IN SEARCH OF A SURREAL VISION

Detail of mineral deposits at the geysers.

A sense of purpose

From the moment I first saw pictures of the mineral deposits, I knew I had to go there. I was flicking through a magazine in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, wondering which parts of this massive island to explore, when the answer jumped out at me.

The bright yellow, orange and red mineral deposits, which formed around a set of geysers about 100 kilometres west of the capital, appeared to be the surreal vision of an inspired sculptor. I had never seen anything like it before, and the fact that I could find no reference to the geysers in the guide books only served to increase my interest. I made a copy of the page giving directions and started plotting the trip.

Things fall into place

Back at the guest house where I was staying, I quizzed Pierre, the young French manager who had lived in Madagascar a few years, about the geysers. He had never heard of them, but became interested when I told him they were in the region of Lac Itosy, a picturesque lake among the hills.

Pierre had a four-wheel-drive vehicle, which would be necessary for such a trip. Knowing he was into photography like myself, I showed him the smudged black-and-white photocopy of the strange patterns that had attracted me. "When shall we go?" he asked.

On the road

We set out early the next morning with Jacques, a friend of Pierre's, and Celine, Jacques' Malagasy wife. I made no attempt to follow the logic of our curious twisting and turning route out of town. I knew already that it would take months or years to find one's way around this city. It's all steep, cobbled streets and hairpin bends, massive potholes and dead ends.

Pierre nudged the Nissan Patrol round or through craters in the road, squeezing past a throng of humanity going nowhere in particular. A dull, leaden sky pressed down, making those people hauling great loads seem to stoop even lower.

Eventually we unravelled ourselves from the city's tentacles and started to see a few unplanted paddy fields and bare hills. We were on Route Nationale 1, one of the country's principal highways, but it was in terrible condition, and we lurched and swerved our way across its pitted surface at little more than walking pace. A hundred kilometres began to appear a wild expectation for a day trip.

Buying avocados from a roadside stall.

Roving the Red Island

Then, little by little, almost imperceptibly, the craters became less deep and more widely spaced, until after about 50 kilometres we were managing to chug along at a reasonable speed. Patches of blue sky broke up the gloomy clouds, and where the sun shone through the earth glowed a deep rust. Madagascar is often referred to as 'the Red Island', and out in the countryside the reason is evident.

Zebu pull carts in the countryside.

As the road undulated and curved across the plateau, the view shifted constantly. A strong breeze blew away the remaining clouds and the sunlight injected the landscape with rich hues of green (grass and fresh-planted paddy), red (the earth and houses) and blue (sky). The plateau's elevation of over 1000 metres gives the quality of light, on a clear day at least, a magical quality.

Now that we had got a good distance from the capital, we rarely saw any other forms of motorised transport. Small, quaint wagons pulled by zebu (hump-backed oxen) were as common as the occasional car, motorbike or truck. Children near the capital had paid us little attention. Now in each village we passed, they dropped their games to jump up and down screaming "Vazar, vazar!" (foreigner, foreigner!).

An attractive diversion

At Analavory, we turned left from the main road to head for Ampefy on the west shore of Lac Itosy. My photocopy said that the geysers were a 'dizaine' kilometres from Ampefy. The term confused me, but Pierre explained that it meant maybe ten, maybe twelve. That didn't sound bad, but the text didn't say in which direction. Celine came to the rescue. She had been there before, she thought, and was sure the geysers were further down the west coast of the lake.

Flowering tobacco plants. Tobacco drying on racks.

The countryside was spectacular - fields of flowering tobacco, tall stands of maize, papaya and avocado trees heavy with fruit. The houses were simple but clean and attractive, and their inhabitants greeted us with broad smiles. After a dozen kilometres, we were heading inland from the lake and Celine didn't look so sure.

Visit to a murky puddle

We stopped to ask some locals, who seemed to know what we were talking about. They led us on foot through orchards and fields down towards the lake, then stopped triumphantly by a murky puddle producing occasional bubbles.

I began to despair as we sweated back to the car in the early afternoon sun. Without knowing which direction to take from Ampefy, it might take a week scouring the countryside to find the geysers.

On the right track

Fortunately, the owner of a small hotel in Ampefy put us right. The geysers were nowhere near there as it turned out; we should have gone straight ahead through Analavory and then branched north, the opposite direction out of town. This we duly did, but soon found ourselves on an extremely rough track, made up of loose jagged rocks, which in places doubled as a stream.

Progress was slow, and when we had covered many more than the supposed nine kilometres, we turned back, frustrated to see the sun slipping towards the horizon. We tried one more track that branched off from the main one, and after bumping over a couple of fields, let out shouts of glee to see water spouting a few hundred metres ahead.

Wading the river

The track led us down to the riverbank, where our joy evaporated when we saw that the geysers were on the opposite bank of a swift-flowing river. Determined to see and photograph those beautiful patterns after such an exhausting search, Pierre and I held cameras and tripods over our heads and slithered our way across the slimy rocks on the riverbed while the current tugged at our waists.

The sense of achievement and anticipation as our toes squelched through the mud on the other side was a heady mix. After hours of thumping up and down, wrong turns and backtracking, we had all of fifteen minutes to enjoy the brilliant colours before the sun disappeared. There were three intermittently-spouting geysers, one of which was already in the shade.

A surreal vision in the sun's dying rays.

I turned my attention to a multi-coloured mound that I had seen in the magazine. It was more than two metres high, and the bands of colours ranged from a rich mustard to glaring scarlet, with various shades of orange in between.

Inspecting the surreal vision

On close inspection, the deposits formed delicate, wave-like patterns which I tried to capture on film, though the unpredictable spouting of the geysers made this a hazardous task.

I ducked in and out, shielding my lens and trying to frame an interesting portion and release the shutter before being sprayed with the sticky liquid. Surprisingly, the water was not scalding to the touch, suggesting that it came up from far underground and cooled on the way up.

In some places the deposits look like coral polyps. Water tumbles over wave-shaped deposits.

The second geyser spouted less frequently, but attained heights of two or three metres. A sill of deposits had formed around the spout, a fascinating array of beige, purple and green. In parts the deposits formed like coral polyps, a miniature forest sprouting from a smoothly-curved boulder.

As the sun slipped over the hilltop, the colours lost their richness, but I kept clicking away, camera mounted on tripod, trying to visualise how these long exposures would look, with frothy waters tumbling over wave-shaped deposits. Soon, however, the light became too dim to record anything on film and we had to wade back across the angry torrent in the gathering gloom.

The long road home

When we rolled back into Analavory after dark, the sand in our clothes and sticky deposits on our skin made us feel as if we had been on the road for weeks. We hadn't eaten all day and squeezed into a tiny 'hotely' (cheap restaurant) lit by a soft gas lamp. We devoured platefuls of fish, pork and rice, surrounded by an audience of wide-eyed kids.

Maybe we were the first foreigners to stop by for a while, or maybe they were puzzled by the strange, sparkling texture of our skin, and by our hair, which stood up starched as if we had seen a ghost.

Our bellies full, we set off through a star-studded night towards the capital, some thousands of potholes away, with our minds full of the surreal visions we had witnessed at the geysers.