madagascar.

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We are driving from Port Dauphin to Berenty.  A taxi brousse in front of us has stopped and some women are offering cooked refreshments to the passengers.

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We approach a bridge, in unusually good condition.

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Under the bridge is a local in a dugout canoe with a load of sand.

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Graves in Madagascar can be elaborate because the ancestors are revered.  They are usually fady or taboo. I don’t know about this one but it could be dangerous to wander into a graveyard near a remote village in the south and take pictures.

These are perhaps less traditional than some I have read about.  Traditionally in the south they made a little house for the dead person that was often made of stone and far more substantial than the houses people lived in.  The dead person’s house was then burnt.

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Across fields to the mountains.  The further inland you go here, the less hospitable the land is for agriculture.

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A father and son, it would appear, walking down the road with their zebu.

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Three youngsters beside the road.

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A taxi-brousse in front of us, perhaps overloaded with people and cargo, has a distinct list to the right.

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Here it has stopped just before a town to let passengers on or off.

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Four men walking beside the road on the outskirts of the small town, two chewing sugarcane.

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We had stopped for a flat tyre and taxi-brousse, which we had passed around half an hour ago in the town, now passes us.

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The spare was either deflated or bald so we couldn’t use it to replace the flat tyre.  There were double wheels on the back so we pulled off one of those, put that on the front and put the spare on the inside at the back.  this took some time.

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While this was happening, some of the charming local women and girls walked past us carrying loads on their heads.

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Nearby there was a small roadside hut, perhaps for selling produce but currently empty.  You can see it in the background at the right of the picture three images back.  A snake fell from the roof in the process of swallowing a gecko.  While we were there it slowly and completely consumed the gecko.

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A glimpse of a village surrounded by cacti, probably a traditional method of fortification.

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A bridge in less than perfect shape, with a local helpfully pointing where we should drive.

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This is a very poor, dry region.

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The road had once been sealed but the seal now was intermittent.  This made it much worse than just a dirt road.  Perhaps in a Range Rover with their excellent suspension you could zoom over it but in our bus it was very slow going.

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Two small boys in front of a village.

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Locals and zebu.

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Big loads of firewood, I presume.

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Taken from a bridge over a rare river near a town.  Many people are here to bathe, water zebu or wash clothes.

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