Monthly Archives: June 2014

Lotsa Chickens

Daily Life

I’m used to seeing street dogs, livestock, and other random animals while out jogging, biking, and whatnot, but Tana has an unusually large number of birds. Okay, maybe not in Tana proper, but in the residential areas and little villages around the periphery there are tons of chickens wandering the streets. I have come very close to stepping on them and hitting them with my bike so many times already.

I have also seen farmers tending to a flocks of ducks and geese. Maybe they are just hear to supply restaurants serving French dishes? There is also a house on my regular running route that has turkeys that roam freely in the dirt road in front. Oh, and I passed a couple guinea fowl today… are those pets?

If that avian flu thing hits here, we are in trouble!

Rickshaws?

Daily Life, Travels

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Over the weekend, I traveled to Antsirabe which is Madagascar’s third largest city with about 200,000 people. Considering very few people in the city seem to own a car, the roads seem pretty quiet, especially after the chaos of Tana. There are still some annoying mini buses, but there is a curious form of transport that seems super popular in Antsirabe: rickshaw!

Personally, I think it is a pretty crazy form of transport which I can’t quite get my head around. I don’t mind paying a taxi when I don’t have my own wheels, but why pay a guy to run you around town, when you have two feet of your own?!? My guidebook suggests tipping generously in order to help lift these guys out of poverty. Despite persistent offers to run me up the road, I just preferred to walk myself. At least they are colorful?

Bonus: Did you know the word rickshaw comes from Japanese? The original word is Jin-Riki-Sha which is made-up of three Chinese characters which mean People-Power-Vehicle :)

Mountain Biking

Outdoors, Sports

As expected, it looks like Madagascar is going to be a great place for mountain biking for me. Maybe the mountains around Tana are not too serious, but the fact that people walk all around the hills makes all kinds of fun singletrack trails to explore. Other routes are just dirt roads which would qualify more as off-road than mountain biking, but

Saw My First Swarm of Locusts

Development

I didn’t get a photo, but it was basically as you might imagine… as in a cartoon or exaggerated CG shot from a film. We were driving just 50km south of Tana along National Route 7 when I saw this black cloud over the hill to the left. I mentioned it to my friend and he said we should roll up the windows.

As we approached, the locusts started to hit the windshield. I got a good look at one as it languished on the window, but still no photo. My friend explained that they consume all vegetation in their path and move on. The area looked green enough to me, so there was no obvious evidence of their wrath, but I can see how they could be a serious nuisance!

Apparently such locust problems are not so common globally. A quick search online indicates that serious locust problems have struck here-and-there or now-and-again, but the current problem in Madagascar attracted the attracted the attention of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) because if it is not stopped early, it can lead to years of food insecurity among affected areas.

Bonus: Locusts are actually just grasshoppers that get really excited, overbreed, and swarm together in a somewhat atypical way. Once they get going, they almost behave like another species, but they are really just grasshoppers.