I WENT NUTS FOR LEMURS
From the minute you picked me up at the airport, and still days later, all I could do was talk about it — my two weeks at the end of the world, a place to which no roads lead. The Anjajavy Forest, along the north coast of Madagascar.
“It was the best trip ever!” I said repeatedly. You mocked me and I couldn’t even alter my wording to prevent further teasing. I just went on and on with the same line because it was the truest statement I could make and Hemingway had always told me, “write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” That was my sentence. Not the most erudite, but the truest.
Proclaiming my love for this weird, wild island in the Indian Ocean, I told you all about the different kinds of lemurs, the giant chameleons, the birds in the garden oasis, the thick carpet of moths on my villa door under the lamp at night, the coconuts and the man who climbed the tree to bring me one so fresh that every day thereafter I asked him to climb a tree and bring me a coconut regardless of whether I even wanted one. Watching him climb that tree was a joy in itself, you see.
This wasn’t adoration born from the bells and whistles of luxury, it was the Coquerel’s sifaka and their antics that did the trick.
Some days, it felt as though I was no longer a person, but in fact a lemur myself. Sometimes a bird or a crab or a zebu cow or a baobab, but mostly I was a sifaka. In the mornings, after watching the sunrise from my villa at the Anjajavy le Lodge, at the far end of the beach along the peninsula, I would dress and suit up in cameras, lenses, GoPro, tripod, notebooks, pens and dictaphone. Damnit, I was excited!
In the early hours of sunlight, I would trek around the reserve in search of my brethren and inevitably I would spot them in the trees, already hard at play.
The long-limbed white and brown sifaka would tangle themselves around high-up branches and grab one another for hugs and play fights. One had a bite-size chunk missing from its ear, so I knew the “play” turned feisty on occasion. Even between mother and child, it seemed.
Sitting alone, I watched one mother sifaka dancing across the lawn with flailing limbs, very much like how I run down mountain paths. She suddenly jumped onto a towering palm tree and began to climb swiftly up it when her little one, the size of a Gremlins Gizmo doll, attempted to cop a free ride, or as I saw it: hug Mum.
Mum did not like this and turned around midclimb to let out a fierce snarl. The baby recoiled but continued to cling on for dear life as Mum hustled up the tree. Just before she took the leap onto the lodge roof, she turned around and did it again. Snap snap snap! It was survival of the snarliest that morning, but baby made it to safety.
Still, days later, I watched the same two in a sweet tango across the lawns in the late afternoon, baby on Mum’s back and Mum carrying the pair back and forth, back and forth, with the brilliant blue ocean behind them. No snarling. They were teammates again. And I was right beside them, while love birds in their great green flock pecked at the grass metres from my feet and the odd lizard stopped by to show off its push-up prowess.
It was these moments, side by side with the wild things, feeling as much like one of them as a human ever can, that made me look you in the eye, again and again, and exclaim, with all the conviction of a girl under the spell of coconuts and dancing monkeys, “best, ever!”