The tall ships of Tulear

Along with all the pirogues are a few tall ships that seem to come out of the 18th century.  Not just one trying to make a living as a tourist venue, as you might find off the coast of Massachusetts or Michigan, but a small fleet of at least four.  And they carry cargo.

Sal has actually had the experience of sailing on one.  Coming back from Anakao one year someone arranged for him to get a ride on one.  Not just a ride it turned out, it was the annual regatta and Anakao to Tulear race.  They are all wood, canvas, and rope.  No motors, no electronics.

Sal also claims the following story is true.  It has  some elements of plausibility so I will recount it.  One of the early European colonizing powers here -- Sal says the Portuguese, and he could be correct, but that sounds quite early -- back in whatever century they were trying to make an imprint, set up a ship manufacturing facility in what eventually became Tulear.  The colonizing powers did not stay the course though, they packed up and left, but the shipbuilding by then was in the hands of the locals, and the building traditions from then are used to this day.

What is clear is that these ships are not for show, they are really used.  I can't think of too many other places where sailing ships are still used to carry cargo.  Chinese junks in some places perhaps, and perhaps Arab dhows along the coast of East Africa.

At anchor

At low tide

Leaving in the morning

Unloading

Tulear scenes

Meat market.  The meat looks good now at 7:30am.  Not so much at 15:30 later in the day.

Coffee shop on the way to IHSM.  Yeah, it's the table and bench under the tree.  I am pretty sure they serve food also.

Boy with homemade toy truck -- a bit hard to make out.  I am often at a distance when I take pictures including people.

The WCS office at IHSM (Institute Haliotechnique et Science Marine).  Only the two blue doors.  Very small but it was good to have a place to work.

The Za Za disco club . . .

. . . has some nice art outside . . .

. . . and some wild times inside.

The restaurant (hotely) where I ate my first Malagasy meal.  Very good.  Tahine took me there at my request.  Big ball of rice, a small dish of beef in red sauce, and a somewhat larger dish of what appeared to be pickled shredded turnip and carrot.  All very tasty and not spicy hot.  Not even close.  But there was a tiny dish of brownish green sauce that was some of the hottest I've ever encountered.  I only used a few dabs, but almost started hiccuping when I ate a whole dab in one bite.  And oh yeah -- I paid $2.50 for both of us to eat.

My second hotel.  Rooms cost $10.  Not sure what the Nauti Club is but it sounds promising . . .

The view from my balcony

The coffee stand across the street from the hotel.  I've never been a customer.  I always go next door, the Bo Beach, a French run restaurant with internet.  Cafe au lait avec croissant runs about $1.50 there.

The departure point for the boats to Anakao is at the end of this road.

The boats are loaded and unloaded by zebu cart.  Zebu carts are widely used for hauling things around.

And this is one of the boats to Anakao.  A pirogue.  There are a few motorboats for hire, but most people travel in these.

Another pirogue.  This one's been fishing.  They are everywhere.   I still haven't figured out quite how they work.  There's an outrigger, a mast held up by three stays, the v-mounted gaff, and a square sail.  They seem to sail in all kinds of wind.  But I don't know how close to the wind they can point.  But they can really rip.

And a lot of the guys who use them are really ripped too.

Mal de Sal

Back in Tulear.  Thought I had left it for good after the last post.  And it was incredibly difficult to leave.  Not emotionally.  Physically.  Endless problems trying to fuel up the boat, trying to get supplies on the boat, and with getting permission from customs to leave.  There is some suspicion that bribes were being sought, but none were paid, and we finally did get off the next morning.  Sal was stuck in town all that night after a late-night session with customs.

We sailed south to finish up some of the transect legs south of Tulear, then did the first leg to the north of Tulear (all the rest of the trip will be to the north), ending at a small village north of Tulear called Ifaty.  Ifaty is protected from the open ocean by a fringing reef (as is Tulear) and it was a bit dicey to get Zanj through the narrow pass in the reef, but once through it is a nice anchorage -- calm and stable no matter what the wind.  And there was work to do in Ifaty.  Norbert has a long time project interviewing local fishermen.  I think this is the first time he'd been to Ifaty.  Among other things, they told him they do indeed see blue whales, but only in May and June.  This is new information.  We also at these nearshore anchorages are out in the zodiac looking for nearshore cetaceans (expecting humpbacks, Tursiops, Sousa, and spinner dolphins).  Sal went out with Pina and found a right whale mom and calf.  This is huge.  Only the third right whale he's seen in Madagascar, and the first calf reported ever.  Young enough that it was certainly born here.  Southern right whales in South Africa are said to be a success story.  As with other parts of the world where right whales roamed, they were hunted nearly to extinction in South Africa.  But with protection, the population has come back.  Grant, the Zanj skipper and a South African, says that Southern right whales are now easy to see, especially around Cape Town.  Where they jump boats (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-10712323)

But Sal has now brought us back to Tulear.  Well, just me actually.  Sal has been working himself ragged, and last night he came down with a fever -- 103F or 39C.  Bad enough to be worried.  No one wants to be back in Tulear, but since we were close, and had the WCS vehicle and driver at out disposal, we decided to make the hour drive south and visit a clinic.  He's there now.  He probably has better meds in his kit than he can buy here, but it seemed prudent to try to get some kind of diagnosis.

So I get to blog more, get another hat (my first blew off already), and send a postcard.  I would have stayed in Ifaty and gone ashore to see the spiny forest and local birds, but we are also now in the market for a portable generator (don't ask), and I am the designated buyer.  But the drive down was very interesting -- through some of that same spiny forest I didn't get to walk through.

Tulear

I have been in Tulear (or out at sea) my whole time here so far.  Tulear is in the southwest, the dry part of Madagascar.  The warm days, cool nights, hot sun, relatively constant wind interspersed with the occasional flat calm, and the way the light falls on the land remind me of Western Australia.  The ground color of Western Australia is rusty red, and in that it is very different -- a tan, sandy color being predominant here -- but the scrubby landscape and the weather seem similar.  The vegetation is both places is sparse, and all dry adapted.

Western Australia and southern Madagascar (probably should include all of Madagascar) also differ greatly in the standard of living and the base infrastructure available.  Tulear is unprepossessing in almost every way.  It is dusty, dirty, and many of the buildings have a look of rubble about them.  There are a few places that I suspect are fairly upscale -- or even kept up -- on the inside, but I have only been in one of them, and every building has a facade of chalky wear, and creeping network of missing bricks, crumbling ornaments, and slowly spreading cracks.  All this is exacerbated because the streets are generally lined with shacks made of sticks and corrugated iron selling all manner of goods from biscuits and bottled water to cell phones and cell credit updates, to fruit, roast sweet potatoes, chunks of freshly butchered goat, and deep fried doughballs and coffee with sweetened condensed milk.  It took me two weeks to notice that, at least in some places the endless wall of dukas (the Swahili word, I don't know the Malagasy term) is shallow and that there are walled gardens and low, seemingly kept up houses behind them.

A street in Tulear lined with tiny shops.  The human powered taxis, called pousse-pousse, swarm everywhere.

The upscale beachfront boulevard in Tulear.  Make that mudflatfront.  And the road turns to rubble 100m from here.

Getting coffee and a donut at the market

One of the main sections of the main market

The mud flats in front of town at low tide

My first hotel in Tulear.  It's brand new.

May the Zebra Force be with you . . .

I wish I could post more.  But I have 15 minutes to get some shopping done.  Then find my way to the boat.  We sail tonight.

Why am I here?

As some of you know, I have gone to Madagascar. Time has already become quite fluid and I have little remaining sense of how long I have been in particular places here doing particular tasks -- yes I have this problem in general, but it is more extreme now -- I think I arrived on or around 7 Aug 2010. And while I routinely ask myself "why am I here?" in many places and contexts (including often when waking up), the topic now is not so existential.

The simple, straightforward reason I am here is to work on a cetacean survey of the west coast. This is one segment of a larger (3-5 year) project to survey all the Malagasy coast. However, the entire west coast is clearly too much for this trip, and probably what we will get done is the southwest coast and north to Morandava in west central Madagascar. This is partly because of the length of the coast, and partly because there are many details to be worked out, much protocol to be developed (though we have quite a good protocol for the visual survey already), much equipment to be prepared, and generally 10,000 (I counted) obstacles to be overcome.

The survey is mainly to assess the presence, distribution, and abundance of cetacean species in Malagasy waters. Some information is already known from shore-based work in three areas -- Tulear in the southwest (where I am now), Nosy Be in the northwest, and Antongil Bay in the northeast -- and from an aerial survey done earlier this year. However, there is not much infrastructure throughout Madagascar (roads, petrol, towns with hotels, restaurants, etc) so it is extremely difficult to carry out a coastal survey from terrestrial base camps. Thus this survey is ship-based.

The ship is the Zanj Explorer, a charter vessel working mostly in Mozambique (running diving and surfing charters), run by South Africans (zanjexplorer.com). She is a 22m, single-hull, sailboat with a broad beam of around 5m. In the pictures on the website they managed to make her look like a party boat, but in person she is much different. There is a fair bit of room aboard, but there is already a lot of equipment occupying that room -- not ours, but rather the generators, air compressors, diving gear, fuel tanks, water tanks, etc, required by the well-equipped charter vessel. Oh, and did I mention surfboards? There are surfboards stashed everywhere. The crew are surfing fanatics, and it looks as if there are at least three surfboards per person aboard.

The Zanj at anchor off Tulear

Zanj sailing downwind in Beaufort 5 and making 5-6 knots under sail alone.  Slow but fairly stable.

We have a scientific crew of six -- three Malagash (Norbert, Boris, and Tahine -- all pronounced with a French accent (e.g., Norbert rhymes with Camembert) and three American/Europeans (myself, Sal, and Pina).  Sal is the P.I. -- the survey is his brainchild, he got together all the funding, and he has organized everything.  Pina is the acoustician -- she will mostly be sitting below staring at three computer screens, monitoring the output from the towed hydrophone array, and directing the recording and processing of that output in at least three different computer programs.  She will also be choosing which sounds to input to a real-time localization system.  I am something of a jack-of-all trades.  I talk to Sal about the survey design and the consequences of dropping one or more transects (and the weather and the consequences of the boat being short-handed and on and on), I do the electrical engineering and hookup (not the sound hookup, but the electrical power running to all the electronics), and I am currently participating in and overseeing the visual survey half of the data collection.

The ship's sailing crew is currently four -- Grant the captain, Ian the "chef de cuisine" (so listed on the manifest we had to submit to the port authorities), and two deckhands, Ryan and Craig.  This is a bit short handed.   The engineer, Gas, had to leave after a week for medical reasons (a huge loss to us both for ability and personality) and there arguably should be one more deckhand.  There is also an observer along from the Department of Fisheries -- required unexpectedly, and learned of only after our arrival, as a condition on our permit to operate.  The requirement was daunting at first because the space is very crowded (though if you wanted to sleep on a surfboard you would have a vast choice of berths anywhere on the boat) and we had no idea who we would get.  We got lucky though -- the observer is easy going, friendly, always in good humor, and has a great rapport with the other Malagash.  It is more difficult for Sal, Pina and me to interact because we speak little French and he speaks only slightly more English.  I still do not know how to properly pronounce or spell his name.  Norbert assures us that his name is unusual even by Malagasy standards and that he has trouble with it to.  Norbert is probably just being polite.

The foredeck of the Zanj.  The brown tube is the hydrophone array -- a 17m plastic tube filled with four hydrophones at precise spacings, pre-amp electronics to boost the hydrophone signal before it reaches the shipboard electronics, and brown oil.   That is Ryan in the background, Pina in blue, Grant in red, Sal in the cap, and Craig in the foreground.  Craig has a bandage on his head because he had gotten mugged a few days before trying to get back to the boat in the wee hours after a pub crawl with Ryan.

Despite in general wanting the survey to be free-running and not tied to any particular port, we are at the moment starting from, and rather strongly tied to, the port of Tulear in the southwest of Madagascar.  It is also spelled Toliara, but no matter the spelling it is always pronounced too-lee-ARE.