Pink Boots and a Machete (5 page)

We left with not much more than a bag of food, a few camping supplies, and hearts filled with hope. We planned to be away three months. After paddling for a while, we set up camp. Sleep did not come easily. Though during the day the forest seemed like a tranquil place, at night the sounds were deafening. Frogs, bats, even monkeys made up the chorus. I wouldn't
say I was scared exactly. But I was. Between that and the malarial dreams that had me covered in blood, I wasn't overly eager for shut-eye.

The next morning we loaded our belongings into the canoe and pushed off again. I took notes on the wildlife and mused at just how small humans figure in nature. I noted the quiet surroundings. Suddenly, our guide motioned me to duck down as a boat of “port knockers” was coming around the river's bend. What are port knockers, I thought, and why does everyone look so scared?

As it turned out, port knockers are small-scale miners who pan for gold along rivers and streams. They are the prospectors of Guyana, intrepid individuals who, like the cowboys of the Wild West, are part of the national identity and the subject of many tales. And judging by the guide's reaction, they can be your worst nightmare. That is, if your worst nightmare is to get robbed, beaten, and possibly raped and killed if you put up too much of a fight, or if they're simply drunk enough. We hid the boat and ourselves under some fallen trees and sat in frightened silence as the loud, drunken sailors cruised by.

Unfortunately, we wouldn't see any monkeys that day, and as the sun was setting, we tied up our canoe, set up camp, and rested our bodies on damp hammocks. I was starting to think we would never find them and that, anyway, I wasn't cut out for this. That night I learned how the rain forest got its name. It rained longer and harder than any storm I had ever endured in Miami during the hurricane season. On the upside, the pots and pans we left out overnight sparkled in the morning. Nature's Maytag,
I thought. But then I noticed that in the mad rush to get the tarps up I had forgotten to bring in my designer field vest. I glanced at the label and swore it was mocking me: Dry Clean Only.

The rain never really let up, and over the next several weeks I was awakened daily by howler monkeys. Howler monkeys are like rats in South America. Anyone who has spent the night in a South American rain forest has at the very least heard them from a distance. I think they actually take great pleasure in waking people they have identified as “not a morning person.” Howlers will find the tree you are under and perch there while making their incredibly loud cry. At first, I thought it was exciting and added to the experience of living in the wild. Soon I just found it annoying. But since there was no chance it would stop, I'd get out of my hammock, bathe in the river, filter some water, take my antimalarial pills, throw on my boots, and wonder what the cheerleaders were doing that day.

Tarantulas soon became an even greater nemesis. They would climb to the top of my backpack and nestle in my long, tangled, wet hair. It was not easy digging them out. Leafcutter ants cut highways through the backs and tongues of my boots left on the ground overnight. A vampire bat took a chomp at my foot hanging off the hammock during sleep, and mosquitoes had a field day on wrists and ankles that rubbed too close to the mosquito net. Somehow they made it under the net, too, and most of the night I was killing them and checking for spiders. I quickly learned that mosquitoes actually love deet. Though I can't prove it, I think deet makes them stronger.

We were starting to run out of food, and morale was sinking, so we decided to seek a village to restock our dwindling supplies. We found a lovely elderly Guyanese couple living on the river's edge who seemed more than happy, eager even, to have us stop. Given how remote the area was, I suspected they didn't get many visitors. As a city girl, I could see the appeal of living far from the masses under the tall forest canopy, with only the sounds of birds, frogs, and monkeys. This had to be one of Earth's last remaining paradises, recalling places written about by 19th-century explorers. No roads at all. At night nothing but stars and the pale light cast by the moon. It was surreal. The couple had created a beautiful floating garden that I hoped to emulate someday when I got back to civilization—whatever that meant. They stuffed us with papaya and delicious pink juice made from a local fruit I had never heard of, and told us stories about saki monkeys. I would have gotten more excited had our first sighting not been in their pot.

We spent two days there, resting and taking refuge from the rains, and then it was time to push on. We traded some of my batteries and a lighter for papaya, the mystery fruit, and condiments. As I looked back, the couple stood waving, and I was sure there was a tear in the woman's eye. I knew exactly how she felt. For two days the place was magical, but I don't think I could have lasted there very long. The only buzz in these parts came from bees.

Another day passed, and we continued on our journey to find the rare monkeys. At that point I wanted to proclaim
all monkeys in Guyana, except howlers, extinct. And then for the first time…SAKI MONKEYS! I screamed, “Look, sakis!” Dr. Handsome asked where. “There! In that tall tree!” I took a GPS reading, jotted our sighting in my waterproof notebook with my waterproof pen, and followed the creatures until the sun went down.

I was officially a scientist.

As we were drifting to sleep that night, we heard loud splashing in the direction of our boat. I stumbled to turn on my headlamp and prayed it was not a port knocker who had found us. I saw not one but two intruders. Inside our canoe, a couple of very large, curious river otters were playing with our gear. They jumped out at the sight of my light. It made an already good day perfect.

Feeling optimistic and reenergized, we continued our search. Along the river's edge, we spotted sakis again. But what were they doing in a group? These were supposed to be monogamous creatures, their units consisting of only male, female, and offspring. Monogamy had disappointed me once again. I came to realize later that this was a very interesting finding, indeed, and that it had recently been written up in a scientific journal.

We spent a few weeks hacking through thick forest, following the animals as best we could. I was no longer as terrified of tarantulas as the first time one perched on my backpack, though I still scoured the forest floor with my light at night. My eyebrow tweezers, which had been ridiculed by my colleagues, got new respect as the favorite tool
for removing ticks and leeches from hard-to-reach areas. I learned that, in addition to the havoc wreaked by leafcutter ants, leaving boots out overnight was a very bad idea because of all the things that could crawl inside, which you only discover after you've given them your foot for breakfast.

I had also found various clever ways of avoiding our assistant's request to help trap the very large and deadly fer-de-lance snakes. Her brother, in particular, had a fascination with these animals and wanted us to help stuff them into a box for closer observation. Luckily, they were only able to find one on their own. I never let on that I seemed to trip on these fearsome snakes at every bend.

The snakes and tarantulas were a small price to pay for the beauty of Guyana's interior. Nothing describes a wonder like Kaieteur Falls. This waterfall is about five times higher than the more well-known and relatively wimpy Niagara Falls and about twice the height of Zimbabwe's Victoria Falls. Its distinction lies in the unique combination of height and volume, making it one of the most powerful waterfalls in the world. It is no less than a four-hour vertical climb from the base at around 280 feet to the summit at just under 1,900 feet. One point on the hike is now officially called the Oh My God, as that's what people say when they realize what they have to climb. I was grateful to be as fit as a professional cheerleader.

Perhaps more impressive than its size is the fact that the waterfall sits in a nearly pristine rain forest atop an ancient plateau known as the Guyana Shield. This geological phenomenon is said to be the oldest layer of rock on Earth, at 2.99
billion years. On the edge of the plateau I got to see some rare wildlife, such as the golden frog and the harpy eagle, and tracks of the elusive jaguar. Every winded step was made worthwhile.

Kaieteur Falls is said to be named after an Amerindian chief by the name of Kai, who canoed over the falls to his death. Apparently, he did this in order to protect his tribe from a rival Carib tribe and the disease that had affected them. The word
teur
is native Amerindian for “falls.” Whether Kai's sacrifice worked is unrecorded, but I have to wonder how plunging to your death over a waterfall would act as a vaccination, however good the intention. There are still no safety rails at Kaieteur Falls, and approaching its edge is risky. But looking over its rim, I could feel the power. Before I knew it, my arms lifted, and I felt I could take to the air and soar. Perhaps the great Amerindian chief had felt a similar compulsion.

The Guyana expedition was soon over, and I returned safely to the joys of hot showers, electricity, and a comfy bed, but I was a different person. Comfort could not keep me around for long. I had been bitten by the bug, quite literally. I switched majors and applied to the top-rated anthropology graduate department in the country, at Stony Brook University, where I would go on to pursue a Ph.D.

I would return to Guyana the next year, just long enough to almost die. As earlier recounted, that return trip ended a few weeks short, with my hands becoming increasingly more swollen and red. By the end, they looked as if I had dipped them in a pot of scalding water they were so blistered and dis
torted. They got so bad I had to cover them with a blanket in town to avoid the stares.

I never did find out what caused my hands to reach the size of basketballs. Apparently, the red streaks on my legs signaled that I had a blood infection traveling toward the heart, spelling doom. To this day, I do not discuss the details with my mom. But I can't help wondering if I should have stayed away from the Kool-Aid.

During the course of two expeditions, I had evolved from naive cheerleader to daring explorer. Or perhaps I was a daring cheerleader and naive explorer. Either way, as I lay in a hospital bed for almost two weeks, hooked up to antibiotics and steroids, I never stopped dreaming of my next adventure. After a full recovery I applied for another grant. I had found my calling. Guyana would not be the last place where I contributed my spit to a village meal.

I had come to Madagascar to do what no other man or woman had done before, to look for and study an almost extinct form of lemur called Perrier's sifaka. There were no photographs of these animals, only line drawings. A sobering article entitled “Death Row” in a 2000
Time
magazine declared the animal nearly vanished. I was going in search of one of the most critically endangered primates in the world.

I learned later that, although nothing was known about the Perrier's sifaka, a beautiful, all-black, elusive creature that lives in a forest in Madagascar's northeast, I was not the first to attempt to study it. A number of highly respected primatol
ogists had tried. After a fleeting glimpse, or at most a momentary observation, these researchers, one by one, had returned empty handed. Seems like these ancestral primates sometimes dubbed “dumb monkeys” were capable of outrunning, if not outsmarting, world-renowned scientists. Desperate to learn about this mysterious tree dweller and to make a small dent in the science, I became passionate about studying them.

It may not surprise you to learn that most donors were hesitant to hand a former cheerleader a wad of money and send her off to one of the most isolated regions of Madagascar in search of a needle in a haystack. But one grantor did. His name is Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, a primatologist and herpetologist with a Harvard Ph.D., a successful activist, and a kid at heart. With an enviable head of thick gray and white hair, Russ continues to collect Tarzan novels and memorabilia, and his sense of wonder and amusement is intact after more than 30 years of fieldwork. For fun he still likes to go out and catch frogs. Perfectly at home in the forest, he himself is not unlike Tarzan.

Thanks to Russ, I found myself in Madagascar, and one day I ran into him on the streets of Antananarivo, the capital, recognizing him instantly from his picture in
Time
magazine, in which in 1998 he'd been named one of the “EcoHeroes for the Planet,” and in the many books he had written. We agreed to meet for lunch that day. I not only wanted to thank him for his financial support, I also wanted to pick his brain about the black ghosts I was going after. Russ had been one of the lucky few to briefly see these sifakas while researching a feature he was writ
ing for
Outside
magazine. Sitting in the restaurant of one of the city's ritziest hotels, the Hilton, Russ warned me of the difficulties I would encounter. The list was long. I studied his face and the charming, nonchalant way he talked about his travels and adventures. Here was an academic legend, a hero in the flesh. I found myself with a bit of a schoolgirl crush and awed that I, a poor excuse for a Jane, was having lunch with Tarzan.

As Russ spoke, I began to identify qualities in him that I like to think I possess myself. He is a go-getter. His curiosity and passion are insatiable. And best of all he likes to follow his gut, which must be what caused him to take a chance on me. It was clear that, like me, he was a bit of a paradox. While he could endure the grueling heat of the jungle and months of living out of a tent, he also had a taste for the finer things in life. A wine connoisseur, he was as comfortable talking to the A-list celebrities he entertained at fund-raisers as to village elders. As we sat and ate what would be my last good meal for quite a while, I knew he liked my enthusiasm and felt he noticed the same stubborn qualities in me that had led to his own success. With a boyish laugh, he asked me about having been an NFL cheerleader. I could tell he would soon become the one cheering me on. “You're going to go far,” he said. With that, he sat back, smiled, and continued to ask about my days as a pom-pom girl. I think the fact that I had been a cheerleader had only helped seal the deal. Perhaps he saw in me some Jane and just enough Tarzan.

That I would “go far” was an understatement. To see this lemur, I had already traveled halfway around the globe. From
Miami, I'd flown across the Atlantic to Paris, then through the islands of Réunion and Mauritius to Antananarivo. Almost 48 hours after setting off, I had landed in Madagascar. The final leg, to Antsiranana, on the northernmost tip of the island, would be reached aboard an old prop plane.

Larger than California and about the size of Texas or France, Madagascar is the world's fourth largest island, isolated in the Indian Ocean off the coast of southern Africa. About 70 percent of the estimated 250,000 species of fauna found on the island exist nowhere else on the globe. They are animals that can only be described as evolutionary oddities.

Madagascar is a scientist's dream come true.

This true living laboratory has given rise to creatures reminiscent of something out of Dr. Seuss. The aye-aye is an iconic example. Although a primate, this nocturnal lemur looks like a large cat, boasts ears like a bat, a bushy squirrel-like tail, an elongated extraterrestrial-looking middle finger, and beaver teeth that never stop growing. Once thought to be extinct, the aye-aye was rediscovered in 1961. It remains an endangered species because its habitat is being destroyed and because of native superstition. Ancient Malagasy legend says that the aye-aye is a symbol of death. Some villagers believe its mere appearance predicts your death. I was both excited and terrified to see one.

Having traveled all over the world, I can attest to the claim that Madagascar is unlike any place on Earth. Entire books have been dedicated to the question of just what caused Madagascar to become so different. Why is it that almost everything
that exists in Madagascar exists nowhere else in the world? Some argue that these animals were already there when the land that is now Madagascar drifted away from Africa some 160 million years ago. But animals akin to lemurs didn't arise until about 58 million years ago, so that throws a huge wrench into that theory. Did they walk, swim, or drift there? Nobody knows. Naturally absent from Madagascar are dogs, rabbits, cats, monkeys, squirrels, gorillas, elephants, pangolins, antelopes, zebras, camels, giraffes, hyenas, lions, cheetahs, monitor lizards, adders, vipers, cobras, pythons, hornbills, woodpeckers, and other animals prevalent in nearby regions of Africa. Why didn't they come, too? Nobody knows. What we do know is that of the more than 150 mammal species that live on the island, about 90 percent are endemic. To this day no one is sure how they got there. But that's only one of Madagascar's unsolved mysteries.

Madagascar is home to screaming reptiles, hissing giant cockroaches, and a curious beast, the indri, that sings a song of indescribable beauty. Many a day I wished I could have been one of the first people to arrive on the island, when it was a real-life Jurassic Park. How I would have loved to witness giant lemurs the size of gorillas sharing the forest floor with dwarf hippopotamuses and 600-pound tortoises. Flightless elephant birds, standing more than ten feet tall, raced through the island's forested savannas on legs no smaller than tree trunks carrying their half-ton bodies, laying eggs that could hold the fluid content of about 180 chicken eggs. With a single egg, an entire village could have feasted on omelets for a month. Sadly,
those jumbo-size creatures, along with the rest of Madagascar's aptly named megafauna, went extinct 2,000 years ago.

But the curious creatures that remain, if more compact, are no less impressive. The giraffe-necked weevil could inspire a Steven Spielberg movie, and I dare say the aye-aye might have been the muse for
Gremlins
. In the trees, two-foot-long chameleons have tongues that can be longer than their bodies. They extrude their tongues faster than the human eye can follow, at around 26 body lengths per second. They have a bizarre way of moving, in which they slowly rock back and forth between steps, often in time to the rustling of nearby leaves.

Camouflage is a fashion staple here, and no one wears it better than the geckos. The humbly named fantastic leaf-tailed geckos have a flattened, leaflike tail complete with notches to resemble a decaying leaf. Its close cousin, the fringed leaf-tailed gecko, sports some 300 teeth, more than any other reptile or mammal on earth. And the lemur's wild nemesis, the fossa (pronounced foosa), is Madagascar's shorter and stockier version of the puma. Dubbed the pink panthers of Madagascar, fossas are killing machines, eating pretty much anything that moves with powerful jaws filled with canines as big as any guard dog's and long, retractable claws on both front and hind feet. The coolest thing about the fossa is that their feet are reversed. The biggest toe lies on the outside of the foot rather than the inside, so it can grip trees. What gets most scientists' attention is the fossa's penis. An adult fossa is about 3.5 feet long and has a penis of about 7 inches, a sixth of its body length. If a man had
the same ratio, he would be 3 feet tall and very smug. These creatures only begin to scratch the surface of Madagascar's carnival of animals.

Perhaps it was my own island roots, but when I stepped off the plane in Madagascar, I was struck by a feeling of familiarity and homecoming, almost recognizing the distinctive sights and smells of this peculiar place. Perhaps as a child I had been there in my vivid imagination. I instantly loved how the dust coats every surface, leaving houses and plants and even cows looking dry and reddish, like they'd been colored by a brick-red Crayola.

Dr. Handsome, the Smithsonian director I'd worked with in Guyana, had come with me. Seems that the sight of my basketball hands there had not scared him off. We were headed to Analamera Special Reserve, a 34,700-hectare nature reserve and the only place in the world where Perrier's sifakas and most other animals on the island are found. But first we would need food and supplies. The port town of Antsiranana, also known as Diego Suarez, was the jumping-off point for Analamera. Diego Suarez was named for two Portuguese sailors: Diego Diaz, who first landed on Madagascar in August 1500, and Hernan Soarez, who arrived six years later. This slightly decaying but hauntingly picturesque town of 100,000 inhabitants has one of the world's most beautiful and widest bays. It was hard not to be captivated. The town retains the charm of its French colonial past, with balustrades and columns lending it an elegant and aristocratic air. Important strategically since 1884, the port was
used as a naval base by the French until 1973. This would be our only opportunity to buy food and supplies to last us through the expedition.

The seemingly simple task of shopping in Madagascar's colorful, open-air markets is an expedition in and of itself, and an exhilarating experience. Walking through the hundreds of rickety wooden stands crowded under a sea of umbrellas, I watched as men hacked big chunks off a side of beef and women stacked fruits and vegetables into tidy pyramids. Despite trying to look like I belonged, I was swarmed by young men offering to act as guards. After repeatedly declining their services, I realized I had been pickpocketed. Luckily, a woman witnessed the crime and screamed at the perpetrator, madly waving her broom and insisting he return my money until he did. I thanked her profusely, completely in awe of her ability to rescue me while carrying a dozen live geese in a woven basket on her head.

With my money back in my possession and tucked into the very bottom of my backpack, I needed to figure out how to convert the local currency. In my pocket I carried a huge clump of cash, bills far too big to fit in an American wallet, and in denominations starting in the thousands. I had no idea how much a 5,000-unit bill was worth. To make matters more confusing, coins and banknotes were denominated in both Malagasy francs and ariary, with the subunit of the ariary, the iraimbilanja, worth one-fifth of an ariary and equal to a franc. The trouble was, besides the difficulty in telling the difference between the two types of bills, posted prices were
arbitrarily given in either ariary or francs. Yes, it was that confusing. With ariary worth five times more than the currency marked Malagasy francs (MFG), on more than one occasion I paid 25,000 MFG when I thought I was paying 5,000.

One of the more stressful tasks in the market is bargaining—unless, of course, you've been trained by the best. And Mima was the best. I had many years under my belt of watching my grandmother score unbeatable prices in Miami flea markets. No salesman at any level of experience was a match for her bargaining skills, and I felt sure I had inherited her shopping genes. But to bargain in Madagascar you have to know what the local price is. Is the equivalent of a dollar too much to pay for a kilo of tomatoes? Am I being taken? Should I try to get my tomatoes for 80 cents? Is it really worth pretending to walk away to save 20 cents? Mima would say yes, so that's what I did. I came to learn that paying a third of the price you were quoted as a foreigner was fair—more than the locals would pay but fair. When I learned that the average Malagasy yearly income is $200 per family, I felt guilty arguing for those 20 cents (or 437 ariary/2,200 MFG) and made it a point to overpay for my tomatoes thereafter.

I thought for sure that once we were in country, getting to the field site would be the easy part. However, I discovered that only two trucks in the entire town of Diego Suarez could make the off-road, muddy trek, and both those vehicles were sitting on cement blocks. “The roads are impassable without a good vehicle,” said the hotel owner, who also rented the cars and manned the restaurant. “I may be able to sort you out a truck,
but it won't be ready for another couple of days.” It wasn't ideal, but it's not like we could just dial up the local Hertz. We agreed to wait. With that he brought us Madagascar's beer of choice, Three Horses. Seeing as how I wasn't going anywhere, I downed several, finding it curious that every bottle tasted different. Perhaps it came down to which horse.

A week later we were jumping into the back of an old four-wheel drive loaded down with camping gear and enough food to last us a month. The driver took us to the local office of the National Association for the Management of Protected Areas (ANGAP), where we picked up a guide and presented our permits. There we met a short, fit Malagasy ranger in his late 20s, who would lead me and Dr. Handsome to the lemurs and make sure we didn't make off with any. In truth, he was our babysitter. We then set off for the forest along a dirt road barely wide enough for a bike, getting stuck numerous times en route and trashing the area's last good truck.