lanirano - no water

Back in Fort Dauphin, we had a weekend off and our fabulous guides took us to Hoevatra for a night. To get there we had to pirogue across the Lanirano lake and then hike across the hill to the tiny but achingly beautiful bay.

Claude - true jack of all trades - cooked dinner for us, pasta with fresh caught sea snails (from the bay) and cheese. Cheese is a big deal - not easy to come by. The sea snails were lovely, and not just as a change from beans and rice, beans and rice, beans and rice.

The pirogue trip was hard work, but the scenery was beautiful. We each had to take turns rowing (or bailing out!) and the trip took around 2 hours not counting the stop at ship wreck bay, to see, and climb on, the rusting metal hulks on the shore.

The lake, and the nearby settlement (which is where Azafady has the Fort Dauphin base camp for volunteers) is called Lanirano after an old legend:

Where the lake is today there was once a village. A traveller came past one day and as he had been walking for many hours and days, he was thristy. He knocked on the door of the first house he came to and asked for water; but was told the family had no water to spare. He knocked on the door of the second house and asked for water; but was told the family had no water to spare. He knocked on the door of the third, and forth and on, with the same answer until he came to the last and smallest house, where the family only had a cup of water left, enough to give their baby, but when the traveller asked for a drink they gave him this last cupful that they had.

The traveller thanked the family and told them to take all that they owned and go up into the hills. Then he called a curse down over the village and left.

That night it rained heavily in the hills, and the river rushed in a flood down to the sea. Meanwhile the waves lashed at the shore, driven by the wind of a storm out at sea. The village, and all who lived there, drowned. The spirits of the dead became the crocodiles who protect the lake. To this day, any descendant of the family who gave water to the thristy traveller can swim and fish in the lake without fear of harm from a crocodile.

Lanirano was part of a brackish water system, but the freshwater lake has been cut off from the salt water tidal river to provide fresh water for the Rio TInto ilmenite (iron titanium oxide) mine. The effects of the raised (and unchanging) water level, the change from brackish to fresh (and salt on the other side of the barrage) are only just starting to show, with some of the trees starting to die, and the local villages are regularly evacuated when it rains in the hills because when the river floods, it no longer goes out to sea but fills up the lake behind the barrage and floods the low laying fishing villages.