Pirogue Trip on the Canal des Pangalanes

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[9 June 2011] Our canal trip in Madagscar turned out to be a fascinating and lovely excursion, but it didn’t start off very well.

The night before, our second in Manakara, we were sitting at our hotel’s sidewalk restaurant as the sky darkened and people passed by on the sand street. Rie was writing postcards and I was drinking plain tonic water since the bar didn’t seem to have any gin. A serious-looking young man approached our table.

“Good evening,” he said in English.


“Good evening,” I said warily. Guides, pousse-pousse drivers, people selling stuff—they all come to you in Madagascar and we’d been bombarded with requests and offers since we arrived.

“I am a guide . . .” he began.

“We have a guide,” I said quickly. “Thank you.” Rie had emailed a man named Sylvain and set up a canal trip in a pirogue (a long thin wooden boat) for the next day. We’d tromped through the heat that afternoon to find his house and confirm. We'd spoken with his wife. We were all set, and I tried to convey this to the young man.

“I’m sorry?” he said, his English hesitant.

“Nous avons un guide,” I said. ”Mais merci.”

What’s your guide’s name? he asked in French.

“Sylvain.”

“Je suis l’assistant de Sylvain,” he said. I’m Sylvain’s assistant.

Yeah, sure, I thought. Like the guy at the taxi-brousse station in Fianar who overheard where we were staying just happened to be a porter for that hotel.

“Sylvain is too busy to come, and he asked me to come.”

Mmm hmm. “We talked with his wife a few hours ago,” I said. "She said he will take us."

“I’m sorry?”

“Nous avons parler avec sa femme.”

He looked like he didn’t know what to say.

“Merci,” I said again. “Mais non. Bon nuit.”

He excused himself and left.

Well, of course Sylvain turned up an hour later, the serious young man with him. Sylvain really was too busy the next day, despite what his wife had thought, and he wanted his brother, Joseph, to take us out instead. We apologized all over the place, but Joseph still looked deeply hurt. We felt a bit glum about taking a tour with a guide we’d offended so badly, but we didn’t see any way out of it. We were probably already known around town as those rude women who won’t even hear people out.

But the next morning was a fresh start. It was bright and cool, and when Patrice, our pousse-pousse driver, dropped us off at the massive breadfruit tree by the bridge, we were all in better spirits. Joseph seemed ready to let bygones be bygones, and the two of us were ready to enjoy the day.

Besides Joseph, two other men were coming along to paddle the boat. Some of these pirogues are made from a single hollowed-out log, but this one was made from boards.  The men loaded in rolled up woven bamboo mats, a cooler and a small charcoal brazier, and we were off.

We began in a small lagoon where the canal meets the ocean. Several working pirogues, dark slices against the blue water, were heading out from the lagoon onto the sea to fish. The surf pounded against the breakwater, but in the lagoon the water was still, despite the breeze. Almost immediately we pulled over onto a small beach, where several women had laid out bunches of bananas and thermoses of coffee for returning fishermen to snack on.

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We walked past a beach Joseph said was sacred, used for marriages and other rituals. It was forbidden to eat pork there, he told us.

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While Joseph bought small lobsters from a fisherman for our lunch, we stood watching a couple catch silver fish in a net at the edge of the ocean. Then it was back into the pirogue, back through the lagoon and out onto the canal, which runs parallel to the sea along a long stretch of Madagascar’s east coast. Some of it’s a natural waterway, and the French dug the rest back in 1906 to transport coffee and rice and other things. 

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Some of the other pirogues on the canal had sails, but most didn't. Some had whole families aboard, but generally they held young boys, out fishing on their own for crabs and eels.

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We passed a little kid using a toy pirogue to scoop water from the canal. Kids go out alone on the canal when they're seven, Joseph told us. At 12, they take their pirogues out onto the ocean by themselves.

On the edge of Manakara, a coal-burning power plant hummed noisily and puffed black smoke, but once we were past it all was quiet. The canal here was lined with reeds and the big-leaved plants called elephant ears, the roots of which the Malagasy eat. In the distance a line of palms stood against the blue sky. Aside from the occasional bird, the only sound was the dipping oars—ours and other boats’—as we rode along at a leisurely pace. “Mora mora,” Joseph said. It's Malagasy for "slowly, slowly" and it seems to be something of a national motto.

Shortly we were wading ashore onto a sandy beach beyond which were small thatched houses made from ravinala, the traveler's palm. Jackfruit, mango and lychee trees stood all around. Right away, little kids surrounded us asking—in fact clamoring—to have their pictures taken. These kids don't go to school because their parents believe that fishing is their school, Joseph said. And they love to have their pictures taken because they believe it lets their soul travel to other places.

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Most of them looked pretty solemn when we took their pictures, but they broke into wide grins when we showed them their pictures on the tiny screen.

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Everywhere in the village was evidence of resourcefulness and making do. Floats for a shark net were made from pieces of old flip-flops, and a little girl held a fan made from a candy-bar wrapper. The people believe in unity and all help each other, Joseph said. “They have a saying, ‘One finger can’t catch a flea.’”

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We traveled further along the canal to another village, this one much more prosperous looking. The houses were made of boards, and there was a two-room schoolhouse where the kids greeted us loudly in unison.

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The village head was apparently a fan of El Che. This is his house.

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We bought some wood carvings and a woven basket and walked to a long pine- and palm-topped dune between the village and the ocean.

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One of the paddlers got a coal fire going in a little pot, and then the three men cooked the lobsters in a Malagasy sauce with curry, pepper, tomatoes and onions. Also on the menu were some of the small silver fish, and some veggies served on top of shredded coconut in vinaigrette.

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While we waited, Rie and I walked on the beach, Rie accompanied for a while by one of the girls from the school.

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Then we ate more of that delicious food than we really had room for and dozed on the bamboo mats, looking up at the palm fronds and pretending we didn’t see the little kids who were hanging onto a palm trunk nearby and watching us. After a while, I heard the little girl who had been following Rie was singing a French Christmas song Rie and I learned as kids in Canada. I sat up and asked her to sing it again. She was very shy, so I started singing the words we knew, “Il est né, le divin enfant . . .” and encouraging her to join in.

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But her words, also in French, were different, so I kept quiet and just listened. A little boy joined her and the two of them sang several songs very quietly, knowing I was listening but not looking at me. A second girl came and joined them, then an older one. They hung around, clearly curious, and were delighted when I took their pictures.

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The first girl went off a bit, pulled a vine from the ground, stripped the leaves from it and started skipping. Then they all were showing off their moves. After a while, I showed the oldest one how to use the camera, something she’d clearly never done, and they took pictures of each other, laughing uproariously at the results.

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After a long rest under the trees, we set off again, the men singing paddling songs as we headed back against a strong wind.

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We stopped a few more times, and at one point saw nepenthes, a carnivorous plant that made Rie’s day.

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A woman who ran a little open air essential oil factory showed her steam-powered machine to us and told us how to use the oils of eucalyptus, citronella and other plants that grow there.

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And when the day was done we were more than happy with Joseph's tour. After we slipped back under Manakara's main bridge, he even gave us one last reason to smile. Pointing to a little reddish cat on the bank, he told us that they were considered royal here.

“Are there cats in Canada?” he asked.

“Yes,” we said.

“Do people eat them?”

It was a natural enough question but we had to laugh.

"No," we said.

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