Staring contest
Let me start this post by saying that I really don’t approve these kind of spectator sports that involve animals fighting with each other. It’s a sad practice that has never appealed to me. However, I’ve seen it in many countries and Malagasy people (the people living in Madagascar) seem to have a particular affinity for cockfighting. I didn’t know this until I was writing this post, but apparently cockfighting has been around for quite a few hundreds of years, with the first mention in 1607 in a book by George Wilson.
I always find it interesting how much people get into it and every time I’m on the sidelines of an event like this I love photographing the crowd that gathers around as they are always so involved in the fight that they don’t even notice the camera.
Africa, Madagascar
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Video :: Starry night above Madagascar
While writing my previous post about the small village of Antsiraraka I remembered that while having dinner there I left my camera for about two hours to take a series of shots of a huge baobab tree against the beautiful night sky with the idea of putting these together in a short timelapse.
I’ve been working quite a bit on timelapses lately (both on a couple of commercial projects and on a personal project – more on that in a later post), but this one is a very short video, with no sound -Â I just wanted to share with you how cool these baobab trees look against the night sky.
Africa, Madagascar
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Appreciating what you have
One thing I always love about traveling is that it puts things in perspective. This was especially true today when I had one of those days that you wish you forget very quickly and the only thing that probably helped was the browsing of my images from Madagascar remembering all the little villages we passed through during the two weeks spent there. We all have problems we deal with on a daily basis but when traveling to places where less fortunate people live you really start to appreciate what you have.
This was the case in the small village of Antsiraraka, where we arrived after a 3 day pirogue trip down the Tsiribihina River and a 30 minute Zebu cart ride (Zebu is the local cow in Madagascar). The village is really basic, but the people we encountered there were full of joy always ready to try to talk to us even though we couldn’t understand much of what they were saying. The accommodation was really basic and yet it somehow felt right to only have electricity from a generator for only a couple of hours while we ate. Because not having electricity just makes you look up at the sky and see thousands of stars!
As you’ve probably guessed already the image below was taken while riding in the Zebu cart and listening to the guy directing his animals while crossing this dry river bed.
Africa, Madagascar
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