Next time I visit Madagascar, I’d like to book a tour by canoe, sailing down rivers and setting up camp on riverbanks in quiet gorges. The water was brown but calm, and crossing these two rivers was always an adventure:
Tsirinbinha River: The sheer technicality of crossing by car on a wooden raft
Our car braked to a stop at the edge of a sandy ramp that led down to the river, second in a long caravan of SUVs. We all got out of our cars to watch the amazing logistical spectacle below, while a villager hacked coconuts in half to thirsty, sweaty tourists who waited in the shade.
I have to explain to you the craziness of this glorified raft. When it lazily bumped into our dock, young men quickly tied it to posts in the earth. The raft was a wooden platform laid on top of two metal boats. Men at the back steered the contraption by swiveling big exposed motors. Big rocks placed at the wheels of cars kept the vehicles from moving. It looked relatively safe but definitely jimmy-rigged together.
Then there was the highly technical puzzle of moving all the cars on and off the raft, like that game where you slide trucks and cars up and down and across the a grid in just the right places so you can create a path to move your own car to the exit. The young men directed drivers, one by one, to turn this way and that so the wheels could align straight with two metal boards, one for each set of wheels, and then the car could roll off the raft onto shore. The raft was barely big enough to fit one row of cars; you had to drive onto a second floating raft to create another row.
It was an amazing piece of work, mostly because I marveled that this was the only way to cross the river since the government didn’t, or wouldn’t, just build a bridge. When it was our turn, it took more than half an hour for all the cars to fit correctly. The rest of us, the tourists, sat or stood around the edges of the raft. I plopped down at the front and let my sandals dangle onto the hot metal boat below. A slight breeze blew my hair in the hot sun as we lazily made our way down to the other side.
Manambolo River: Drifting to crocodile caves by canoe
The early morning light was already quite hot, and I squinted my eyes almost shut as an old man pushed our boat along the river into the sun’s rays. He was dressed in a red fedora and hat and didn’t seem to be bothered by the heat in his red sweatsuit as he dug his pole into the riverbed below, stretching his arms forward in long, slow strokes. His face was stoic, and he hardly said anything, not until I gave him a small tip, at which he nodded and said in a soft voice, “thank you.” He was such a badass old man.
Our boat, or a pirogue in French, was a narrow, hollow canoe not much wider than my knees. I tucked my legs into the vessel and tried not to tip the whole thing over. But even so, it wouldn’t be a disaster. The water level looked only as high as my knees, though during wet season it might be 30 feet higher. We slipped past thickets of reeds, drifted to the opposite side and floated into a tiny inlet that led up to the dark mouths of limestone caves. The sand in my toes was so fine it was powdery. The interiors were warm, so warm that during rainy season, crocodiles swim here to lay their eggs.
Farther down the river, three small white dots on a limestone shelf were actually skulls. The Vazimba tribe offer water, honey and rum to the dead in honor of their ancestors. We circled back to shore in a peaceful silence.
