I was lucky enough to travel around Madagascar for three weeks last summer. I wrote my first draft of this post as I was sitting on my second of three flights back to State College, 36000 feet in the air somewhere north of Quebec. PJ and I then experienced the very rapid transition from the misery of a cancelled flight to the joy of being bumped up to one 5 hours sooner than we had planned.
I remember being really excited to be almost home, but simultaneously wishing I had spent months in Madagascar instead of weeks. I hope that you’ll get where I’m coming from after reading the next few posts, but the long and short of it is that Madagascar is so incredibly different from anything I’ve ever experienced before, that by the time I was truly understanding what was happening around me, we were flying away...
I remember being really excited to be almost home, but simultaneously wishing I had spent months in Madagascar instead of weeks. I hope that you’ll get where I’m coming from after reading the next few posts, but the long and short of it is that Madagascar is so incredibly different from anything I’ve ever experienced before, that by the time I was truly understanding what was happening around me, we were flying away...
My Madagascar trip was from July 22nd to August 12th, but realistically started about 3-4 days before when I started packing. Our itinerary was fairly complex, with several location changes, meetings, camping, equipment needs, etc. (see schedule above). As such, packing was a fairly complicated process. I brought one gigantic suitcase, my hiking backpack, and our super cool handheld 3D scanner, an Artec Space Spider. Click the button below to check out the scanner specs, and be excited for lots of 3D gifs coming your way soon!
My friends and colleagues were kind enough to share their packing lists with me, and what I gathered from each of these were a few common trends: 1) bring a mini pharmacy with you, because you never know what you’ll need in the field; 2) limit clothing, and wash along the way to save valuable space; 3) solar panels are your best friend for fieldwork in the southwestern Malagasy winter months. I’ve attached my packing list here so you can see what I brought along, but have learned a thing or two during my travels so check out the Things To Bring Next Time list at the end of the post as well.
My friends and colleagues were kind enough to share their packing lists with me, and what I gathered from each of these were a few common trends: 1) bring a mini pharmacy with you, because you never know what you’ll need in the field; 2) limit clothing, and wash along the way to save valuable space; 3) solar panels are your best friend for fieldwork in the southwestern Malagasy winter months. I’ve attached my packing list here so you can see what I brought along, but have learned a thing or two during my travels so check out the Things To Bring Next Time list at the end of the post as well.
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As you can probably tell from the schedule, my main task in Madagascar was to scan as much as I could with our Spider. At the University in Antananarivo, a Perry lab undergraduate researcher and I worked together to gather 3D scan data from a bunch of subfossil and modern elements, mainly skulls from as many different species and sites as we had time for. For Heritiana Randrianatoandro (a Malagasy graduate student affiliated with our lab), we concentrated a lot of our efforts on Archaeolemur skulls (see image on left for one of our first scanning subjects). For PJ, a bunch of giant aye-aye (Daubentonia robusta) finger bones and the like. And for me, sifakas, both at Antananarivo [Tana] and at Beza Mahafaly (see my Beza post later). |
The problem with traveling for three weeks straight is maneuverability: you want to be able to carry all of your own stuff, and if you cannot carry it, then don’t bother bringing it along. For the 3D scanning, I needed to bring the hardcore Spider laptop and mouse (which must weigh at least five pounds haha), the Spider batteries, cables, charging equipment (solar panel, car battery inverter, surge protector), a turntable for spinning the scanned objects, poster putty to hold the objects in place, at least one notebook for a record of everything scanned, and the calibration equipment. For camping, I needed to bring a tent, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, pillow of some kind, towel, and hiking boots for walking around the spiny forest. Already this is getting to be a rather long list, and I haven’t even counted everything needed for travel pharma, clothing, hygiene, and food (see packing list if you dare). My suitcase was grossly overweight on the flight out, but the attendant was kind enough to let me go without paying the overweight fee. At least I was warm at night while camping - PJ packed a little too lightly for that leg of our journey :P
Hmm, I just realized how long this post is getting and all I’ve done is rant about packing and the overall schedule. I have so many Madagascar things to talk about! How about I cut myself off with my list of Things To Bring Next Time and a neat little teaser gallery of pictures from the drives? Yeah, I’d say that’s a good compromise. Next post I’ll go into more detail about my week in Tana, with a bunch of pretty pictures of bones and things. Until next Wednesday, my friends! | things to bring next time:
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