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Double Vision A shipwreck in paradise shows a glimpse of hell. By Susan Zakin I am in deep islandhood here in Madagascar, a place that reaches the sea too soon and must turn back on itself. Here the most prevalent disease is not cholera or malaria but double vision. I eat in restaurants with Europeans who perch on the rim of a world of red dirt and spirits but act as if they are in a Paris café. I travel to a smaller island. In this paradise of palm trees, brutality and neglect swim like crocodiles under a calm surface of sky and ocean. Madagascar is an island, of course, the fourth-largest in the world. But I am way beyond that. A few days ago, I got on a 1972 De Haviland plane on its way to Ile Sainte Marie, an island off the east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The plane was rattling and roaring, about to take off, when suddenly the engine stopped. Oops, sorry. A bit of fuel leaking onto the tarmac. A lake, actually. Not to worry. A wad of chewing gum in the appropriate aeronautical crevice and we are off to the new Madagascar tourist destination, the one that hasn't been discovered yet, or at least not too egregiously. After the pilot allays our remaining fears with a landing so smooth it provokes applause, I toss myself and my bulletproof, overpriced, ergonomically disastrous yuppie Patagonia gros baggage onto a pirogue going to an even smaller island called Nosy Nato. Island living is not for claustrophobes. This is especially true here. Nosy Nato (Nosy is Malagasy for island) is so small you can walk around it in a day. You will still have time for lunch, swimming and an afternoon preprandial beaker of Three Horses, the national, and apparently only, beer. This place may not be paradise, but it sure does a good imitation, with its palm trees, powdery sand beaches, fluffy clouds, and all around us, the Indian Ocean, so bizarrely turquoise it looks like a doctored photo. After the sun falls, I look around and take off my clothes. I slide into this harmless-looking ocean, which is the temperature of warm milk. The absence of shock when I get into the water reminds me of how the Sea of Cortez can seem like a barbed-wire fence sometimes with its stinging rays and puffer fish. I miss it, even crappy Rocky Point with its metastasizing condos. This is so infantile and whiny that I don't mention it to my companions the next day. A Swiss couple I met on the plane named Jeannette and Thomas, who both speak English almost as well as I do, have shown up at my hotel. We've decided to walk around the island to search for lemurs. Our Three Stooges approach to this quest consists of walking rather aimlessly up the beach and stopping for a swim now and then. When the coast gets too rocky, we barge inland, trampling the back yards of Malagasy families whose chickens warn them of our approach. After the odd bit of garbled French, they send us on trails to the beach. I can't say what it is about this certain path. But we know it is the right one. We follow it to the abandoned Hotel Les Lemuriens, its tame lemurs left behind in the forest. A French family and their Malagasy guides skirt the trees. We trail along behind them. Soon the lemurs appear. They are everything that these animals are supposed to be, mythological creatures like gryphons or the Sphinx, part dog, part raccoon, part fox, part monkey, part anteater. They hang from the trees by their tails, they leap around, they play with each other like sharp-toothed puppies. They lack the intelligent, haunted, disturbingly human look that you see in golden tamarinds, for instance, or chimps. Madagascar, which separated itself from the rest of the world 160 million years ago, is the only place they still exist. Everywhere else, the smarter, tougher primates, like us, outcompeted them. In Madagascar, there are no native newts, toads, cobras, pythons, cats or ungulates. The mongoose is the only naturally occurring predator for lemurs. "There are hundreds and hundreds of things that don't occur in Madagascar and that's almost more interesting than what is here," says Frank Hawkins, a British scientist who has been working here for 15 years. "This is a snapshot of a world that's very long gone." Double vision. The guide thrusts a banana toward the lemurs, who hesitatingly approach. I want to say something, stop them, but, of course, it's too late for that. These lemurs have become the family dog. On the way back, we stop for lunch at a collection of thatched huts. The French owner, a Gauguin wannabe with the requisite Malagasy girlfriend, tells us about the ferry that went down the week before with 40 people aboard. Double vision again. The sea here only looks benign. These islands were once a haven for pirates and brigands, Hole in the Wall gangs who hid behind turquoise surf. The ferry was loaded down with an oversized cargo of cement. "Two lifejackets, only two on that boat," says Gauguin Jr. "No radio. Even if they had a ..." he pauses. "Portable." This is the French word for cell phone. Mora, mora is the phrase here that means mañana. Nobody called in an alarm until the next morning. By that time, 36 people had drowned. Government officials doled out $120 to the family of each victim. Rumors flew. The captain survived because he snagged one of the two life jackets. The cement company owner is a high government official. Maybe true, maybe not. What everyone knows for sure is that there is no enforcement of laws under the corrupt, brutal regime here. You hand the equivalent of five bucks U.S. to a crooked official and your troubles are over. Unless you take the wrong boat. Welcome to Paradise. Mora, mora.
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