surfEXPLORE Madagascar part 3 (of 3)

surfEXPLORE Madagascar part 3 (of 3)

by Sam Bleakley (link to part 1 & part 2)

Boat to the Barren Islands

We set off at 5 am the next morning. Maintirano’s port (and lifeblood) is tidal and we are soon stuck in the mangrove. But the sunrise seems to coincide with enough tide to float us, and we slowly push the boat beside the still lipped mangrove trees. Our feet sink deep into mud. I find the mangrove environment intimidating. Red-clawed fiddler crabs scuttle about, their oversized claws looking like violins playing a slow tune to parody our slower progress. We are over-loaded, boards and supplies over-filling the boat, already ready to sink. Mangrove is a stubborn, salty, mocking place, intolerant and always ready to slow you down.

The tide finally cooperates and we jump back in the boat, the mud banks now revealing a vivid green phosphate. Captain Malimbi starts the engine and steers expertly through the surf in the rivermouth. With two outboards, the fiberglass hulled boat can motor at thirty knots, but with a heavy load and a moderate swell we move at a steady twelve knots. Captain Malimbi points a perfect line west towards Nosy Marify. Emi Cataldi checks on the GPS on his ipad. Captain Malimbi never deviates. Within one hour we leave the brown waters of the coastline. There is now an inky blueness to the ocean, and – all surfers know the feeling – a ‘sharkiness’. Fish dart and dive, chased by something bigger.

At Nosy Marify, Malimbi steers south towards Nosy Manandra. It takes three hours to get to Nosy Andrano, where we plan to stay. Most of the Veso live on neighbouring Nosy Lava, but Cécile has already agreed with the community that we can stay on Nosy Andrano because it is lightly populated. About fourty people live on Andrano, perhaps just four or five families in about eight thatched huts. It is low lying and barely 500 metres wide. The shore is lined with pirogues and lakanas, the water now a clear green, inviting, the sand powdery. We greet a few families. They are frizzy haired, barefoot, with open friendly faces, and white teeth from a low sugar diet. They appear immediately comfortable around vazaha (foreigners).

Our Malagasy sound-man (with the Puzzlemedia film crew) Hery explains that when entering a community it is custom to present to the president of the fokontany, the local committee, in this case Chief Jean-Baptiste. He emerges from his thatched hut just as we approach. He has a wounded hand, wrapped in a black and yellow cloth.

“What happened to your hand?”

“Someone is jealous of me,” replies Chief Jean-Baptiste. “And someone broke a taboo to make it worse,” he adds, naturally superstitious.

“Is it healing?”

“I use charcoal to fend off the black magic.”

I ask sound-man Hery if I should offer Chief Jean-Baptiste some tea tree oil for his wound. He agrees, and Chief Jean-Baptiste seems happy with the gift. I quickly advise how much to use. Sound-man Hery confirms the role of fady – taboo – being drilled into Malagasies from childhood.

“Their power is absolute because they come from the ancestors and anyone breaking a taboo can make the whole village maloto (unclean). In fact the Malagasy word for ‘excuse me’ and ‘please’ is azafady, literally ‘may it not be taboo to me’.”

In many ways a Malagasy fady is no different than formalities drilled into my life since birth, like not farting aloud in a public restaurant, or not going into the wrong bathroom. Here the toilets are open air, apparently at the west end of the beach in the rocks. We ask where we should set up our camp. Chief Jean-Baptiste leads us across the shoreline, behind six family huts, pass their wooden racks to dry fish, and underneath a slender grey-green casuarina tree. We clear the spiky cones and needles and carefully pitch our tents.

We invite Chief Jean-Baptiste for lunch. Haja and Neke prepare a simple feast of rice, beans, carrots and cucumbers. We spread out a tarpaulin and sit cross-legged.

Jean-Baptiste was Chief of a village called Ampandikoara on the mainland, but Dahalo attacked the village and they all moved to the Barren Islands. Apparently there was nothing violent about it, it was more intimidation. Eight men came while the Veso were fishing, threatened the women and children, who fled, then the Dahalo proceeded to drink all the alcohol on site and have a party. Now they occupy the village with a pack of fierce dogs. It is fady for Veso to go ashore there.

Chief Jean-Baptiste explains that the Sakalava are the main tribe along west coast and the Veso are not defined as an ethnic group, but the term means rather a way of life. Many Veso believe that they descend from mermaids. They are convinced of the existence of many spirits and marine gods that can sink or save a pirogue caught in a storm. However, anyone can become Veso, which simply means ‘the one who paddles’ – or ‘the paddler’. Most of the Barren Islanders have moved from the south where fish stocks have depleted, and Chief Jean-Baptiste speaks positively about the work of Blue Ventures to educate the Veso about sustainable fishing.

“We are happy to see you,” concludes Chief Jean-Baptiste. “We are both nomads of the sea - nomad de la mer. We have never seen surfers here.”

Becoming Veso

A few South African surfers may have checked out the Barren Islands by boat, but nothing has been documented, and we set to work inspecting various reef passes that bend the swell into snappy rights and lefts. There are wide deepwater channels and gorgeous coral heads poking through. We settle for a right, skipping across head high sets until sunset. We talk and laugh nervously between sets. Outback, every change in sea colour seems to reveal the fin of a shark, but it is just colour - blues, blue-blacks, inky, turning to green lips on the reef at takeoff. Knowing that Madagascar has one of the highest densities of sharks in the world, you cannot get sharks out of your mind, and lines from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea come to the fore - after the giant fish is caught and tethered to the skiff:

“The shark was not an accident. He had come up from deep down in the water as the dark cloud of blood had settled and dispersed in the mile-deep sea. He had come up so fast and absolutely without caution that he broke the surface of the blue water and was in the sun…”. 

 

The best wave is a shallow arcing right on Nosy Abohazo where the reef affords a clear run and turtles rule, popping up right next to you. Emi pops up on the set of the session, riding his Mini-Simmons with trademark style: silky, smooth-flowing, hips loose, the wide-tail seeming to defy physics by maneuvering in the tightest of pockets with radical angles. Erwan Simon is catlike, agile, slicing across the sucky sections. The early noseride platform becomes my alter for the session, where I play my own musique evangilique, a saltwater anthem that no one else can hear.

A teasing cross-offshore wind adds a few quirks to the waves, but we quickly learn to read the setup. Outside sets feather on the reef. Avoid these thicker dark blue peaks because they break wide with fat shoulders. Chose the smaller smoky green ones that hug the reef, forming a darting first section. A sudden surge of stinging jellyfish arrive with the tide, forcing us to paddle to the boat and collect our wetsuit vests for some extra protection.

Later we learn that the island connected to the reef here is considered sacred by the Veso because it is infested with rats – Malagasy giant jumping rats with rabbit like ears and muscular hind legs. The Veso believe that their ancestors used to live there, but the rats ate them. So the rats now have the spirit of those people. The rats are therefore sacred and no one should harm them or else bad weather will entail. Maybe I should think the same way about the sharks, unlike Hemingway’s old man who is now haunted by a litany of sharks that feast on his catch:

“Dentuso, he thought. Bad luck to your mother… But I killed the shark that hit my fish, he thought. And he was the biggest dentuso that I have ever seen. And God knows that I have seen some big ones…”.

But eventually the old man cannot help but admire the shark:

“He is beautiful and noble and knows no fear of anything.”

Thankfully we do not see a single shark (while the very same swell makes international headlines further south along the Mozambique Channel as Australian Mick Fanning has an intimate conversation with a great white cruising at Jeffrey’s Bay on the World Tour just as his final with fellow Australian Julian Wilson gets underway).

Learning by Doing

We soon develop a sound routine camping, dictated by sunrise and sunset, our surf sessions in synch with the tide. There is a silvery light from three to five, then the pirogues come in. After sunset we all don jumpers and trousers. John Callahan, who has a penchant for bringing the understated moment to life through photo’s, has the tripod set up, ready for something. Twenty minutes later the sky turns amber, burns out, then glows orange, fading to ice blue and now black, stars suddenly appearing like the lights of a distant great city in space.

Emi – a ‘fire person’ as North American Indians would say - has gathered hardwood and lights a fire that we gather around and talk story, again enjoying the wallpaper of stars and sudden silence. We eat and sleep deeply. I wake up before sunrise, shave on the beach and wash in the sea as the day unfolds with a tang like fresh fruit. The rest of the crew rise tousled, hair collectively rising like baked dough. We make coffee with condensed milk. Even Callahan, who detests camping while one of the most seasoned travellers you could meet, perks up at the coffee.

Every morning one of the Veso, Kardo, starts playing music and singing, bringing a wonderful energy to the island. He has a handmade kabosy – a small Malagasy guitar – painted yellow and blue. He writes his songs and sings about the longing to travel, but the stress of having to ask permission from his parents to leave. When he puts the guitar down he admits he does want to leave his Veso life and live with his wife and kids in Tana. He dreams of performing his music to huge audiences. He picks the guitar back up and plays. When he is not fishing he seems to spend hours, whole days, plucking the thick taut metal wires, cutting at his fingers, but delivering an incredible sound.

Right now he’s sitting in one of the cramped huts with his brothers. I sit outside with sound-man Hery and tap out of time. Kardo notices, looks at my watch and jokes that he does not wear a watch, ever, but concludes,

“I don't need a watch. You might be on time, but I am at least in time!”

Kardo talks longingly about his salegy music heroes, Jaojoby from Diego Suarez, Fredy de Majunga, Tianjama and Dombolo from Tana, hoping to infect others with his own sound soon.

The Veso are modest and clever, valuing perseverance, integrity and friendship. The kids don’t go to school, but learn through doing, through teamwork, through entire families pulling together, everyone chipping in, doing what they can. I cannot contrast the welcoming Veso more with the apparently unwelcoming Dahalo. The Veso are non-confrontational, with a healthy level of superstition. They are proud they don’t steal. Incredibly, the community has engineered no separation from us, welcoming us into their lives, revealing their secrets. But there is little mystery to their trademark pedagogy: learning through doing. The kids sail toy pirogues. They make them entirely by hand only using wood and string, modelled exactly on the life-sized boats that have no metal fastenings. They care for their toy boats like pet animals, and sail them in the shorebreak also learning how to swim as they dive and chase after them. Again, learning by immersion.

A dad comes ashore in a pirogue with his two six to eight-year-old sons. I help them pull the boat up the beach. He runs off with a basket of fish to trade, and soon returns. The boys, without being told, set about re-rigging the sails. Dad comes along and checks their work, correcting mistakes, not telling them they have done anything wrong, but they quickly learn the correct techniques, hoist all the sails the appropriate way, slide the pirogue with ease back into the water and set out at pace on the brisk southwest wind. They turn back to me and point out humpback whales, far out to sea, heading north from the Antarctic.

We maximize every ounce of two small swells that themselves came from the Antarctic. This includes a gruelling day trip to inspect one of the pointbreaks on the mainland, which is slightly unnerving as it is close to one of the villages hijacked by the Dahalo. But we have no encounter and surf long, lilting lefts, back in the bloody red waters. Yet the right by the sacred island populated by rats remains the highlight under the marginal swell, apart from the jellyfish that turn the line-up into a bed of needles. But as the water duvet doubles over, the waves are open and inviting. For want of a better name we call this spot Sacred Rat.

Callahan shoots off his ammunition of images, expertly balanced in the boat in the channel, Captain Malimbi now savvy to the needs of the photographer and the film crew. Callahan seems satisfied with the action: “we’ve got what we can in a hard to get to place.” Seeing the waves puts more pieces in the jigsaw of exploration (following oceanography, mapping, accessing). Actually riding them is the final piece.

On our final day Chief Jean Baptiste proudly shows us his hand that has cleared up nicely from using the tea tree. We say a reluctant veloma – goodbye – to the community.

“My music - aza adino – don’t forget,” says Kardo, flashing white teeth, the whole community also smiling.

“You can find everything in Madagascar,” says sound-man Hery as we leave. It’s true. This is a spiritually rich, puzzling, enormous island where cattle thieves are hunted down and shot, and where tribes have killed foreigners believed to be ‘heart-takers’, where you can eat the finest French cuisine in Tana, witness a 149-0 football match, all own goals, and yet three hours out of the capital meet a community who have no idea that a human has walked on the moon. They will share the news in disbelief.