What's for lunch?

Our first real exposure to Malagasy cuisine is lunchtime Monday at Villa Vanilla, a charming, historic 3-story brick-house-turned restaurant with white trim and shutters and a green tile roof. It served exquisitely prepared food although the results don't satisfy everyone's palate – liver paté and duck paté among them. The tastes are new and strong and surprising, requiring a sense of adventure and at times, humor. This may be a piece of cake compared to Tuesday, when we will tour a crocodile farm and eat lunch, there too (beats touring a croc farm and being eaten for lunch, I reckon). There will be croc meat in appetizers/salads and as entrees. At least it should be fresh, eh? Crocs are Madagascar's only natural predator.

Children, children everywhere

Two million people call Antananarivo home. It appears a surprising number of them are elementary school-age children who play everywhere we look, seemingly without supervision and in places that appear to be fraught with danger such as busy streets or water. They are drawn to Ryan's video camera like bugs to a light, laughing and jumping and singing and running to keep pace. They mug for the camera and smile broadly when seeing their likeness in the viewfinder. They are extraordinarily happy children, it seems on the surface, but they also are victims of Madagascar's poverty, which makes half of the people live on about $1 US a day, or less. They beg constantly, holding out their hand while repeating "Monsieur … Madame … please, please." We are advised to decline because tourists are often pressured greatly in Madagascar, but it is hard to ignore their need because there appears to be no end to it and they are charming, as well. Ryan's short video clip here captures a few of those we saw today. If it doesn't show, be patient with our technology challenges from here; it will appear soon. Tuesday afternoon, we will be visiting an orphanage of about 45 children supported by Churches of Christ where several of our Malagasy students and other ACU alumni are volunteering this summer. It is a 90-minute drive from Antananarivo; watch for our video coverage a little later in the week.

Shirtless in Sambava

The sartorial realities of our predicament set in Monday morning after a 4-hour night of sleep punctuated by the crowing of a local rooster outside who started sounding off at 3:30 a.m. The adventurously eager Ryan Britt, my roommate, was up at dawn to open the window, balance his Panasonic HD camera on the sill and record the sun rising over the cityscape 10 stories below on a time-lapse video capture. I have all my shoes, enough underwear and socks to last a couple days, toiletries and third-world meds, and one extremely casual change of clothes. I felt lucky compared to some others, especially to learn our bags, if they can be found, couldn't possibly arrive until Tuesday night at the earliest, and near midnight at that. The last-minute money I spent on travel insurance was looking pretty good, but the possibility remained that a week's worth of clothes for meeting with national media and government officials, including the president of the country, would have to be found at who-knows-where in our already busy daily schedule. Biblical customs were followed, with the well-off giving items to the needy (if the pants fit), but the shopping prospects in Madagascar for American-sized tourists are not rosy. We spent 90 minutes Monday afternoon at a shopping plaza, but found slim pickins in dress clothes for university administrators. I refused to pay $100 US for a dress shirt at several shops/tables at one place called Zoom. We had, overall, the best luck at a store named Jumbo, a Malagasy grocery with hints of Wal-Mart from back home. "Dr. Money, when's the last time you bought a dress shirt and tie at the grocery?" I asked the rumpled-looking president as we rifled through a small display of wares. He laughed. In fact, we all laughed a lot today. Getting mad accomplishes little. Most Malagasy men are slight in size, so S-M-L-XL means little here to us. Long tall Texan Jack Rich is counting his blessings to have his own clothes. He'd be in a world of hurt otherwise. The relative of one of our Malagasy students is a tailor who has offered to make four of us a pair of dress pants by Saturday's event. We may take him up on it.

Lemur of the Day: Monday

Our first celebrity chooser is Victoria Tyson, a senior at Abilene Christian High School. She selected a family of ring-tailed lemurs like those we'll see this week at a lemur park on one of our excursions. There are 22 species of lemurs in the the world, and they are endemic to Madagascar (found only there in the wild). They have ancestors in Africa's apes and monkeys.

The luggage conveyor blues

[Written Monday, posted Tuesday night; I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying.] We wondered aloud: Why in the world were 230 or so people flying 12 hours from Paris to Madagascar on a Sunday night? No fancy deboarding platforms here like the glass and steel ones in Paris. A-Town is downright down-home in this Indian Ocean neighborhood, so we exit the plane via a stairway/ramp and pull our rolling carry-ons several hundred feet down the tarmac in the cool night air, which smells like burning wood (because there had been local fires that day in the countryside). The terminal looks like a cross between Abilene Regional Airport and the Greyhound bus station downtown. Several dignitaries took us to a special welcoming salon (room), greeted us and gathered our passports to whisk them through customs while we watched the luggage conveyor for our bags. The reason they tell you to always pack a change of clothes in your carry-on bag became crystal clear: the travel fairies either were asleep on the job or were playing a cruel joke in the middle of the Madagascar night, because only 5 of our 24 travelers got all their bags. Close to 30 suitcases were missing from the flight, and 25 of them belonged to the ACU contingent. The five Tyson family members were batting 1 for 10 in this Samsonite derby. Videographer/producer Ryan Britt was left with not much more than a toothbrush when he opted to carry on his HD camera equipment instead of clothes. Vicki Anderson, Karen Rich, Pam Money, Jerry Strader and moi struck out entirely. Part of the luggage contained 125 pounds of full-color Commencement programs we didn't have time to print in Madagascar, plus press kits we prepared for the local and national media. We quickly overwhelmed the tiny baggage claims office in the terminal with our paperwork and wondered if ACU's first Commencement to be held halfway across the world would be its most casual on record, hosted by two dozen rumpled tourists wearing the same underwear – or each other's – for 7 days. If something doesn't happen by Saturday, I have two programs and 1 press kit in my carry-on to divide between the expected Commencement crowd of 400 like some New Testament miracle involving too few loaves and fishes. If Air France is willing, maybe this scenario will end up just as well as that one. It will be interesting to find out just how. By the time we check into our rooms and get to bed, it's 3 a.m.. Our trip totaled 27 hours, most of it in the friendly skies.

Rating the in-flight movies

[Written Monday night, uploaded Tuesday night. I have some serious catch-up blogging to do because of the crazy travel day Sunday, but because we're 8 hours ahead of our fellow Abilenians, we hope they are forgiving. The digital camera is kaput, but Ryan will start uploading video clips as soon as our technology behaves.]

• 10,000 B.C. – 1 chameleon. How many bad actors does it take to kill a wooly mammoth, after all?
• The Devil Wore Prada – 2 chameleons. Why didn't Meryl Streep's harried assistant just tell her to go fly a silk kite?
• The Bucket List – 3 chameleons. Jack Nicholson was perfect for his role, but I lost interest when it was interrupted by supper at 9 p.m.
• Semi-Pro – Incomplete, aborted early on. Too raunchy to watch while sitting next to a trustee from Kentucky.
• Fargo – 2 chameleons. Dark comedy, too depressing to watch while recovering from unsettling Survivor dream mentioned previously.
• Casablanca – 4 chameleons. First time I've watched this classic movie all the way through, honestly. A fitting end to the longest flight of my life, as the nice French lady tells us to prepare the cabin for landing.

Mind over matter

Our flight leaving Paris was held at the gate for an hour when 30 passengers were late arriving for the 10:15 p.m. departure. We were happy to see lunch when it was served about 3 p.m. Maybe I read the travel info incorrectly, but I was surprised to learn it would be 10+ hours to Madagascar. It ended up being more like 12, so my plan to stay awake in anticipation of a good night's sleep in Antananarivo lasted all of 10 minutes. With no knee or elbow room nor knowledge of when the next meal would be served, it was back to catnapping for the Men in Our Row. The in-flight movie going to Paris didn't work, but Air France had individual touch-screen monitors on the back of each seat on this one to view movies, listen to music, watch news programming and follow the flight's progress on some kind of GPS tracker that informed passengers of the plane's elevation, air speed, distance from the airport of departure and arrival, and the air temperature (down to -56 degrees, if you really want to know). That's great, but when you have 5,438 miles to traverse, it tends to be a case of too much information after the first couple hundred kilometers. Think about it: worrisome souls (I can be one) begin to wonder why the pilot walked from the cockpit to the rear of the plane about the same time we lost 10,000 feet of altitude, just before a soothing French woman's voice announced that everyone needed to return to their seats and secure any loose items in the cabin. Maybe the pilot needed a toilette break and had to stand in line with everyone else, but hey, shouldn't you be flying this plane, monsieur? Why did the pilot change course over one particular ZIP code over Kenya, making what amounted to a hard left turn on the GPS tracker? Turbulence on this flight was more pronounced than the others, and one's mind tended to wander as we flew over places such as Kartoum and the Nile River, over the vast deserts and inpeneterable forests I have only read about in Natural Geographic or seen on the Discovery channel. But when you're flying several miles up in the sky over the largest stretches of wilderness south of the equator, and the plane starts to shake, you are tempted to look around the cabin and wonder if this is an episode of Survivor looking for a place to happen, and if so, what would this assortment of humanity bring to the table? Would this be a remake of The Flight of the Phoenix, with Jerry Strader's scouting and piloting background saving the day, the provost patching broken plane parts to help him fly a makeshift aircraft away from the burning sands? Would Joyce Voss sew animal skin outfits for us in the rainforest when our tattered Sunday church clothes became threadbare? Would Jack Rich lead an expedition down from Mount Kilimanjaro to safety? Would the episodes of the Bear Grylls TV show about wilderness survival pay off, especially the one about skinning a dead camel and sleeping in its body cavity to survive the cold desert nights and ward off jackals? I have an active imagination, I know, and it's a writer's curse. I also had too much time on my hands. After a while, a fellow runs out of things to dream about while napping, as I surely did.