Deserts of the Heart

A sole-searing, soul-baring trek through the unforgiving Masoala desert in Madagascar helps quell some of the restlessness that wracks our hearts

There were times, trudging across Madagascar’s Masoala peninsula, that I had to blink back tears. My straps cut grooves in my shoulders; my thighs screamed for relief. Socks left my soles so raw that I had to psyche myself for every step. Then the tears would flow, seemingly on their own. Tears of anger, frustration and pain. Without doubt, this was the hardest thing I had done. And the tears only seemed to mock me and my romantic notions about the trip. When I’d arrive at some tiny village at nightfall, I’d fall into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. Next day, pain again.

And yet, and yet… when it was over, when I look back after all these years, I know. Given a chance, I would leap to it once again: sweating, hurting, weeping—but trudging along determinedly just the same. Because I remember what drove me. I remember the exhilaration. I remember, like a precious gift.

I went to Masoala after several years of a vague, growing disquiet. Through school and university, I didn’t do too badly, but not too well either: always, just enough to get by. At work, I was recognised for something one year; laid off the next; found another job, boom, just like that. Aimless that way, I muddled through five jobs in eight years. It just came easy.

Maybe too easy. Nothing in my life really pushed me; I wasn’t pushing myself.

And that was making me uneasy. Restless. Something inside, or someone, kept murmuring: you’re comfortable, but where’s the passion? The excellence? The determination? Yes, where’s the exhilaration?

I think that’s why I found myself in Masoala: struggling 150 km across that remote peninsula; alone like never before, loved ones oceans, and several days to the nearest telephone, away. Physically, emotionally, it was tougher than anything I’d done. But I craved this: surmount a challenge; prove to myself that it didn’t always have to be easy.

I had to exorcise, once and for all, that unease. It took me several years to understand what my hike across Masoala had done for me. And it all came into focus when I read John Krakauer’s Into the Wild. In it, Krakauer traces what happened to Chris McCandless, a young man who disappeared after he graduated from Emory University in 1990. In 1992, McCandless was found dead in Alaska’s Denali National Park.

It’s an utterly compelling book, most of all because of the parallels Krakauer sees, in his own life, to McCandless’s tragedy. Seeking to escape from the comfortable existence that might easily have been his, Krakauer had deliberately sought out dangerous, difficult challenges throughout his life. And at one point in Into the Wild, he writes: “As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards. I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals… [But] I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.”

I brooded over those words for a long time, memories of Masoala flooding back. I never did have the intensity or the heedlessness of McCandless or Krakauer; nor the intellect and the ideals. Hard as that trek was, it wasn’t remotely as difficult or dangerous as the experiences McCandless and Krakauer had had. So I don’t want to overdo the comparisons.

But I can’t help making them. I think I know what Krakauer meant when he wrote of the “agitation of the soul”. I think I felt some of it too, before Madagascar and Masoala. Through the gut-wrenching loneliness, I answered a lot of questions. Maybe I even proved myself to myself. Yet, here’s the funny thing: I never have rid myself of the unease. I learned that it cannot, and should not, be exorcised. I understood how it would fling me into a challenge, drive me till I overcame it. I came to welcome unease, to appreciate how it fuels so much.

The restlessness of the soul. Like an old buddy murmuring those words to me. After Masoala, I’m a believer.

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