Free Pink Boots and a Machete by Mireya Mayor

realized I had been pickpocketed. Luckily, a woman witnessed the crime and screamed at the perpetrator, madly waving her broom and insisting he return my money until he did. I thanked her profusely, completely in awe of her ability to rescue me while carrying a dozen live geese in a woven basket on her head.
    With my money back in my possession and tucked into the very bottom of my backpack, I needed to figure out how to convert the local currency. In my pocket I carried a huge clump of cash, bills far too big to fit in an American wallet, and in denominations starting in the thousands. I had no idea how much a 5,000-unit bill was worth. To make matters more confusing, coins and banknotes were denominated in both Malagasy francs and ariary, with the subunit of the ariary, the iraimbilanja, worth one-fifth of an ariary and equal to a franc. The trouble was, besides the difficulty in telling the difference between the two types of bills, posted prices werearbitrarily given in either ariary or francs. Yes, it was that confusing. With ariary worth five times more than the currency marked Malagasy francs (MFG), on more than one occasion I paid 25,000 MFG when I thought I was paying 5,000.
    One of the more stressful tasks in the market is bargaining—unless, of course, you’ve been trained by the best. And Mima was the best. I had many years under my belt of watching my grandmother score unbeatable prices in Miami flea markets. No salesman at any level of experience was a match for her bargaining skills, and I felt sure I had inherited her shopping genes. But to bargain in Madagascar you have to know what the local price is. Is the equivalent of a dollar too much to pay for a kilo of tomatoes? Am I being taken? Should I try to get my tomatoes for 80 cents? Is it really worth pretending to walk away to save 20 cents? Mima would say yes, so that’s what I did. I came to learn that paying a third of the price you were quoted as a foreigner was fair—more than the locals would pay but fair. When I learned that the average Malagasy yearly income is $200 per family, I felt guilty arguing for those 20 cents (or 437 ariary/2,200 MFG) and made it a point to overpay for my tomatoes thereafter.
    I thought for sure that once we were in country, getting to the field site would be the easy part. However, I discovered that only two trucks in the entire town of Diego Suarez could make the off-road, muddy trek, and both those vehicles were sitting on cement blocks. “The roads are impassable without a good vehicle,” said the hotel owner, who also rented the cars and manned the restaurant. “I may be able to sort you out a truck,but it won’t be ready for another couple of days.” It wasn’t ideal, but it’s not like we could just dial up the local Hertz. We agreed to wait. With that he brought us Madagascar’s beer of choice, Three Horses. Seeing as how I wasn’t going anywhere, I downed several, finding it curious that every bottle tasted different. Perhaps it came down to which horse.
    A week later we were jumping into the back of an old four-wheel drive loaded down with camping gear and enough food to last us a month. The driver took us to the local office of the National Association for the Management of Protected Areas (ANGAP), where we picked up a guide and presented our permits. There we met a short, fit Malagasy ranger in his late 20s, who would lead me and Dr. Handsome to the lemurs and make sure we didn’t make off with any. In truth, he was our babysitter. We then set off for the forest along a dirt road barely wide enough for a bike, getting stuck numerous times en route and trashing the area’s last good truck.
    After several hours we arrived at a spot where fallen trees prevented the vehicle from going farther, so we jumped out and unloaded our gear. We began walking. Where to exactly I had no real clue, but I was happy to be on my way there.
    For days on end we trekked, set