Indri Indri!
April 10th, 2006Ok, so I have now mostly recovered from the nasty flu bug I had (yay!), and I have wrestled most of my room, my online accounts and my work schedule into some semblance of order. I even made it to the gym this morning for the first time in… maybe a month?
Ah yes, Madagascar. I have uploaded pictures on Flickr, but as yet I have been too busy/lazy to give them titles or captions, so you can go see them here (or just click on the pictures in the previous posts) to look at them, and maybe they’ll all be properly catalogued eventually.
Overall, the trip was a great blessing, and offered continuous evidence that I am indeed very blessed (I call this being “lucky” for lack of a more handy term). For example, at the beginning of the trip, because our flight to Paris was delayed we were left with very little time to make our connecting flight to Antananarivo (the capital of Madagascar). As a result, none of our luggage made it onto the plane… except mine. Which was fortunate not only for me, but also for the girls in my class since I had stuffed my huge bag full of clothes and shoes which I intended to give away in Madagascar and so had brought about four times as much as I needed. So for nearly five days they wore my t-shirts, used my sweatshirts as towels and borrowed my toothpaste.
My Professor developed a pretty horrifying allergy/infection on her feet after the first night in the dry forest after she had to sleep without a mosquito net (which was in her delayed luggage) and got bitten by many unknown insects. I am not exaggerating when I say that her swollen, purple, blistering feet seriously looked like special-effects makeup from a horror-film. She was largely out of commission for the later part of our trip (and had to go to a hospital in the city), but we had the help fo her Malagasy friends to guide us around and by then we had gotten enough of a feel for the culture and the language to manage by ourselves just fine.
I really want to say something about the shopping, which was really good (I came back with my bag nearly full again despite having given away almost all my clothes and shoes), so maybe I’ll do that in my next post. In the meantime, do take a look at this remarkable video I took of an Indri (one of the largest lemur species) in the forest of Andasibe making communication cries that sound like whale song. Just click here to watch. Incidentally, “Indri” means “look!” in Malagasy, so the scientific name of the species (Indri indri) means “Look, look!” 
PS: The latest complaint I have that’s beginning to be a bother is the absurd light sensitivity my eyes have developed in the past month or so, especially my right eye. Never mind that I was in dark glasses nearly the whole of Madagascar, I actually often experience severe discomfort (along with profuse tearing) looking at projector screens in lecture, out of the dining hall window or even right now as I type. I’m hoping it’s something easily fixable… like build-up on my contact lenses or something.