Madagascar: Smile and Wave

I just returned from a two-week trip to Madagascar with my mother. It’s hard to quantify the important lessons I learned. I think on a very successful trip, you learn in two ways. First, there are facts about the country or area you’re visiting. Then, there are also feelings or cultural norms you understand better as a result of your journey.

Madagascar: Facts

I learned 1,213 interesting facts about lemurs, chameleons and the splitting apart of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. We drove for 743 hours on roads that could also qualify as Class Five hiking trails (well, it felt like 743 hours, see note above about the difficulties of quantification). I saw 1 snake and 7 frogs in my bathroom. I visited 3 national parks. (see picture below of Cascade Falls at Amber Mountain National Park.)

I’ll write about all that in a travel recommendation post soon, I promise. (Spoiler alert: it’s not the type of place where you just hop off the plane/train and google how to get to your hotel). 

Madagascar: Feelings

The most interesting thing I walked away with was not a fact or a hotel recommendation. It was a philosophical understanding.

I call the understanding ‘Smile and Wave’

Here is how it came about:

In sub-Saharan African villages, it’s super common for groups of children to gather together and stare at tourists. In my experience, they will look until one of two things happen:


1 The tourists leave. Then, presumably, the kids just go back to playing soccer or chasing around after their siblings or whatever they were doing before.


2 The tourists smile and wave. Then, the kids break out into delighted grins and smile and wave back, talking to each other and calling out greetings to the people in front of them. 

The second reaction is obviously more gratifying. So I usually choose to smile and wave. 

The reason I call this a philosophy and not just an observation about travel: it works outside of sub-Saharan Africa as well. It even occasionally works with groups of people that are not children. 

 
I read a quote recently that said something like,

“If you’re holding a cup of coffee and someone bumps into you, the coffee spills out. Because there’s coffee inside the cup. Whenever someone or something bumps into you, whats inside spills out. Think about that when you consider how you treat people.’

As I finished the paragraph I felt two things:

1. Bad for my first reaction about how annoyed I would be if someone spilled my coffee.

2. Contemplative of what it means when I’m rude to to people.

Maybe part of the reason vacation and travel is so fun and relaxing is because I’m looking out for reasons for smile and wave. I’m going to try and practice at home, eventually working my way up to the 4:30 PM stroller crowd on 3rd Avenue. We’ll see how long I last.

Pictures of Madagascar below!

Banner photo credit: Trevor Cole