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'Forest in a Sack'
| Article
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20633 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
4,595 Words |
| Author
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Richard Bangs
Richard Bangs is the author of Island Gods, Whitewater
Adventure, and Riding the Dragon's Back, which won the
Lowell Thomas Award for the best travel book of 1989. He
is the founder of SOBEK Expeditions, an international
travel-adventure company, which has become part of Mt.
Travel-SOBEK. |
It is fady to kill a lemur. The punishment is ill health, and five years in jail.
In Madagascar, the planet's fourth largest island, floating 250 miles of the east coast of Mozambique in the southwest Indian Ocean, the Afro-Indonesian people have long governed their lives with a series of social taboos, or fadies. And a longtime fady, rooted in the commands of the razana, the ancestors, is that it is wrong to kill the little button-eyed primates, the lemurs, found only on this island, which apparently rafted away from the African continent 165 million years ago. Yet today, in a world of heightened environmental consciousness and recognition of the accelerating loss of species, lemurs are being killed, sometimes to be served to wealthy foreigners who will pay a little extra to have a taste of the exotic. In the 1990 Marlon Brando film, The Freshman, the plot revolves around a movable restaurant that serves endangered species to high-rolling epicureans. In a case of life imitating art, I heard a rumor that a restaurant existed in the Malagasy Republic that served lemur.
October is the burning season for Madagascar, and so when I approached Antananarivo, the two-hundered-year-old capital, on a Air Mauritius Boeing 737, the air was thick with smoke, the landscape parched and coughing. As subsistence farmers below were clearing crop and pastureland and scorching trees to create charcoal, I struggled to fill out my customs and immigration form on my lap, but after twenty-five hours of flying from San Francisco, it was not a simple chore on the coarse, brown customs form that seemed to be made of cheap toilet paper.
While waiting for the baggage in the Ivato International Airport, I had to go to the bathroom and discovered in a museum world of disappearing species that there was yet another. The attendant offered to sell me toilet paper, as there was none in the stall. "There is a shortage in Madagascar," he explained, and I knew why--it was being used for customs forms.
Within an hour I was on another flight, Air Madagascar, aka Air Mad, to a large island, Nosy Be ("Big Island" in Malagasy), off Madagascar's northwestern shore in the Mozambique Channel. From the air, there was a muscular poetry to the landscape--naked and tan-skinned, with raw red rivers, like broken veins, bleeding said the sea. A Soviet cosmonaut said the Texas-sized island was the only landmass he could identify from space because it was surrounded by a halo of rust red sea, the color of the lateritic relentlessly scrubbed off its denuded surface by the wind and
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