Most Interesting Things

1. Locust swarms—gigantic swarms of gigantic locusts hitting our bus as we push through them. Am I in the middle of another biblical plague?
2. Letting a juvenile of the largest species of beetle climb over my arm at the dinner table. It was as big as my hand.
3. The aye aye! My favorite Madagascar animal. It looks so ugly and evil and it has a super long middle finger for digging grubs out of trees. It climbs down trees headfirst and mates for up to two hours while hanging from branches. It is terrifying by appearance, but such a sweetie in reality. (The one at the Ivoloina Zoo is a little girl named Lucy.)
4. Indris (tailless lemurs) sound exactly like whales calling.
5. The tourist tree, named because its bark peels just like sunburned skin.
6. The traveler’s palm, named because you can stab its stalk to get a stream of fresh water.
7. The smallest mouse lemur weighs only 30 grams.
8. Breadfruit = delicious. Enough said.
9. Bamboo lemurs are adapted to eat the cyanide-filled stalks of African bamboo.
10. Lemurs are territorial and they make warning cries that are bone-chillingly scary and at the same time obnoxious.
11. There are no poisonous snakes on the entire island.
12. Lemurs the size of gorillas lived here until 500 years ago—just moments ago on the geologic time scale. I saw the skull of one. This is a very sad but still very interesting fact.
13. Mountains here look like they’ve bubbled out of the Earth. They are round and smooth rock and streaked with color.
14. The miracle fruit, the one that temporarily makes sour things taste sweet, grows here in the demonstration garden of the Ranomafana Arboretum! (It’s native to West Africa.)
15. 1/3 of the annual rainfall fell in the four days we were in Ranobe. This is supposedly the dry season?!
16. Getting stuck in Sakaraha, the sapphire capital of the island, because it's not safe to drive the roads of mining country at night. Our bus and hotel were both protected by one sweet dog and two intimidating military men with giant guns.