All places do, of course. But we’re here to talk about Tana.
(Hello, welcome to my blog. I talk about Madagascar a lot. It’s a bit of a thing.)
It was one of those things that I knew intellectually, but really felt in my bones (and olfactory nerves?) when I stepped off the plane on my second visit in 2018. I knew that smell. It was like a small homecoming. All the nerves and anxiety I’d had about the trip just melted away.
Caveat here: My nose is weird, and I’m very bad at picking out specific scents. So, I’m not going to try to describe it, because there would just be lots of question marks and blank spaces and weird guesses.
It smells like this… Does that help?
But here’s the point to me writing this:
I FOUND ANOTHER PLACE THAT SMELLS LIKE MADAGASCAR.
Wait what.
This is a hiking trail on Kipp Mountain in the Adirondack Mountains, in New York State. I was there recently on vacation for the first time, and this trail was recommended to us by our lovely host (thanks, Dave). It’s a nice challenging climb, but fairly short, and we get near the top, just below the summit, and…
whiff
Holy moley. I literally stopped walking. My brain couldn’t process it. It basically shortcircuited and started screeching MADAGASCAR-IS-NOT-HERE-WHAT-IS-THIS over and over again. Turns out, there is a small slice of elevation on this mountain that smalls exactly exactly like Tana does. Just a slice—a few feet higher, and it disappeared into your normal pine forest upstate New York mountains scent.
Look at this little part of the trail, though… There’s red soil.
Just like in Madagascar.
I’m sure it had something to do with the iron content in the soil, plus the faint hint of charcoal from people grilling on a holiday summer weekend. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t smiling for the rest of the day, because this new random mountain smelled like one of the places that feels like home to me.