surfEXPLORE Madagascar part 1 (of 3)
surfEXPLORE Madagascar part 1 (of 3)
Three or four times a year I travel
with an international collective called surfEXPLORE to find and document new
waves, often in post conflict or post environmental disaster locations, and
certainly in hard to reach places. The planning for these trips demands detailed
research of oceanography, coastal geomorphology, land and boat access, culture
and history as we target coastlines with little or no documented evidence of
the waves, let alone people riding them.
Right now we are in Madagascar:
nothing new on the generic surf map, but the central wild west coast between Mahajanga
and Morondava remains largely unexplored by surfers. If exploration is the act
of searching to discover new information and practices, rather than the
colonial project of exploiting resources, documenting this area is the
‘exploration’ part of the trip we’ve been planning for over a year – to explore
the sapphire seas of the remote Barren Islands offshore from Maintirano. As far
as we know, we are the first to surf (and document the surfing) in this
archipelago, a web of Veso fishing communities, surrounded by shark-rich shallow
reef passes. We thrive on
this notion of surfing the clean slate. It’s not a conquering thing, but a
traveller’s - or better explorer’s - delight. The beginning line of Apple’s
mission statement is: ‘Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers
in the world …’. This has been described as uninspired, even lame, but read it
again. It says exactly what Apple does. surfEXPLORE designs the best surf trips
in the world. We like that.
The agenda this time is not just
photographing, writing and exploring, but also filming for a documentary with
French production company Puzzlemedia to be aired on Planete Thalassa. We want to capture the wild drive to Maintirano, the homeland of the
fiercely proud Sakalava people, and sketch an ethnography of the Veso fishing
nomads who live in seasonal camps in the Mozambique Channel.
Flying into the ghostly capital Antananarivo (affectionately known as Tana), where vintage French Renault
and Citroen taxis roam the streets in otherworldly style, is easy. Safely getting across the high plateau where the soil is a Mars
red, then down to the coast at Maintirano (a twenty hour mostly off-road mission)
is the hard part. This is the terrain of the dangerous Dahalo bandits who steel
zebu cattle and hold-up passing wagons for hard cash. Then the adventure
continues by boat to the Barren Islands. That will be the topic of part two and three,
but first, here’s a brief surf travel geography of Madagascar to get your teeth
into.
Shaped – from the South - like an
approaching whale 250 miles off the southeast coast of Africa in the southwest
corner of the Indian Ocean, Madagascar has 3,000 miles of coastline sporting
empty pointbreaks, and is fringed by offshore reefs. Most surfers head for the
town of Tulรฉar, or the nearby villages of Anakao and Ifaty,
on the southwest coast facing the Mozambique Channel. Many of the best
breaks are a mile offshore - snapping blue-green lips kissing flaming live
coral. Further south there are more quality peelers at Itampolo and Lavanono,
accessed via slow-progress dirt roads. The small town of Fort Dauphin on
the southeast coast is much easier to reach, and it offers a feast of delicious
spots including a long right point, Monseigneur Bay, as well as some punchy
beach breaks. A hotel and several good lodges overlook the waves, making this
Madagascar’s premier surf zone. But a quick look at Google Earth will confirm
that the east coast is ripe with promising reef and point setups. There is an
impressive concentration around Mahambo, halfway up the coast, and Soanierana,
further north, where the rumble from right points is heard by nearby
communities farming coffee, lychee and vanilla. Everybody knows Madagascar for
its vanilla.
But Madagascar’s surf is hardly vanilla,
more honeycomb, with added dashes of brightly coloured fruits.
During the summertime (November to March) occasional Indian Ocean cyclones will
deliver solid six-foot swells along the east coast. But heavy rains at this
time can also cause total wash out of tenuous wooden bridges and dirt roads,
swallowing wagons in metres of mud. Overall, the best season for swell along
the west and southeast coast is the Southern Hemisphere winter (May to August)
with consistent four-foot swells breaking like ripe fruit as the foam is whipped off the back to make honeyed ice-cream.
As a surf destination Madagascar is
hardcore, needing passion, patience and local knowledge. Some solid French and
a few phrases in Malagasy are key. Sensibly, Puzzlemedia have hired a
local sound man, able to switch naturally between Malagasy, French and
English. Once out of the capital, Malagasy is the mainstay. But he’s never been
to the Barren Islands, nor has anyone we speak to. Game on.
Huge, fragmented and
unusual, the island has long been regarded as a hotbed of puzzling geology,
botany and zoology. Madagascar’s plants and animals have evolved in isolation
for 80 million years. The area was once wedged between Africa and India in the
supercontinent known as Gondwana, joined to present-day Somalia, Kenya
and Tanzania. The island broke free 165 million
years ago (the mid to late Jurassic), with
the Mozambique Chanel soon too wide for large African animals to float over.
Later, about 88 million years ago, the eastern half of the island broke off and
slowly floated north via plate tectonics to ram into Tibet, forming the
Himalayas (50 million years ago) and becoming India.
In its isolation Madagascar has fostered
a world of lemurs, chameleons, giant jumping rats with rabbit-like ears, ‘spiny
cactus’ trees and massive baobabs that look like the preferred food of the Jurassic
dinosaurs. The limestone karst scenery known as tsingy (the Malagasy
word for ‘tiptoeing’) seems like the ancient nesting ground of pterodactyls. Nowhere
on Earth exhibits such a degree of both biodiversity (the sheer range of plants
and animals) and endemicity (the state of existing nowhere else) – a perfect
description for ghosts.
The Malagasy peoples too are unique, with
a complex culture where music and magic are central. In elaborate festivals,
some ethnic groups, drunk on home-made rum, venerate the rights of the dead,
turning the bones of their ancestors from inside elaborate tombs. The original
Malagasy settlers from Indonesia and Malaysia arrived 2,000 years ago,
ultimately mixing with Bantu-speaking peoples from Africa along with Indians, Arabs and Swahilis. The Malagasy
language has been classified structurally as Malay-Polynesia and Austronesian,
and is thought to most closely resemble Maanjan, spoken in Borneo. There are
terraced rice paddies and rice feasts three times a day, and to those who know
Indonesia, Tana can feel like an African Jakarta.
Fomba (customs)
include the practice of tromba possession in which, through a haze of
hardwood incense and stitched together by music, powerful Malagasy ancestral
spirits are recalled to heal illness, resolve disputes, offer advice, alleviate
daily problems, and thus empower the present in powerful ways. The family unit
extends far beyond the living to the long departed. No family member ‘dies’
except in the literal sense as their presence is recreated daily through
memories. The ghost is then a part of the fabric of every member of the living
community’s collective brain – memories made from synapses firing, neural
networks growing ever more elaborate and electrical storms in the hippocampus,
the seat of memory. But this unique culture follows the global pattern of being
shaped by colonizing impulses, its memories partly imported from its French
masters.
The colons, as the French were
known, governed the country as a prosperous colony before a national rebellion
led to independence in 1960. The nation should have thrived on its rich mineral
wealth, but a series of governments, such as Didier Ratsiraka’s paradoxical
Christian-Marxist state (replete with a Mao-inspired boky mena or ‘red
book’) ran the economy into the ground. At a subsistence level charcoal
production and consumption for fuel has stripped the topsoil through
slash-and-burn to reveal so much iron earth that astronauts have claimed that
the island appears to be bleeding to death from space. And some communities
here are so isolated that news has still not reached them that man has walked
on the moon. Imperialism and ecological degradation are so often the legacy of
the false promises of ‘civilization’ and ‘growth’, turning the ghostly into the
ghastly.
Thankfully
international attention on the unrivalled biodiversity and cultural heritage of
Madagascar is challenging these issues of sustainability and social justice
head on, while fresh governments set out to repair the horrendous road network.
But would Madagascar be the same without these unavoidable off-road dramas?
It’s part of the allure of surf travel here. And the Malagasy people you’ll
meet along these painstakingly slow journeys will likely be some of the most
polite, charming and welcoming communities a traveller could find. Hospitality
to strangers is sacred. But the exception in the fourth largest island on the
planet are the dicey Dahalo, roaming the arid plateau from Tsiroanomandidy to
Maintirano. With surfboards it is impossible to take our kit by small internal
planes, so we set we off on the journey, pre-warned of the dangers, our
charismatic driver Donnรจ with
a loaded gun at his side playing Malagasy gospel music - musique evangelique - at full blast to
engineer a safe passage through Dahalo-land, hopefully...
