Salama!

First of all let me make a disclaimer and say that the keyboards here are very strange. All the letters are moved around so it takes a really long time to type something. Things may also be spelt wrong because the computer's default language is French. That aside though, connection here is pretty fast and not too expensive.

So far Madagascar has been a whirlwind. Emily, the other Research Assistant here from Duke, and I arrived last Sunday night around 11 pm (4 pm Eastern Time). It took us two hours to get our baggage, everything moves pretty slowly here. The capital was interesting. There are basically NO rules for driving, except you can never be on the phone at a gas station. Otherwise that though anything goes. Drivers here use their horns a lot, and I'm surprised there aren't more accidents. The poverty in the city also took me by surprise. When I say Tana (Antananarivo) is a city, I mean there are just a lot more people there and the roads are paved. There are some bigger business buildings of course, but the houses people live in are similar to what I see here in the rural cities. They are incredibly small, usually made of wood or bamboo with a tin roof. I would upload some pictures, but unfortunately the computers we connect on are loaded with viruses so its not that safe to plug things in. This means that all these post will just be text about what's going on here. When I get back to the states I can upload some of the best pictures.

A house in the village of Mandena

We flew from Tana to Sambava on Wednesday morning. Sambava is a little beach town on the coast, about an hour and a half drive from the Marojejy National Park entrance. It is where our base camp is, so we will come here to resupply and enter data into the computer. Its hot here, but it rains on and off everyday. The first thing we learned when we got here was to always have three things in your backpack: a raincoat, water, and a flashlight for the common power outages (it also gets dark quickly and early in the forest). We are renting bungalows in Hotel Mimi on the main road in Sambava. We have them rented until the end of December, so those rooms are our home away from the rain forest. They are very nice for the area and there is a restaurant in the hotel which is very convenient since you shouldn't walk around too much at night.

The Bakery/Restaurant at Mimi Hotel

 Bio people, there are geckos in the bungalows to keep the bugs to a minimum. Its always really comforting when I see them climbing on the wall because that means I have less spiders and other critters crawling around. Our first night here, I swear there was a spider the size of my palm on Emily's floor.

One of the many geckos at Mimis

We leave for our first trip up to the park tomorrow. We bought about two million ariary (the Madagascar currency, about 2,000 Ar = 1 USD) worth of food and supplies for our trip. We have to hire about 50 porters to carry all our baggage, equipment, and supplies into the park and then up to Camp 2. The food should last for the first month so we won't come back down to town until early to mid August. The hike tomorrow will take roughly five hours. It will be difficult, but we don't start getting to a steep incline until closer to our camp, plus all the trails are well maintained because its a national park. It only gets really tough when we are tracking the lemurs because they don't stay on the trail.

We've also spent the last week preparing to collect data. Emily and I will both be working on two projects, which involve collecting vocalization and scent marking data. We will focus on the scent marking project for the first couple weeks or so. Our job is to follow an animal with the help of local trackers. We will watch the same animal all day and record where they scent mark using a GPS. Its not too difficult, but we have to learn which animals are which. This takes some practice and will require about a week to get it right. That's how we will be spending all next week actually. The local trackers go out early in the morning to find the lemur group, then we meet them around 7 am. The lemurs in our group are habituated, meaning they can tolerate the presence of humans (there are 6 animals total, but there may be a new baby born in the next couple weeks, if it isn't here already).

Today has been a good day so far because I had my first successful Malagasy exchange with a local taxi driver we now know. It consisted of us greeting each other in Malagasy, asking how things were going, and replying that there was nothing new. BABY STEPS. Malagasy is a hard language to speak because nothing sounds like the way it is spelt. Most people in the rural areas only speak Malagasy, unless they have been schooled in which case they may speak French as well. Very few people can speak English, but there are some.

To say hello here, you say "salama" (sa-lam-ma). Goodbye is "veloma" (vel-oo-ma) I know a few other useful phrases. My favorite by far is "tsy misy" (tsi-meess) which basically means none or there is none. You can use it in many different contexts according to one of the Peace Corps volunteers we've met here, plus its fun to say.

That reminds me though, there are five Peace Corps volunteers working in the area who are all from the US. One older couple, Bob and Jean, and then three younger people who all graduated college within the last couple years, Nick, Joel, and Liz. We've met them all and some of them will probably come visit us in Camp 2. Its refreshing to speak English with them, maybe grab a beer every now and then, haha. Bob and Jean are about 60 and they will be bringing a group of thirteen children up to Camp 2 in about 10 days to see the sifakas, so we'll be looking forward to seeing them.

Anyway, its all very new and exciting, and I'm sure I will have more entertaining stories when we come back down in a month. I can get mail and packages here, but it takes a very long time and can be unreliable. For the address, contact Vicki. Happy Birthday Mom!! Veloma!