Monday, April 14, 2014

Faces of Malagasy People





As I predicted, blogging on my tour of Madagascar is going to be challenging. Uploading pictures requires great patience. At the moment it may take over ten minutes to load even one and that's when I'm not knocked offline. The benefit is that it means I can not fool around. I need to report succinctly and with clear purpose.

First of all, I feel great and am totally thrilled with the experience so far. I have seen amazing countryside in my day and half  here and have met worthwhile people. Tonight I will have my first look at animals. I have left the capital and am staying in rustic lodging at a nature preserve in the interior of the country.  I am going on a night walk with a private guide to spot nocturnal lemurs and glow-in-the-dark chameleons.

This country is vastly different in character and landscape than I experienced in Tanzania. The inhabitants don't consider themselves even Africans. The island has many people who have come from the continent, but many more who trace their origin to Indonesia. This Asian element, with years of mixing, including with the French, is obvious. Unique facial expression, shape of heads, skin color, language and food preference makes the culture as special as the animals that live here.

I know I have not shared any landscape pictures today and that many of you may be curious of what it looks like here. I promise I will share a few snapshots in the following report. It is simply the fact that I can barely condense the diversity of geographical features and I felt a greater urgency to show people. The above pictures are a fraction of faces I have snapped. I even got to draw one of the young ladies in pink, who were part of a choir on their way to a performance. I must thank my stars now and sign off before I lose all my work to the caprice of the signal. Best to you all from out here somewhere.

4 comments:

  1. Fantastic! Such wonderful faces! Thank you for sharing your adventure, it's the next best thing to being there myself! Take care, stay safe and well and enjoy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for explaining about the racial mixing. When I looked at these pictures before reading your post, I could see the difference right away between these people's features and the faces you photographed in Tanzania, and even a few days ago in South Africa. Their skin is lighter, for one thing, and there are other differences as well. I had no clue about the mixing with Indonesians and the French, although I easily could have. All I had to do was read the Wikipedia article on Madagascar after I learned you were going there, but somehow I never got around to it. I'll remedy that little oversight now.

    ReplyDelete
  3. {Hey|Hola}, creo que vi que visitaste mi {blog|weblog|sitio web|sitio} {así que|por lo que} vine a “devolver el favor” ¡Estoy {tratando de|intentando} encontrar cosas para {mejorar|perfeccionar} mi {sitio web|sitio}! ¡¡Supongo que está bien usar {algunas de|unas pocas de} tus ideas!! Terapia de pareja malaga

    ReplyDelete