Latest / Adventure Sports Podcast / Ep. 1187: Madagascar - Kayaking the Mangoky from Source to Sea with Oscar Scafidi

Transcript

Ep. 1187: Madagascar - Kayaking the Mangoky from Source to Sea with Oscar Scafidi · Adventure Sports Podcast

0:06
[SPEAKER_00]: your listening to the Adventure Sports podcast.
0:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for adventuring with us, as we discover what incredible athletes and outdoor enthusiasts are doing all over the world.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Now here's your host, Kurt Linville.
0:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello Adventure Sports podcast family, boy, today's episode is super cool.
0:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking about Madagascar.
0:27
[SPEAKER_01]: You know that island that broke off the continent of Africa forever ago and has its own unique wildlife and geology and plants and anyway.
0:38
[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking about that, we're also talking about a river on Madagascar.
0:42
[SPEAKER_01]: People say the main gauki, because that's the way it's spelled, but the locals have corrected us.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's men gauk.
0:49
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what I learned from this among other things.
0:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is a source to see.
0:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It is about 750-ish up to quite a bit more kilometers.
1:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a book, kayak, the man gawk.
1:07
[SPEAKER_01]: So all of that is going to be super fun.
1:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm sitting here and I realized that I was wearing a hat.
1:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And this hat says on it, beacon guide books.
1:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And my friend at Beacon Guidebooks Andy, I've known him for several years.
1:24
[SPEAKER_01]: He has done amazing things with back country, column Gazette, column guidebooks, whatever you want to call them.
1:32
[SPEAKER_01]: They're for backcountry skiing, and what he's done is he's taken aerial photographs and put together an amazing guidebook for backcountry skiing.
1:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And he has these for epic ski routes all over the country.
1:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I think maybe his first book might have been in our valley around Crestabudin, the elk range, but he has since done ranges all over the West.
1:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And beacon guidebooks, if you want to figure out where the epic runs are, figure out how to do them safely, figure out how to get there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
2:11
[SPEAKER_01]: then check out beacon guidebooks with Andy.
2:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh and by the way, this is not a paid advertisement.
2:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just wearing the hat seriously and I thought, you know, I should let everyone know about this.
2:21
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk about backcountry skiing and actually, even though it is now spring, it is March.
2:28
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time you hear this, March the 4th,
2:31
[SPEAKER_01]: This is actually the beginning of the backcountry ski season in earnest and the reason is because this is when the snow consolidates and it's possible to get into some epic areas without as much avalanche danger be safe out there and all you backcountry skiers enjoy the second ski season of 2026.
2:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Now to kind of set the scene, imagine for a minute, almost being lost in the wild places of Madagascar.
3:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Going to places that no one else has gone to or no one goes to, you don't know if you're the first person to be there or not.
3:15
[SPEAKER_01]: For 27 days, we're talking about running rivers through canyons, rapids, having to portage over mountain ranges, true adventure, imagine this for just a minute.
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you feel it?
3:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you hear the sounds?
3:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you feel the water?
3:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you see the sights?
3:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you smell it?
3:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Madagascar.
3:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's dive in.
3:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey friends, today I have a very unique gentleman with us.
3:46
[SPEAKER_01]: He is a travel writer, he is an educator, he does long distance expeditions, adventures across the continent of Africa.
3:55
[SPEAKER_01]: The man is Oscar Scafidi and Oscar is here today to talk specifically about one of his books and he's contributed to many, which we'll talk about, but this book is kayaking the man gawk, or as we like to say the man gawkie.
4:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's the man gawk we just learned.
4:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So Oscar, welcome to the Adventures Sports podcast.
4:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, thank you very much for having me cut.
4:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so you're in Ethiopia right now.
4:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that right?
4:22
[SPEAKER_03]: That is correct.
4:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'm in the capital of Ethiopia.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Add us above a and I looked kind of over some of the books you've written.
4:29
[SPEAKER_01]: There is also the Kwanza kayak the Kwanza so another one and then you have travel guides to Angola and other countries.
4:38
[SPEAKER_01]: How did you end up in East Africa?
4:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So I am a qualified teacher, so I teach history and I teach a lot of African history and I've been teaching on the International School Circuit for the past, I mean it's coming up to 20 years now.
4:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't know if...
4:55
[SPEAKER_03]: I juggle a couple of different careers at the same time.
4:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So right now, I am working at an international school here in Natasababa with my partner, who's also teaching at the school.
5:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And we arrived here because we were previously both working in Indonesia and we wanted to move back to Africa.
5:12
[SPEAKER_03]: and so we applied for a few jobs in various different countries on the continent that we were interested in.
5:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And this looked like the most appealing location and school.
5:21
[SPEAKER_03]: So we ended up moving out here last year in August, I think.
5:26
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if we didn't even talk about kayaking these great rivers,
5:30
[SPEAKER_01]: we could just spin the rest of the time talking about what it's like to be in the international teacher and travel from location to location experiencing the world and the people on that level.
5:41
[SPEAKER_01]: What is that like?
5:43
[SPEAKER_03]: It is a fantastic career.
5:46
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess I say I jog a few different careers, but there's certainly a lot of overlap in terms of the opportunities that these different things allow you to do whether it's travel, writing, or teaching internationally.
5:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, basically you sign a two-year contract.
6:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, obviously you interview for jobs, but once you're offered a job, you sign a two-year contract and then you relocate yourself and your life to that place.
6:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And then after that, you can kind of go on to rolling one-year contracts, so it's really up to you and your employer how long it is that you want to stay in that place.
6:19
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, it's really the world as your oyster in terms of places to go because they're international schools in almost every country in the world.
6:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I did not know that.
6:27
[SPEAKER_01]: That is a fantastic way to experience the world.
6:32
[SPEAKER_01]: That is super, super cool.
6:34
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my biggest complaints about adventure travel is that it's too short.
6:39
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you don't get to spend enough time in one place to really get to know the culture in the people like I would like to anyway.
6:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, I just returned from Tanzania about three days ago.
6:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm still jet lagged, but my biggest complaint about that trip, which I won't complain.
6:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a wonderful, wonderful experience that I had.
6:57
[SPEAKER_01]: But my only complaint was, I really didn't get to see Tanzania.
7:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw Kilimanjaro, a very big mountain.
7:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And I got to know the people that I climbed in with very well, which was delightful.
7:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But I was sad because I really didn't get to experience Tanzania itself.
7:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I really like about this, this career path is that you get to spend multiple years in the same location, getting to know the city that you're in, you are working with a lot of local colleagues, so you build that sort of network.
7:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And you get to see a country from a completely different side to how you would see if you were going in
7:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
7:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I love it.
7:43
[SPEAKER_01]: You also seem to have a connection to big rivers.
7:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So how did you get started exploring these rivers?
7:49
[SPEAKER_01]: What's that about?
7:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so the first big river expedition I did was in Angola in 2016.
7:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So my friend Alfie Western and I we collect the Quanzar River, which is the longest river in the country.
8:01
[SPEAKER_03]: It's I mean it's
8:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a bit of debate as to how long exactly it is.
8:07
[SPEAKER_03]: The Wikipedia entry says that it's about 975 kilometers long.
8:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not sure what that is in miles I'm afraid.
8:14
[SPEAKER_03]: But we ended up kayaking just shy of 1,000 kilometers on it.
8:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And we did a solid 300 kilometers of portage in addition.
8:23
[SPEAKER_03]: So I get the feeling is actually a bit longer than it's recorded as in the official sources.
8:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I was wondering about that.
8:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to know really where River starts.
8:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It's easier to figure out where it ends most of the time.
8:38
[SPEAKER_01]: But like I was just on Google Earth, and I was looking at the main Goch River.
8:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, and I thought, well, I wonder which leg of this is the river and which one is where they started and how you get the miles in and all that so you've touched upon one of the chief sources of stress when it came to organizing our expedition in Madagascar on the main goc so for the quads of river and Angola it was actually my friend Alfie who came up with the idea for the expedition
9:06
[SPEAKER_03]: he also lived in Angola at the time and he had a previous interest in the river he'd done a couple of shorter sections but anyway for him finding the source is very easy the source is listed in various locations and it's accurate so when you drive down to it actually signposted as a sort of tourist site or a site or a special interest so you can just follow the sign off the road, drove a few kilometers off road and there you are that is the source
9:32
[SPEAKER_03]: for Madagascar, it's a very, very different situation.
9:35
[SPEAKER_03]: So firstly, the start of the river is in a much more remote location.
9:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And secondly, there's not really one established authority who's decided exactly which tributary is, you know, the beginning of which tributary is the source.
9:51
[SPEAKER_03]: So lots of them.
9:53
[SPEAKER_03]: hydrological debates to be had as to exactly where the start point is.
9:58
[SPEAKER_03]: In the end we spent months doing the research and the best we could get was a French hydrology report of the island from the 1990s.
10:06
[SPEAKER_03]: They covered the entire island so it had a very short section on the mangoc and it just referenced one of the tributaries which is the Matziatra and it referenced the
10:18
[SPEAKER_03]: the source of the match, see Archer as being the source of the mangoc, because that feeds into the mangoc.
10:23
[SPEAKER_03]: But it just said, it's kind of over here next to this mountain.
10:27
[SPEAKER_03]: That was about as close as we got.
10:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So no GPS location, no signposting.
10:32
[SPEAKER_03]: We just had to sort of head in that vague direction and work it out once we got on the ground.
10:37
[SPEAKER_01]: interesting.
10:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So on Google Earth, I mean, for the listeners, I'm sorry you don't have this open in front of you right now, but on one of the tributaries, it looks like there's a sizable lake or series of lakes that could be a source.
10:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that not where it is?
10:53
[SPEAKER_03]: No, so the matciatra kind of flows, it's to the south east of Fianad and so that's the nearest point that you would find because that's actually quite a large town.
11:06
[SPEAKER_03]: That is very good luck.
11:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the matciatra sort of flows over that town.
11:14
[SPEAKER_03]: So you sort of follow it to the south east from that town and that's the that's the source of the mangoc.
11:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm kind of a chuckling here because the adventure begins just with the idea just trying to sort out how to start where to start what to do.
11:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's a big part of it.
11:33
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a huge part of it, and it was a little bit frustrating because we just wanted a GPS location.
11:39
[SPEAKER_03]: You want certainty when it comes to the planning stage, you want to know where the start point is, and then you know how long it's going to take to get to it.
11:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Whereas what we did is we just got ourselves as far down the matsearch as we could, and then we had to start hiking towards the source.
11:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So we had a solid four days that was a little bit.
11:57
[SPEAKER_03]: a little bit difficult mentally because we're walking the wrong direction.
12:01
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to have to redo all of this.
12:03
[SPEAKER_03]: We're sharing all of our gear with some local guys who say they know where the sources and we're just following this river as it goes from being a two meters wide to being one meter wide to being a trickle.
12:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it was very, very tough.
12:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So how far did you have to hike
12:26
[SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't too bad actually, once we'd found the source, according to the locals, we sort of said, okay, camp for the night and then tomorrow we'll start from the beginning and the expedition will actually begin.
12:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So that was a technically day four of the whole trip.
12:44
[SPEAKER_03]: So when people ask how long it took, I mean,
12:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I suppose from source to sea it took about 24 days, but to actually get to the source in the first place took it to another four.
12:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So in my head it's at least 28 days worth of journey.
12:58
[SPEAKER_03]: But actually only took one day of solid hiking before we could get to a section where it was wide enough and deep enough that we could put the kayak together and actually start paddling.
13:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, what kind of a kayak is this?
13:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Explain a packable kayak to us.
13:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, so it is a clapper kayak, so clapper are a German brand.
13:19
[SPEAKER_03]: This kind of kayak was invented at the turn of the century, so I think sort of 1906-1907.
13:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was such a good piece of engineering that it basically hasn't changed for nearly 100 years.
13:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And they still use the same materials actually.
13:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So you get a birchwood frame, so a very lightweight flexible wood.
13:37
[SPEAKER_03]: You make the sort of skeleton, and then you just pull a canvas skin over that skeleton.
13:45
[SPEAKER_03]: the rudder and the paddles, et cetera, et cetera.
13:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So we had a 5.45 meter long two-man kayak.
13:55
[SPEAKER_03]: weighed about 36 kilos with absolutely nothing in it.
13:59
[SPEAKER_03]: So by the time you've added additional stuff like seats, rudder pedals for the rudder, that sort of thing, I think you're up to at least 40 kilos and then obviously we add all of our gear on top of that.
14:11
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, basically you can break it down and what ended up happening both on the Angola trip and on the Madagascar trip is you split it between the two of you.
14:20
[SPEAKER_03]: So you end up with about
14:21
[SPEAKER_03]: 20 kilos of cock on your back and then you add all the other stuff that you need as well for survival and camping and hiking.
14:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's not a light load.
14:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So 40 kilos is about 88 pounds.
14:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have about 44 pounds each of just boat.
14:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Not to mention everything that you have to throw on there.
14:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, okay, what about resupply?
14:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you have to be self-sustaining all the way down or could resupply as you go?
14:51
[SPEAKER_03]: We were allowed to resupply, so I mean, we were allowed to do whatever we wanted, it was our trip, but on the Angola trip, back in 2016, we decided we were going to apply for a Guinness World Record, and they're quite strict about what they mean when they mean
15:11
[SPEAKER_03]: move the kayak under our own power for the entirety of the journey.
15:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So we either needed to be paddling the kayak or we needed to be carrying the kayak.
15:21
[SPEAKER_03]: No one could.
15:22
[SPEAKER_03]: We couldn't get porters, for example, to carry any piece of the kayak at any stage.
15:28
[SPEAKER_03]: However, we were allowed things like resupplys.
15:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So we didn't have to carry all the food we required for the entire, I mean Angola was a 32, 33 day journey.
15:37
[SPEAKER_03]: So we basically had pre-arranged rendezvouss at the sort of 7 to 10 day mark where we could get more food and swap out gear and that kind of thing.
15:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And that was a similar situation in Madagascar.
15:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, we had to carry the car in the whole way or paddlet.
15:54
[SPEAKER_03]: But then we did have a couple of rendezvous points with our chief guide where he just had a massive suitcase for the food and we could just grab stuff and put it and put it on our backs.
16:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, so, man, where to start?
16:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess the first thing is, you'd already done a big river.
16:10
[SPEAKER_01]: So you knew what you're getting into when you chose to do
16:13
[SPEAKER_03]: the men gawk and i have a hard times not seem in gaki so i i have to get it well so it's way so yeah turns out we pronounce it wrong for the entirety of the expedition so if you watch our documentary film we're saying it wrong for for all of what five minutes so we're only going to finish line that's hilarious where can people see the the film because they're going to want to see this
16:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, it's available free for you on YouTube.
16:39
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you just type in kayak, the mangoc or kayak, the mangoc key, you will find it quite quickly.
16:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it's out there in the world if people want to watch it.
16:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So you've traveled around a lot of Africa and other places in the world.
16:52
[SPEAKER_01]: But what stands out in Madagascar is unique, something that you think the listeners would say, wow, that is something.
17:02
[SPEAKER_03]: where to start with Madagascar.
17:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So just to say, even though I did the expedition in 2022, I had actually previously lived in Madagascar for many years, well, two years.
17:12
[SPEAKER_03]: So I actually worked at an international school in Madagascar between 2017 and 2019.
17:17
[SPEAKER_03]: So I got a really good opportunity to explore the island and get to know the culture and the people there.
17:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So
17:25
[SPEAKER_03]: We were talking early on about how that gives you a completely different view of a place as opposed to going in as a tourist.
17:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think people talk about Madagascar as the eighth continent because it's so unique in terms of flora and fauna compared to anywhere else in the world.
17:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, if you look at it, it sort of fits quite nicely against the coastline of Mozambique and it used to be part of the coastline, but it's split away long, long ago and since then everything's evolved in a completely different direction so they have a lot of endemic unique.
17:56
[SPEAKER_03]: plants and animals, the most famous one being the Lemus, made famous by the Phil Madagascar, but also you have incredible rainforests, you have some amazing Indian ocean beaches, those sorts of things.
18:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the one thing that really stood out to me when I first moved there in 2017 is how a lot of it didn't look and feel like Africa,
18:23
[SPEAKER_03]: It looked and felt much more like certain parts of Southeast Asia.
18:29
[SPEAKER_03]: in terms of the people and the culture and the farming that was happening there and the fishing and things.
18:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's a very specific reason for that.
18:36
[SPEAKER_03]: So the people of Madagascar originally are not from mainland Africa, they're actually from Southeast Asia.
18:44
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's very strange to think when you look at the map, because you'd assume that Madagascar would have been settled from the West, people getting in boats in Mozambique, coming across the Mozambique channel, which is not that far.
18:56
[SPEAKER_03]: and settling that way.
18:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Whereas in reality what they did is they came all the way across the Indian Ocean from some islands in Indonesia such as Borneo, which is truly incredible.
19:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And you see that overlap in the Madagascar language, you see it in the types of food and musical instruments and certain technologies that people use.
19:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's just something I didn't really know about before I moved there.
19:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, that is a cool, it's not trivial there, but for me, it's something that I did not know and I find fascinating, the way that the people in Southeast Asia traveled through across the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, it's just mind blowing.
19:40
[SPEAKER_03]: it's incredible that the technology and you know in a lot of cases not in very big boats at all but just using quite advanced navigational techniques of having a really clear understanding of the winds and those sorts of things.
19:52
[SPEAKER_03]: So I guess they kind of skirted that way all the way across, vise, relancor and india and things and then and then down which is quite amazing if you look at the distances.
20:03
[SPEAKER_01]: goodness.
20:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's crazy.
20:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean listeners pull up a map and look at this because it's kind of mind blowing.
20:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That's something else.
20:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so what is it that makes the the man got River unique?
20:16
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say probably it's the levels of isolation that you see along quite vast stretches of it.
20:23
[SPEAKER_03]: So Madagascar itself is a huge island, it's about 1,600 kilometers or 1,000 miles long.
20:29
[SPEAKER_03]: It's got a big spine of mountains that sort of go down the middle, so they...
20:33
[SPEAKER_03]: they divide the east coast and the west coast.
20:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And this river sort of cuts through quite close, starts quite close to the east coast, and it sort of cuts through westwards over and comes out on the west coast right through, almost through the center-ish of the island.
20:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is one of the most isolated undeveloped parts of the entire island.
20:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So,
20:57
[SPEAKER_03]: you've got a very remote chain of mountains that basically has no people in it.
21:02
[SPEAKER_03]: You've got grassland again.
21:04
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not very inhabited at all.
21:06
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's a part of the country that you would not get to see otherwise.
21:10
[SPEAKER_03]: There are no roads.
21:12
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no way of getting there unless you're on the river.
21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: What kind of wildlife are you encountering along the way?
21:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I would assume there are some crocodiles and things like that.
21:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But being separate from the main continent of Africa,
21:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so one of the chief sources of stress when we did our Angola expedition was not only Manit in Crocodiles of which there are a fair fear in Angola, it was also hippo hippos.
21:39
[SPEAKER_03]: So hippos are very, very dangerous.
21:41
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, far more stress for kayakers than Crocodile should be, especially if you're in a big kayac.
21:47
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, the big, the territorial, they've got no natural predators once they reach maturity and they're very, very aggressive.
21:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Now luckily for us, the last hippos in Madagascar died out a long time ago.
21:59
[SPEAKER_03]: They used to have pygmy hippos, but now they don't have any hippos.
22:03
[SPEAKER_03]: So we were, I mean, quite pleased to read that we weren't going to have the hippo risk along the river.
22:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry for the lack of biodiversity, but yes, there were crocodiles.
22:14
[SPEAKER_03]: So crocodiles were our main concern and also bullsharks, or Zambisi sharks, and we did see both of those as we were going.
22:22
[SPEAKER_03]: But because the communities along the river are quite impoverished and kind of have a lack of access to protein essentially, they have poached a lot of these crocodiles.
22:34
[SPEAKER_03]: right down in terms of the total numbers.
22:37
[SPEAKER_03]: So whereas in Angola, when we were kayaking in 2016, we saw some massive crocodiles, huge, huge, very scary.
22:45
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, some of them looking like they were almost the same length as our five and a half meter kayak.
22:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Whereas in Managaskar, the average crocodile we saw was probably one meter because they just get, they get caught in
23:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Beyond that, we saw a lot of beautiful bird life, saw some incredible fish eagles and various other animal birds up in the trees.
23:11
[SPEAKER_03]: And we did actually see lemurs, many different species of lemurs.
23:15
[SPEAKER_03]: It sounds like a bit of a stereotype, but yeah, as we were kayaking along, we did have Cifarkas, which are the sort of fluffy white lemurs.
23:23
[SPEAKER_03]: They're actually quite famous because when they're on the ground, they bounce sideways, so they look like they're dancing.
23:27
[SPEAKER_03]: So we disturbed them while they have in their lunch and they were swinging through the trees making a lot of noise.
23:33
[SPEAKER_03]: We saw brown lemurs who are very, very common across the island bouncing around as fantastic.
23:38
[SPEAKER_03]: See, a lot of animal life as we went.
23:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Now that's fun.
23:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So what's it like contrast for us?
23:46
[SPEAKER_01]: What's it like to float down a river in a place like this in comparison to some other way to see the land maybe hiking across it?
23:56
[SPEAKER_03]: From a wildlife perspective, you are much better off floating.
24:01
[SPEAKER_03]: You can sneak up on a lot of animals, much better on a river than you could if you were hiking.
24:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So I've had some of those incredible encounters I just talked about.
24:10
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think some of those would have happened.
24:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Had we been trudging along, making a lot of noise on a hiking trail.
24:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, that's one thing.
24:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And I've actually got another example of that.
24:21
[SPEAKER_03]: This is actually from a completely different trip.
24:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I was in Gabon.
24:25
[SPEAKER_03]: we were on the water of a river and we managed to sneak up on a group of forest elephants because they just couldn't hear us because of the rushing water all around us.
24:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Whereas had we been walking they absolutely would have cleared out before we arrived because they've got a fantastic sense of hearing as well as a sense of smell.
24:44
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah it's it's quiet it's very peaceful and therefore
24:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, and humans have used waterways to get through difficult areas for, I mean, thousands of years, which is pretty common.
25:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think it's considerably faster on this river to be on the water?
25:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think it's considerably faster on this river to be on the water?
25:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, yes, when it's clear and it's open and there are no waterfalls or rapids, you can absolutely cover more distance on a river than you could hiking.
25:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think on a few days towards the end of the trip when things widened out and we had less issues with rapids.
25:31
[SPEAKER_03]: we could cover 60, 70 kilometers in a day and considering how much equipment we had with us, that wouldn't have been possible hiking.
25:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I think our one day hiking record was about 45 kilometers, so I'm like that, and that was starting in the dark and ending in the dark.
25:46
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, you can go a lot quicker, which means you can see more diverse landscapes and just a lot more of a country.
25:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean, we saw a century of transect of Madagascar that stretched.
25:59
[SPEAKER_03]: 750 plus kilometers.
26:01
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no chance we could have hiked that.
26:05
[SPEAKER_01]: What an amazing life experience.
26:09
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you just mentioned waterfalls and rapids and things like that.
26:15
[SPEAKER_01]: What is this named rock river like?
26:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it pretty tough?
26:19
[SPEAKER_03]: it's very tough.
26:20
[SPEAKER_03]: So we were trying to do our due diligence beforehand and map out the river and where all the obstacles were going to be.
26:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Unfortunately we were relying on very old satellite photography because it's just it's not a place that satellites frequently go over and take detailed photos because there's absolutely no commercial interest in that part of the world.
26:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So a lot of the photographs we were looking at were taken in the sort of late 80s early 90s.
26:43
[SPEAKER_03]: and you can imagine how much a river changes over the course of 30 years.
26:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So we mapped it out as best we could, but we've quickly found out once we got on the ground, that it's not a particularly suitable river for kayaking on, especially not source to see.
27:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So our initial estimates were, I think we thought,
27:05
[SPEAKER_03]: worst case scenario we're going to have to portage with the clapper kayak for about 60 to 100 kilometers and that was we thought us being conservative so we're like okay we'll we'll kayak about 650k and we'll do the last 100 or so carrying it which is bad enough because that's a very heavy kayak that's a lot that's a lot in the end we ended up carrying it for nearly 300
27:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So 300 kilometers, that's 180 miles.
27:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It's ridiculous.
27:40
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not good.
27:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And also, it's not, we were not carrying it, you know, a long flat sections of grassland.
27:46
[SPEAKER_03]: We had to carry it through that mountain range in the center of the country, because that was the section with...
27:51
[SPEAKER_03]: massive gorgeous that we couldn't navigate.
27:53
[SPEAKER_03]: It was the section with the waterfalls.
27:55
[SPEAKER_03]: It's also section with a canyon that our chief guide max called Crocodile Canyon and he was quite insistent that we shouldn't go into Crocodile Canyon.
28:05
[SPEAKER_03]: We took him at his word and decided we're going to portage around Crocodile Canyon.
28:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
28:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't imagine.
28:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had other people gone down this river before.
28:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm sure that parts of it had been.
28:19
[SPEAKER_01]: But so you were first.
28:21
[SPEAKER_03]: So yes, that's one of the things that kind of drew me to that river.
28:26
[SPEAKER_03]: So there are sections on the lower mangoc that have been done.
28:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's actually very good for tourism.
28:32
[SPEAKER_03]: It's nice and flat.
28:32
[SPEAKER_03]: It's wide.
28:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Not too many dangerous animals.
28:36
[SPEAKER_03]: There's road access.
28:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So I do actually know an organization that runs a reserve down there.
28:42
[SPEAKER_03]: They take people out on three-day kayaking trips and they do camping and things like that.
28:47
[SPEAKER_03]: But the upper sections and the Matziatra especially.
28:51
[SPEAKER_03]: as far as we could see no one's ever done it, even our guide who had taken people specifically for white water rafting in certain sections of the middle of the river said no one, no one goes up to the start, why would they?
29:03
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no reason to go away, so we were as far as we are aware the first people to do this.
29:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, so you really are boat scouting the whole way.
29:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, for instance, you mentioned the gorge and having to go around that over through the mountains, but how did you even know where to get out?
29:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so we had to rely a lot on local advice.
29:27
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's a lot of fishermen on the river, and obviously they move up and down.
29:33
[SPEAKER_03]: For some of those communities, the river is the only way of moving goods up and down because there's no roads in some of those sections.
29:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So we had to ask, basically, you saw anyone who looked like they knew or anyone in a boat you said, what's, is there a hazard down there?
29:47
[SPEAKER_03]: How far can you get?
29:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Where's the next village?
29:49
[SPEAKER_03]: How far have you been?
29:50
[SPEAKER_03]: You always have to establish that
29:52
[SPEAKER_03]: We always want to make sure that they're giving you their first hand experience, rather not that I heard.
29:59
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, it was a lot of guess work, but also a lot of just relying on local information networks because they knew a lot better than we did.
30:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds very, very adventurous.
30:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It really does.
30:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I think...
30:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to assume too much.
30:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I've had dreams of going over the waterfall.
30:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know was there, you know.
30:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a terror for me.
30:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So I can't imagine what it's like to go down or river without knowing hardly anything about it.
30:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It had to be something else.
30:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's certainly a risk.
30:32
[SPEAKER_03]: We tried to mitigate risk as much as possible beforehand, but there was a large element of unknown when it came to this.
30:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, we did err on the side of caution.
30:42
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, we are in a five and a half meter long kayak.
30:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's filled with a lot of gear.
30:49
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's heavy, it's slow, it's not very maneuverable.
30:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, by the time you see a problem, you can't sort of quickly nip around it.
30:57
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to be very, very careful that you don't drift yourself into trouble because by then it's too late.
31:03
[SPEAKER_03]: So we did a lot of stopping, getting out, walking up to the obstacles, assessing a lot of discussion as to whether we were going to go through or whether we're going to actually get out carrier or even break it down and carry it along the distance.
31:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it was at certain points, it was very slow progress, but we were deliberately like that to be careful.
31:25
[SPEAKER_01]: It sounds like fun.
31:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you ever wish that you had two smaller boats instead of the one bigger one?
31:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so we, Ben and I, having done the Madagascar trip, it was never really a discussion whether we were going to use a clever or not.
31:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Back in 2016, when my friend Alfe and I were doing the Angola expedition, I think the main reason we used a clever was because he already had one and it was in country.
31:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we did a bit of research because people were saying you should use pack rafts, for example, it would be a lot easier.
31:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And we looked into that and then they were like, oh, maybe you want hard shell kayaks and in the end the clapper Through share luck happened to be the right tool for the job because we needed something that had a high-carrying capacity For all of the gear it makes more sense for you to break down a larger boat and split it between two
32:18
[SPEAKER_03]: then you each try to carry your own boat just from a power to weight ratio, sort of thing.
32:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, the pack rafts, they're just not sturdy enough, they can't carry enough, they're too slow in terms of a top speed, especially if there's a headwind.
32:33
[SPEAKER_03]: They just weren't suitable for the job, although they would have been a dream to portage.
32:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, for sure.
32:40
[SPEAKER_03]: We did think about that every time we were carrying our big heavy boat.
32:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
32:45
[SPEAKER_01]: What about food?
32:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such a simple question, but what did you eat when you re-supplied what was available?
32:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So, for the Madagascar trip, we took in all of the food that we required for the entirety of the trip and there was no assumption that we were going to be able to get any useful food by the side of the river on the river, that kind of thing.
33:17
[SPEAKER_03]: mountaineering dehydrated rations.
33:20
[SPEAKER_03]: So what we ended up having were ultra high calorie dehydrated rations that designed for people who are climbing up mountains and very sensitive to the weight that they have on their backs.
33:31
[SPEAKER_03]: which is also our situation, basically.
33:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, we're a weird jamboree of sort of dehydrated, spaghetti bolognese and chicken teak and masala and very, very, very, so that, to be honest, it's actually really delicious, it's really nice stuff.
33:46
[SPEAKER_03]: But unfortunately for us, it just wasn't enough calories.
33:49
[SPEAKER_03]: It was physically impossible to carry the amount of calories that we needed, because we're working from the minute we wake up to the evening, burning thousands of calories every day.
34:00
[SPEAKER_03]: We just weren't getting enough in.
34:02
[SPEAKER_03]: So we were constantly hungry.
34:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And dinner time was one of the most exciting times of the day because we're just desperate to rehydrate one of those ration packs and start eating it.
34:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Were you able to supplement the food with foods along the way at all?
34:18
[SPEAKER_03]: No, not really.
34:20
[SPEAKER_03]: We were very surprised, actually.
34:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And a lot of the villages that we went to, they had nothing to sell us.
34:26
[SPEAKER_03]: But nothing, they were, they were subsistence farmers and they did not have any to sell like, it wasn't a negotiating tactic.
34:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, we had money with us.
34:35
[SPEAKER_03]: People were just like, I'm sorry, I can't spare any of this food.
34:39
[SPEAKER_03]: This is for us.
34:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So, so no, we would have loved to be able to buy especially carbohydrates.
34:45
[SPEAKER_03]: If we had more access to yams or plantains or sweet potato, something like that, it would have been fantastic because we were craving
34:54
[SPEAKER_03]: I can probably count on one hand the amount of times we managed to buy food from communities as we were as we were going along.
35:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Obviously, when we passed through towns on the rare occasion we passed through towns, then it was a little bit more promising.
35:10
[SPEAKER_03]: But on the multiple isolated sections, there was no food going and neither of us are particularly good fishermen, so we didn't even bother trying that.
35:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I would have been looking for some fish.
35:24
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when I've had to do extended trips with dehydrated foods like that, or freeze dried foods, I've always tried to take a small container of olive oil at least because you can pour a little olive oil on it, get some more calories or, you know, they're all sorts of tricks.
35:39
[SPEAKER_01]: One of my favorites was, you mix regular butter with peanut butter.
35:45
[SPEAKER_01]: You add enough water to make it swallowable, right?
35:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe even feasible and then,
35:50
[SPEAKER_01]: you can put some molasses or syrup or jelly or something like that in it and me and you can get a lot of calories in a very compact space, but I still find myself on those extended trips losing weight.
36:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't seem like it's any way, you know, they're just no weighted to keep up with it.
36:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh no, so we both lost about 10 kilos each, what's that about
36:19
[SPEAKER_03]: and I didn't really have I didn't really have 10 kilos to spare so I wasn't looking too good.
36:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Wasn't looking too good on the finish line but we put it back on pretty quickly once we finished so that was fine.
36:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Now that's that's amazing so this is not a luxury trip anybody the ones to go on a luxury trip and and enjoy fine dining that this is probably not it.
36:41
[SPEAKER_03]: No, this was hard work from start to finish, and from a purely psychological point of view, it was hard the whole way because of the uncertainty.
36:51
[SPEAKER_03]: We were never quite sure how far we're going to have to go that day.
36:55
[SPEAKER_03]: We're never quite sure whether this is going to be a kayaking day or whether we're going to have to break it down and start carrying more portage.
37:01
[SPEAKER_03]: We both weren't big fans of the portage, as you can imagine.
37:05
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so hard, hard, hard, hard.
37:08
[SPEAKER_01]: all the way through.
37:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's not your easy little float trip.
37:12
[SPEAKER_01]: But the funny thing about Colorado River trips is that often people will get the rafts.
37:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you have the raft, then you can have the huge ice chest.
37:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you have the huge ice chest, then you can have the ice and you can have the stakes and you can have the drinks and that that sounds amazing.
37:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I need to try that one day.
37:31
[SPEAKER_03]: That sounds quite luxurious.
37:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, food is a big deal on these sorts of expeditions and quite often we end up just getting buy, I think, you know, it's just so darn heavy, you know?
37:44
[SPEAKER_03]: You're right, even if you do how to write it, and especially we're already carrying the clever, so we are, we were really micromanaging how much extra weight was going in those bags.
37:53
[SPEAKER_03]: We were, you know, down to the gram, weighing everything and talking about what is the
38:01
[SPEAKER_03]: especially as we're probably going to have to carry it over some very uneven terrain.
38:06
[SPEAKER_01]: What was your number one concern when you when you set out on the trip?
38:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Probably getting injured in a very isolated location and the medical evacuation routes were extremely limited especially at the beginning of the trip.
38:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So once we got up into the mountain range
38:30
[SPEAKER_03]: That was one of the most isolated places I've ever been in in my life.
38:35
[SPEAKER_03]: We originally budgeted for three or four days worth of hiking in those mountains and ended up taking nine.
38:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, wow.
38:44
[SPEAKER_03]: And for that time, we saw hardly another human being because there's no reason to go up there.
38:50
[SPEAKER_03]: There is, I guess, the land up there is not good for farming.
38:54
[SPEAKER_03]: There's almost no water.
38:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So you wouldn't be able to irrigate your crops and people don't take their animals up there because there's no water, it's very, very hot.
39:03
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's just a sort of quite, I mean, it's beautiful, but it's extremely isolated.
39:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was thinking if we got injured up there, like we've got a serious problem because beyond getting a helicopter, I have no idea how you would have gone out there.
39:18
[SPEAKER_03]: You had to be carried out a bit, basically.
39:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, sounds like a very punishing environment.
39:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it was tough, so we had some guides with us, so at that time we had a guy called me who was from the area and he managed to rope in a couple of other guys, three guys, actually Rodea, Resosia and Ramam, they were also from the area.
39:42
[SPEAKER_03]: but they had never been through that mountain range.
39:45
[SPEAKER_03]: They had always stayed to the east of the mountain range.
39:47
[SPEAKER_03]: There was no reason for them to go up into those mountains.
39:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And they knew what was on the other side of the mountains because it could be reached via a road, sort of did a huge dog leg down to the bottom of the island and back up.
40:01
[SPEAKER_03]: But they didn't know of anyone who'd ever cut through like that, but good on them, they volunteered to take us and help us out and it's very lucky that they did because without them we absolutely would have run out of water up there.
40:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So obviously when we're on the river, we can drink out the river.
40:20
[SPEAKER_03]: When we're not on the river, we have to carry our water.
40:22
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a water is very heavy.
40:24
[SPEAKER_03]: There's only so much water you can carry.
40:26
[SPEAKER_03]: and then you need to start relying on finding more.
40:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And we, Ben and I have no idea where to find it, whereas these guys could look at the landscape and they, I don't know, what it is that they saw, but they could say, over there, I think we'll be all right, this way less so, but I have no idea to this day how they did it, but just when we were running out, they'd always get us to the next bog or little trickle of water that we hadn't seen.
40:52
[SPEAKER_03]: That's one thing.
40:55
[SPEAKER_01]: ah well take notes uh that that's a good skill to have that's crazy that's a fantastic skill to have yeah i wish they could have told me lime they were amazing sure wow
41:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm going to speak as an experienced Westerner, often when people think about doing adventures in places like Madagascar.
41:16
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't know what to expect in terms of dangerous, like venomous animals.
41:23
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't know what to expect in terms of disease risk.
41:28
[SPEAKER_01]: how to find water that's fit for drinking, how to mitigate the risk of getting things like cholera or yellow fever or dip theory, you know, a lot of the things that we don't worry too much about in the West.
41:41
[SPEAKER_01]: How have you, I guess, gained a skill set to know what to expect in that in that regard?
41:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I've lived and worked on the continent for almost 20 years and I've traveled to
41:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think over that time you just kind of pick it up, I am vaccinated against all the things that it is possible to be vaccinated against when it comes to exotic diseases.
42:08
[SPEAKER_03]: I actually recently an Indonesia had the new Dengave vaccine that they have, Dengave being a particularly horrible mosquito-borne disease that you definitely don't want to get, especially in an isolated location.
42:19
[SPEAKER_03]: As soon as they bring out a malaria vaccine, I will be first in the queue for that one.
42:23
[SPEAKER_03]: But up until that point I have on expeditions like this we take the antibiotic Doxycycline as a profile access to to stop you being to stop you getting it basically Not great to be taking antibiotics for a month at a time, but it's also not great to get malaria in the middle of nowhere So I think you have to balance those two things out.
42:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my word.
42:47
[SPEAKER_01]: We're there a lot of mosquitoes
42:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, they were absolutely.
42:50
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you're hanging out by a river.
42:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Mosquitoes love rivers.
42:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So, yeah, if you're camping by the river, you are getting bit and constantly.
42:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So, we were always very aware.
43:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Whenever I sort of give talks about these trips, especially in schools, the students, always ask about the dangerous animals.
43:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And what immediately pops into their mind is,
43:11
[SPEAKER_03]: crocodiles, lions, these sorts of exotic phoena.
43:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And I always tell them the most dangerous animal is the mosquito, but that's always the biggest source of stress for us because they carry so many diseases, some of which we cannot mitigate against.
43:28
[SPEAKER_03]: We just need to hope we don't happen to get bitten by one of these mosquitoes.
43:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, so making big smoky fires in the evening,
43:35
[SPEAKER_03]: making sure we sort of cover it up when we're sat around in the evenings, make sure we're zipped into the tent and night, that kind of thing, take in the prophylaxis when you can.
43:44
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I think there are lots of websites where you can go and find out what is what, fun and exotic diseases are on offer in a particular country and then you can work out whether you can actually do something about it or not.
44:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, and offer.
44:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
44:05
[SPEAKER_03]: I love that.
44:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And for Madagascar actually, one positive thing, again, this is to do with the evolutionary branch of having split off from mainland Africa and developed differently.
44:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, there is not a single venomous anything in Madagascar.
44:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Really?
44:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, which is perfect.
44:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, I love the fact there's no hippos.
44:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I love the fact that we're not at risk of getting bitten by a venomous snake while we're camping or stepping on a scorpion or something like that or a weird spider getting in your turn.
44:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, no idea why that is, but we've got, there's no venomous anything in Madagascar.
44:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
44:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Good to know.
44:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there would be a lot of people who would consider all the pathology, you know, all the disease risk.
44:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And might just say, is it worth it?
44:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you address that for us?
44:57
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's absolutely worth it.
45:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I think, yeah, there are things you can do to mitigate those risks.
45:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Det is fantastic.
45:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it doesn't smell good, but it'll certainly keep the mosquitoes off you.
45:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Especially for a short trip, if you're going as a tourist for a week or two,
45:13
[SPEAKER_03]: You can absolutely take Dr. Cyclone for a week or two or you could even get slightly fancier anti-malarials like Malarone, those kinds of things, which are not antibiotics and have far less side effects.
45:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I think it's not as big a deal as some people make here.
45:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think it has to be a big part of your planning if you don't want it to be.
45:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so here's a question and then we'll leave this subject behind.
45:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But last question in this, in this genre of questions, if you go to the World Health Organization, he look up an area in Africa or maybe Madagascar, different places.
45:50
[SPEAKER_01]: It just says, stay out of fresh water.
45:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't get in it.
45:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
45:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
45:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm always hesitant because you're kayaking in the water.
46:00
[SPEAKER_01]: you're going to be in the water, you're drinking from the river, of course you'd be purifying it, but still, whatever you see those sorts of warnings, just don't get in the water.
46:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you address that for us?
46:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I've been getting in the water for however many years, and I've had no issues, although I I'll add the caveat on the Madagascar trip, then got Shisto, all bill hardsier, and that
46:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Bill Hart's here is not a very nice parasite.
46:34
[SPEAKER_03]: It's basically a parasitic snail and it burrows into your legs or feet as you're in the water And it sort of migrates through your body and then it lays eggs in your internal organs and obviously through this reproduction cycle It greatly upsets your immune system and makes you very very sick and it just keeps going on a sort of three weeks cycle
46:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't know how it is that Ben managed to get it and I didn't, because we were trudging through the same disgusting mind and we're in the same river for the whole time.
47:02
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, partway through the trip Ben just got really, really sick.
47:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And we could not work out what it was.
47:07
[SPEAKER_03]: I could see actually all of the red marks on his legs, but we just assumed it was mosquito bites because we were both getting bit and bit by mosquitoes.
47:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Quite frequently.
47:18
[SPEAKER_03]: But then he sort of a few days after getting very sick, he made him a
47:24
[SPEAKER_03]: We assumed maybe he just upset his stomach through some dirty water, or sunstroke, or whatever, but it actually turned out that that's just the natural cycle.
47:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So your body gets very upset when they first go in, immune system calms down while they lay their eggs and whatever, and then when the eggs hatch, your immune system freaks out again, and luckily by the time.
47:46
[SPEAKER_03]: We finished the expedition before Ben got to the hatching stage.
47:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So he managed to, as a preventative measure, one of our guides said we had to take these essentially D-worming, D-parasite tablets at the end to kill anything that might have got into our systems.
48:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So we both did, and I took the tablets and fell completely fine, because obviously,
48:08
[SPEAKER_03]: they just went straight through and didn't do anything.
48:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Ben took the tablets and again his immune system freaked out because suddenly there's a bunch of like parasised dying inside him and he had a whole other day of feeling atrocious and then that's when we realised we'll wait a minute.
48:23
[SPEAKER_03]: He must have had something like billharts here because otherwise he wouldn't be having this reaction to these tablets.
48:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Amazing.
48:31
[SPEAKER_01]: That's adventure on the whole other level of Oscar, I think.
48:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it was pretty rough and I felt bad for Ben because there was quite a short window between us finishing and I was actually having to.
48:43
[SPEAKER_03]: go to the airport and leave the country.
48:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of our very important final jobs we had to do was in the capital and Tananariv, we went to meet our official sponsor.
48:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So we were sponsored by an NGO called Vision Madagascar, which is a Malagassi organization.
49:00
[SPEAKER_03]: They do great work and the head of Vision Madagascar, a gentleman called Mr Zuzar Buka, we went from meeting with him basically.
49:09
[SPEAKER_03]: We haven't actually met him face to face at the beginning of the expedition, so we wanted to go and say thanks for believing us, thanks for your support and he also wanted to talk to us about a couple of sort of things he wanted to do after the expedition of finish.
49:22
[SPEAKER_03]: We're both sat there in a boardroom, listening politely and interacting, and I'm sort of looking at Ben, and he's just sat there like sheet white, sweating.
49:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Just feeling awful.
49:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, and I said to him, I said, whatever you do, do not throw up in this boardroom, like that is not a good look, like if anything's sick, like, say you've gotta go and walk out, because, yeah, this wouldn't be a good impression to make on the sponsors, but he managed to hold it together.
49:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, hey, do you have a story for us about something that happened on this trip that was just completely not the way you would have wanted it to go, you know, when things weren't sideways on you?
50:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we had quite a few sideways experiences.
50:09
[SPEAKER_03]: We had a very frustrating interaction with a local
50:21
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's particularly frustrating because that was one of the first times we'd actually reached a large settlement and so we've got out the river we were actually going to camp like
50:33
[SPEAKER_03]: in town that night and we were actually able to go and get some food like buy some food in the market and so we were it was supposed to be a day of relaxing with our guides and it kind of didn't go that way because this local official just took an interest in us and he was he was drinking in a bar he was already drunk by the time we went into the bar and he just kind of latched onto us yeah and just
50:56
[SPEAKER_03]: He's quite aggressive so he was telling us in French and he was telling the guides in Malagasi that we needed to pay him money because he's a very important man and yada yada yada and it's just really not what you want to be dealing with when you're exhausted and you just want to have some food and and relax and so we sort of took ourselves away from him.
51:16
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, apologetic like sorry we got to go we we left and walked across town to go somewhere else and he followed us so like an hour later he came and found us and then continued berating us and saying how he's going to get the police to arrest us if we don't pay him money and you know it was all it was all deeply frustrating but at the same time there's a certain comic element to it because he was he was trying to justify he said we had to pay for it
51:45
[SPEAKER_03]: was that we had to pay a snake tax.
51:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'll never forget that phrase, a snake tax, because it may be laugh.
51:51
[SPEAKER_03]: I was like, what do you mean snake tax?
51:52
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, oh, foreigners come here to borrow, and we have like an endemic species called the borrower Python, and it only lives here in Madagascar.
52:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And foreigners like you come here, and you steal the Python, so you can go and sell them.
52:05
[SPEAKER_03]: abroad and make money.
52:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And so you have to pay a tax so that we can protect the snakes.
52:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're just looking at him like, if this is, I don't know if this is true, if there is this python, but this is the most imaginative shake down I've ever heard like we have had to take to like, specifically a snake conservation tax to you, you with their fish, so yeah.
52:27
[SPEAKER_03]: But it all ended rather happily actually because, um,
52:31
[SPEAKER_03]: in the end, a police chief who we had bumped into weeks prior on the side of the river.
52:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And he'd asked us at the time, he was like, what are you guys doing?
52:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And we told him, where we're kayaking the whole river and he's just like, no, you're not.
52:46
[SPEAKER_03]: That's ridiculous.
52:48
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't believe it.
52:49
[SPEAKER_03]: There's too far.
52:50
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't do that.
52:51
[SPEAKER_03]: But who's very nice?
52:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And we say goodbye.
52:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And we thought, obviously, that's the last time we're ever going to see that guy.
52:57
[SPEAKER_03]: But anyway, he appeared in this restaurant where we were getting berated by this guy.
53:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And it turns out that he had family in this town.
53:06
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was such a coincidence.
53:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And he kind of walked in.
53:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And because he's quite a senior police official, he
53:12
[SPEAKER_03]: The body language and the attitude of this other official changed instantly when he realized that we were sort of quite because he came and sat, we invited him, we said, I do want to join us for lunch, come and sit with us and obviously he did, and then then this official changed the story immediately and was like, I can't be saying this in front of this senior police chief basically.
53:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and then we actually explained to the police chief, we're like, oh,
53:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Could you talk us through the snake tax and like whether we have to pay it or not please it?
53:44
[SPEAKER_03]: He was just sat in a laughing.
53:45
[SPEAKER_03]: He's like, no, no, no, like you're not paying us snake tax, like this this guy needs to go away.
53:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So, so yeah, it was like a snake oil tax to me.
53:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
53:55
[SPEAKER_03]: But it was an hours frustration getting to that point.
53:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my word.
54:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The vast majority of people around the world won't do that to you.
54:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But they're just a few, you know?
54:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
54:09
[SPEAKER_03]: So I was a little bit reluctant to include any of that, both in the documentary film and them in the book because you're right, that is not representative of how we were treated by the people of Madagascar.
54:21
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not even representative of how we were treated by the officials and security forces of Madagascar.
54:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Everyone else we met, whether they were a fisherman by the side of the river or whether they were a police officer or a John Darwin
54:38
[SPEAKER_03]: They were super supportive, super friendly, you know, they helped us in all sorts of different ways, whether it was letting us camp in their village or whether it was giving us directions and advice.
54:49
[SPEAKER_03]: That kind of thing, we felt very welcome and very safe the whole time.
54:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So he was literally the only person we met where that wasn't the case.
54:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's why it stood out so much.
55:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it makes a good story.
55:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so shy, I mean, we can look back on it in a laugh now, although we weren't really laughing much at the time.
55:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
55:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So how can people find your book?
55:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, they can go to our website, Kai, the main gock, or main goki, M-A-N-G-O-K-Y.
55:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's all out there.
55:22
[SPEAKER_03]: But also, I think it's the book is linked under the video on YouTube.
55:27
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you just look up Kai, the main goki on YouTube, you can find it there.
55:31
[SPEAKER_03]: And we are actually donating 25% of the profits from the book to a charity that we raised money for with the expedition.
55:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's an educational charity called our kids, our future managasca.
55:44
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think the expedition itself raised like $45,000 for them.
55:49
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're very enthusiastic about continuing to raise money for them through telling the story.
55:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, please please please
55:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So the name of the book is kayak them and gaki.
56:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, kayak them and gaki.
56:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's supposed to see a long Madagascar's longest river.
56:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Or that should have a little asterisk and say portage somewhere as well, I think, because I'm portage.
56:13
[SPEAKER_03]: kayak big.
56:14
[SPEAKER_03]: kayak, portag, portag, portag, the Bangkok.
56:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
56:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
56:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And the name of your website is at the same.
56:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, it's just kayak them and gaki.com.
56:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
56:25
[SPEAKER_01]: kayak the mingoc, okay with a y. Mingoc with a y.
56:29
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, fantastic.
56:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it sounds like a world-class adventure.
56:35
[SPEAKER_01]: What is your, just to kind of close this out?
56:37
[SPEAKER_01]: What is one of your favorite memories from that trip?
56:40
[SPEAKER_01]: One that you're going to, you're going to treasure for the rest of your life.
56:45
[SPEAKER_03]: I think once we got over the mountain range and to the mangoc proper, I mean at the top of the mountains as we saw the river for the first time, that really stood out to me.
56:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Firstly because it was the end of a traumatic nine days of carrying an extremely heavy kayak over a mountain range.
57:04
[SPEAKER_03]: But also we arrived in the evening, it's sunset and we just saw this beautiful river.
57:09
[SPEAKER_03]: It was wide, it was fast flowing, there were no rapids, there were no waterfalls, and we could see all along the river, plumes of smoke going up as each village was lighting their fire to cook their dinner.
57:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And all of those things just represented a massive change from what we just done for the previous three weeks, so we knew they're from that point onwards.
57:33
[SPEAKER_03]: No more potage, no more waterfalls, no more rapids, no more isolation, and we were so excited about that.
57:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was visually beautiful, but also what it represented really stood out to Ben and I.
57:46
[SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.
57:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And what a beautiful word picture you just painted for us.
57:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I can see it, you know, with a smoke coming up and the river reflecting the evening light.
57:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's great.
57:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's fantastic.
58:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Oscar, thank you very much for sharing this with us.
58:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I thoroughly enjoyed that.
58:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And once again, the book is kayak the main gawk with Hawaii and then Gaki.
58:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a film on YouTube, same name, the website, same name.
58:16
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how people can learn more.
58:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And good on you, man.
58:19
[SPEAKER_01]: It just sounds like an amazing time.
58:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, thank you very much.
58:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, I look forward to the next adventure.
58:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, would you have the next adventure let us know so that we can find out what you're up to because these are not small things.
58:34
[SPEAKER_01]: This is awesome sauce.
58:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So everyone out there, and kayaking rivers in Madagascar, it just sounds so romantic that I know it's really hard, but that's why it makes adventure real, right?
58:47
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why it makes adventure real.
58:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever your adventure is, do get out there and have some fun.