The Plagues of the Tropics

“Nine you were set out from Rivendell...”

Okay, six, not nine, explorers set out from Vondrozo to head “sur terrain” just three weeks ago. But our numbers dwindled quickly as warrior after warrior fell victim to the tropics—Madagascar, it appears, is a tough place to live...

We travelled from village to village with the WWF agents, Florant and Augustin, and were transiently accompanied by a few other WWF employees, as well our Peace Corps friend, Brian. After our first week of scrupulous attention to hygiene in Vondrozo—pots and pans carefully washed in purified and boiled water—we were somewhat shocked at the washing protocols (or lack thereof) at play in the field. We slept in our tents pitched in the village square every night but ate over wood fire in a thatch hut that was invariably vacated in a show of hospitality upon our arrival. Our agents shared cooking duties with a variety of local villagers, and our plates and pots mingled with theirs each night in the murky water of the soapless wash basin. I once had a friend whose strategy for washing dishes in the wilderness was that he just didn’t do it—we took that sentiment to the extreme for three weeks in rural Madagascar.

It’s no wonder then that we got sick—as Sergio said, “Our stomachs just aren’t accustomed to this sort of thing.” It was Sergio first who puked his breakfast on the doorstep in Ambohitsara, then Christa who was blacking out in the heat and woozy with giardia, then Kuni up-chucking dinner in Anivorano, then Henintsoa with impressively infected heel blisters that left her hobbling along the trail. About a week and a half into our travels, Christa, Kuni, and Henintsoa left us to seek medical attention in Farafangana, our nearest “major metropolis,” though from all they had to say after, they might have been better off staying in the bush with us. That left me alone with the boys, and when you counted our impressive entourage of porters, it was a lot of boys. I counted at one point in Vohimary Nord and discovered that I was the lone female amongst twenty-six men packed into a thatch hut about the size of your average Stanford dorm room. You could say I felt a little bit conspicuous. But it was fun nonetheless...

Fun that is until it was my turn, too, to fall victim to the tropics. Ranto, Segio, and I had gotten pretty cockey as the remaining three survivors in the EXPLORE program—we named ourselves the Three Musketeers, with Ranto as Aramis, Sergio as Porthos, me as Athos, and friend Brian as D’Artagnan—and then I fell ill like all the rest. I spent a miserable day wrapped up in my sleeping bag, shivering with chills, aching muscles, and a splitting headache, as my fever climbed to an impressive 39.9*C. My symptoms were the classic trademarks of malaria, so we were all pretty worried for a while, but my saving grace was that I also had some riotous diarrhea, which is not usually associated with malaria. A call to the Peace Corps doctor in Tana diagnosed me tentatively with “invasive bacteria”, and a few hours after downing my first dose of cyproflaxin (courtesy of Kaiser Permanente Petaluma, CA), my fever started falling, and I was on the road to recovery. I was 100% healthy twenty-four hours later and delighted to rejoin the adventures of the Three Musketeers. Our ranks soon swelled to include our friends, Christa and Kuni, who—fresh from the creature comforts of Farafangana—rejoined us for our last week sur terrain.

Antibiotics make you superman, and my cyproflaxin saved me from more than mere invasive diarrhea. Southwestern Madagascar is somewhat infamously renowned for a dust flea parasite—called “parasy” in Malagasy—that likes to burrow in human feet and deposit feces and eggs under the skin. The key to avoiding the parasy is to keep your feet clean at all times, but any of you who have ever been hiking with me will know already how much such a task challenges me. At the time of my great fever, I had five sizeable holes in my feet from which I had dug out parasys and egg sacks with a needle and tweezers—since that time, the count has now increased to seven. Sergio is beating me currently with a total of nine parasy invasions, but his feet are twice as big as mine, so I still claim to be leading the race if you consider the parasy to surface area ratio. The parasys themselves are disgusting yet oddly thrilling, but the open wound left behind after one is removed poses real problems in this unhygienic environment. I was particularly worried about one large hole on the underside of my foot, but the cyproflaxin took care of my problems for me. Just one day into the antibiotics course and my wounds were sealing themselves over as if Hermione Granger had poured a few drops of essence of dittany on my exposed skin.

Even Ranto, our native Malagasy Explorer, was not resistant to the plagues of the tropics. Ranto held out the longest, but upon our arrival in Vohilava, the last COBA of our séjour, Ranto also found himself passing his obligatory day in bed after spitting his breakfast up in the bushes. So that makes everyone on the team with some sort of health issue, but I like to think we are stronger now for having been through it. We bonded, too, over new invertebrate challenges in our last week together in Vohilava—as if stomach bugs and parasys were not enough, our adventures in the damp understory of the Vondrozo Forest Corridor brought us into contact with a multitude of leeches. They crawled all over our feet and shoes, inch-worming up our ankles and pant legs, and at every pause in our march, I found myself flicking clusters of them away from the laces and tongues of my shoes. Eventually, I just gave up the battle and decided to leave them be until the end of our hike. But when I finally pulled off my socks and shoes back in the village, I had two anklets of slimy, speckled leeches nestled in a circle around the top of my sock line. When I flicked them away, it became an anklet of free-flowing blood instead. Ah, tropical ecology! I knew there was a reason I always said I wanted to work in the mountains...