Rob left for Whistler today (for work but yes I’m sure he’ll fit a little fun in there) and so while I was cooking dinner tonight, instead of the usual pish-boom-bah video game noises or Law & Order grotessity for background noise, I flipped to one of my all-time fave shows, Pilot Guides. And lookee here! It was a special on Madagascar.
Ah, Madagascar.
Do you ever have one of those moments where you remember a memory you had all but forgotten? And it resurfaces like a deep-sea diver, slowly, carefully, until it reaches the surface and then, it’s so strange and other-worldly that you hardly believe it’s a memory at all? It seems like something that you perhaps imagined, after too much daydreaming… (or too many episodes of Pilot Guides and Don’t Forget Your Passport).
Watching this show, murky memories of my own visit to this mysterious land resurfaced. And all of a sudden I remembered…
…waking up at the crack of dawn to follow our guide into the jungle to gaze in wonder at wild lemurs…
…lounging on utterly pristine, deserted beaches bordered with water the color of topaz and knowing we were probably among a dozen white people to have visited Ile Sainte Marie that year…
… driving along red, red roads with potholes that came almost to my knees…
… driving by people trudging along roads in the middle of nowhere, carrying poles with stacks of bananas at each end…
… being accosted by the sight of corrugated metal shacks juxtaposed with gigantic billboards advertising L’Oreal mascara in Antananarivo…
… sleeping swathed in mosquito nets and waking up in the night and reaching for a bottle of water only to realize just in time that a HUMONGOUS cockroach had claimed it as his resting place for the night…
…being toted around a once-grand-but-now-crumbly town (was it Toamasina?) in a pousse-pousse…
…renting bicycles from some semi-shady character (he said it was his friend’s bike?) and being followed by intensely curious yet intensely shy Malagasy kids who didn’t understand the concept of chewing the gum we gave them (I hope they didn’t have stomach aches because of us)…
… seeing vanilla growing on the vine…
… accidentally coming across a funeral procession (Malagasy remove ancestors from their tombs, dress them in fresh shrouds and party with them all night long once every few years)…
…following some entrepreneurial kids who gave us a guided tour of authentic pirate graves adorned with faded cross n’bones tombstones…
…trying to shoo semi-tame lemurs away from the jam pot as we tried to eat breakfast on the beach at a super-luxurious resort on the east coast…
Was it really me who saw all these things? It seems so long ago. I guess six years, when they’re packed with adventures and memories, can seem like sixty.
They’re memories I treasure. And I love dusting them off every so often – in fact, it’s necessary, to keep them alive.
And that grunting sound a lemur makes?
It’s one that buries itself in your mind, but you never really forget it.
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