Tag: Madagascar
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Barefoot in the Malagasy Jungle: the Making of Onja’s Crowdfunding Video (part 1)
It started back in July when I got an interesting item in my “Google Alerts” for Madagascar. A small NGO was looking for a filmmaker and a social media manager to support their project in eastern Madagascar. I quickly fired off an email doing my best to convince “Sam” that this project was tailor-made for…
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Madagascar: Visiting the Tsingy de Bemaraha (Part 2)
This post is a continuation of my previous post, where I described out trip from Antananarivo to Morondava, and then north across two rivers and to the “petit tsingy” and a boat ride through the Manamobolo Gorge and the caves that border it. In this post, I will share our experience in the “grand tsingy”…
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Madagascar’s Majestic Baobabs
I’ve been pretty quiet here on the blog – we have been hard at work on some crowdfunding initiatives, and in between, I have been editing some of the video footage I shot on our trip to Madagascar’s west coast. Way back in August! That’s when we took a trip that most foreigners who spend…
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Anjezika: Antananarivo’s “Waterworld”
This is Anjezika. Once a vibrant fishing and rice-growing village, it has gradually been encircled and choked off by the surrounding city of Antananarivo, Madagascar. Now, nobody grows anymore rice here. A few small fish can be collected from the stagnant water that separates small squares of low-lying land where the people have built their…
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Merry-Go-Round, Madagascar Style
In retrospect, the kids somehow look terrified. But they were having a great time, I assure you!
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Heartbreaking
As in many parts of the world, when you drive around urban areas of Madagascar, people will tap on your window asking for money. Frequently these are little people. There are many theories about how to respond – sometimes the kids are exploited by adults and sent out to beg, often carrying babies – and…
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Children of the Street: Ankorondrano
A group of about a dozen kids gathers on a small patch of green with a few benches and trees. Basically a large roundabout. Imagine an oblong Dupont Circle, except Starbucks is 3,000 miles away. The sound of traffic is constant. Two young volunteers lug a bag of supplies to a cement bench and quietly…
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Children of the Street: Ambohijatovo
In this third installment on a project Anne and I are involved in, we assist “Zanaky Ny Lalana”(Children of the Street) at yet another location. This week we went to Ambohijatovo, one of the ten locations where Malagasy volunteers for “Teach for Madagascar” currently hold sessions. Teach for Madagascar is a program whereby Malagasy volunteers provide literacy and…
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Love Your Neighbor
Truth be told, we didn’t ask to come to Madagascar just for the lemurs – although they’re a pretty nice bonus. A big reason we came here because we want to try and make a difference, somewhere, in someone’s lives; to have a purpose. But Saturday was a pretty tough day. We started the day…
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Vintage Camera Test: 1930s Franka Rolfix (I think!)
Last week when we visited the Anjezika neighborhood, I brought along a couple of untested vintage cameras from my collection. One of them was this folding camera with virtually no identifying information, other than the brand on the lens and shutter. This is one of the first vintage cameras I bought when I started collecting…
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Travels in Madagascar: in and around Ampefy
Ampefy is a little town about 100km west of Antananarivo, in a landscape dominated by volcanic landforms – many of the surrounding hills have the telltale conical shape of dormant volcanoes. There are a few hotels in town, but we opted for an AirBnB (yes, even in Madagascar!) lakeside lodge that went for around $22…
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Getting Lost in Antananarivo, Just a Mile from Home
Less than a mile from our home is a lake that functions as a water catchment area during the rainy season, but also offers a running trail, a place for young lovers to escape, a livelihood for a small informal community, and maybe a bit of photography. We took a walk there late one recent…
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Madagascar’s Saha Forest Camp: An Eco-sperience! Part 2.
As the title suggests, this is a continuation of my previous post, wherein I describe Saha Forest Camp and its surroundings…in case an orientation is needed! We’re not serious hikers. But our local guide had done a good job so far guiding us through the rain forest, and we had nothing planned, so we decided…
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Madagascar’s Saha Forest Camp: an Eco-sperience! Part 1.
A couple of hours north of Antananarivo, at the end of a rutted, slick red clay road that meanders for about 10 kilometers eastward from the town of Anjozorobe, where the winding rice paddies finally end in a jumble of primary forest, Saha Forest Camp is perched on a hillside. We arrived at a clearing…
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Madagascar’s Mantadia National Park: the Lemurs
Normally when we go on a trip somewhere, we end up with 6-10 really good photos worth sharing, which give an overall impression of the experience. But I have been stalling on this post because the number of close-up lemur photos we got is pretty overwhelming. So I’m just going to post a bunch of…
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First Photowalk in Tana
We’ve had a few weeks to settle into the groove here in Antananarivo (pronounce “tananarive” but more frequently shortened to “tana”) and so we figured it was high time we got out and about with our cameras. There is so much going on, and so many fascinating street scenes to photograph here – but we…
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(Re)introducing Madagascar: Golden Hour in a Roadside Village
So it was our first “real” weekend (i.e. the first during which we were not stumbling around in a jet-lagged haze) and we decided to head out of town. We decided to return to a destination we had visited on our vacation trip in 2012, and a place many visitors to the country go and see…
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…and we’re off – to Madagascar!
When we were posted in Namibia, we took a trip to Madagascar. The thought was, “when will we ever have this opportunity again?” because plane tickets from the U.S. are wicked expensive. How ironic that a few short years later we should discover that we will be posted there for a two-year assignment (extendable to…
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How do tortoises “get it on”?
Ever wonder how turtles and tortoises “get it on”? You’d think they were cursed by anatomy, but yes, they do mate – there’s no “you lay the eggs and I’ll come along after and fertilize them.” Animal Planet’s probably all “been there, done that” but on a recent trip to Madagascar I heard the strangest…
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Free Jungle Sounds
Every now and then I come across some sounds that might be of use to other video hobbyists. These are pretty clean, high quality recordings taken with a Rode Videomic. Feel free to download the sounds and use them for whatever you want. Frogs Sound – the sound of African bullfrogs croaking. Recorded at Kempinski Mokuti…
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Underwater Videography: Things I’ve Learned
If you’ve ever managed to take along a camera snorkeling, you probably had the same reaction I did when you got your finished footage home to the computer: “It looks nothing like it did when I was actually snorkeling.” Colors are washed out, everything is a dingy blue, all the fish you saw are nowhere…
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Madagascar on 12.12.12 part I: the Lemurs
If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I have been pretty excited about 12.12.12. Why? Because that’s the day the third “One Day on Earth” film is to be recorded in every country around the world. The first film, recorded on 10.10.10, was in my Christmas stocking this year (you can order yours…
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Preview – Wildlife of Madagascar
Simply amazing – Andasibe-Mantadia National Park. Here is a preview of the kinds of things that will be posted in the near future on video. Though they are wild, these ringtail lemurs are very curious. This white-ruffed lemur is “just hanging around”
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Entering Madagascar
Getting off the plane at Antananarivo, we were greeted by a pleasant, warm humidity…and the occasional raindrop. As our driver took us into the city however, the rain started for real. Soon the rain was gushing down in buckets, and the streets of downtown ‘Tana turned into rivers, and I wondered how some of the…
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Conservation International: Forests and Carbon in Madagascar
This is an excellent example of what organizations are doing to protect forests. In Madagascar, forests are especially important, because something close to 80% of Madagascar’s animal life is unique, and highly adapted to very specific areas and niches in Madagascar that may in some cases be limited to a few thousand hectares of forest.…