The Vanilla Isle (part 5)

The Vanilla Isle (Part 5)

The next day we drove to Toamisina, a city on the coast which is the largest port in Madagascar.  It was sunny and warm, and we spent the day negotiating pot holes, overtaking huge cumbersome trucks and stopping to take photos.  

You can see the extent of the deforestation in this photo.

But the villagers are always smiling!

Drinking young coconut water is a safe and tasty way to quench a thirst.

Generally the scenery was stunning!

The day was quite uneventful really.  In the evening Jean wanted to take us our for a drink out in Toamisina and we ended up getting pulled into drinking with some pretty insistent prostitutes.  Not wanting ‘to seem rude’ I think was mostly the reason we ended up having a drink with them (or rather, buying a drink for them) whilst they plied us with their ‘wares’.  It’s the second time we’ve seen this in Madagascar, and the second time I thought it was a sad thing to see.  Both of them went for a feel of the family jewels, and both of them discovered our money belts blocking the way!  For the best I felt. It was really hard to get away without being rude.  She kept wanting to show me how well she could smoke my cigar.  Jean was apologetic afterwards.  I viewed it as an experience really, but not one that did anything for me.  The woman with Ro was far more insistent, which was a bit more difficult for him.  I think she took a real shine to him.  Not so much fun at the time, but a good story to tell afterwards!

The next day it was blowing a gale and raining heavily.  We nicknamed the weather as Tropical Storm Deev, after a friend at home who has the unerring ability to create a monsoon out of a rainshower.  We set off up the coast towards the Vanilla country.  Slow going as the road was in an appalling state in places.  Kids try to charge you for repairing the road, although you see them in the distance larking about and only when they see you coming do they actually start doing any work.  Regular road check points, although as soon as they see us they usually wave us through.  If you want to smuggle anything in Madagascar, make sure you look like a tourist.

Our final stop before the ferry crossing to Isle Sainte Marie was in Fenerieve Est, which is one of the main towns for Vanilla and Clove production.  We were keen to buy some genuine Madagascan Vanilla from the source as a souvenir, but bizarrely you couldn’t find it in the market and Jean ended up talking to a guy who knew a guy and before we knew it we were off into the suburbs of the town, eventually meeting this guy who looked like he belonged in a gangster movie.  

But we procured our Vanilla, at a very favourable price!  It smells amazing :)

Vanilla is actually a vine which grows up other plants.  I did not know this.  Now I do.  We found a charming little bed and breakfast place overlooking the sea run by a Malagasy lady who was married to a Slovenian man.  She had her own wood fired pizza oven!

The view from our room was gorgeous, however the weather forecast was bad and Tropical Storm Deev quickly started delivering a biblical quantity of rain along with some pretty stormy looking seas.

The next morning we were due to get up early and get the ferry over to Isle Sainte Marie.  But it was not to be.  Tropical Storm Deev had caused the canceling of the ferry for at least the next two days, which meant there was no prospect of us being able to get over in time before we had to fly back.  We were disappointed, although the prospect of getting a refund on the flight was welcome as we have been chomping through our cash with alarming speed.  So we decided to stay in our little cabin for an extra night.  A passing man told us that a little island just off the coast had lemurs on it, and the locals would paddle us over there for a small fee.  I was very doubtful that there were lemurs, as the island was only about 2 hectares total, but it was something to do.

The boats are not exactly high spec, but they did the job.  You can see the island in the background.

The only thing we found, slightly as expected, were enormous spiders.

Not much else.  It was an outing!  

We discovered some dominoes at the bed and breakfast place and played three rounds of.  Ro won them all so is now very keen on the game.  We had some gorgeous fish for dinner.  I ordered it, and about 10 minutes later a man turned up from the village with his catch of fresh fish, which the owner bought and then went and cooked for us!  Yum!

The upshot of the bad weather is that we had to drive back to Antananarivo.  Quite disappointing really but we’d had a pretty fantastic time so neither of us have had our spirits dampened.  We headed back to Toamisina, had lunch, and then spent the night at Feon’ny ala, where we had stayed when we went lemur watching.  This time it was wet and foggy, which made us grateful that the time we had gone lemur watching was so hot and sunny.

The next day, on the way back to Antananarivo, we stopped off at a small animal park in the hills, and we saw more lemurs, chameleons and other indigenous fauna.  The chameleons in particular were pretty cool, mostly because the guide would feed them live grasshoppers whilst we watched at they would eye them up greedily before flicking their long, sticky tongues out snaring the unfortunate grasshoppers and gobbling them up.  Yummy.

Some crazy looking geckos with amazing, marble like eyes...

And a particularly psychedelic grasshopper - luckily this guy is not for the chameleons!

So now we’re back in Tana and I'm writing this in bed the night before we fly back to South Africa.  I'm sad to leave Madagascar.  It is truly a wonderful, inspiring, colourful, beautiful and magical place.  But it'll be good to get back to somewhere with proper roads, a telephone system that works and scaffolding that doesn't look like it belongs in the middle ages.

I hope, if you are reading this, that you have enjoyed it and that you are all safe and well and happy.  Signing off...xxx

And publishing this in Cape Town...we're not in Tana anymore! xxx

The One Phone

THE ONE PHONE

Prior to coming away traveling it occurred to me that an iPhone might not have all the necessary attributes, particularly battery life, necessary for the hardened peregrinator.  During an epic clear-out day at work, I came across an old Nokia 3210 handset at the bottom of a box.  Of course, given that these phones were designed to survive a nuclear holocaust, it worked immediately.  I remember gazing upon it lovingly and caressing its plastic surface for a while, before greedily pocketing it and looking around furtively for anyone who might've observed our prophetic union. I found another one for Ro in the same box, only it was a 'lesser' model and, during our epic adventure 'from paradise to Hellville', he lost it.  The Nokia 3210 lives on however and has been battered and bashed around over the last couple of weeks, surviving with the same fortitude and robustness that I remember from when I had one years ago.  

Since, clearly, an electronic device with this sort of longevity and reliability can only have malign intention over the future of the human race, I have named it 'The One Phone to Rule Them All'.  Oddly, even though I have seen its deadly intention, I am curiously taken by it.  It saps my inner strength but my love for it grows ever stronger. Its simple yet elegant design, epoch-spanning battery life and disarming ability to accept any SIM I introduce it to is beautiful, even if there is clearly necromancy involved. 

I have come to understand, as it weighs more and more heavily in my pocket, that my meeting with this glorious yet demonic device was fateful and that it is biding its time in my pocket, subtly altering our travelling plans to guide itself back to the source of all evil in the universe, at which point it will be rejoined in unholy union with its creator and the world will be plunged into an a new age of darkness, ravaged with hellfire, sulphurous damnation and the screams of the doomed!  At the end of days, The One Phone will activate and rule over all other mobile phones, and our love of convenient, wireless telecommunications will be the conduit for judgement day!  You have been warned.

I seek to understand its complex and maleficent ways.  Recently I have noticed that sometimes a human-like visage forms on its screen.  There is a superficial air of innocence about it as it watches me.  Seemingly it is whistling out of the corner of its mouth (see photo).  But I can see past its beguilingly pleasantries!  It sees our every move!  All the time it plots our downfall!  And yet I cannot let it go. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that I am bound to The One Phone and my fate is inextricably interwoven within its vile electronic sorcery.  Repent all ye who read this!  The One Phone to Rule Them All has awoken!  And in the darkness it will bind us all!

THE VANILLA ISLE (Part 4)

THE VANILLA ISLE (Part 4)

I woke the next day feeling a *lot* better.  A great relief for me as I had been a bit worried I had something nasty.  I think in the end it was just traveller's diarrhoea and a day with no food.  Jean came to see us and we decided to cancel our trip west.  He was a bit reticent about it since he had seen me unwell, and since Ro wasn't feeling too great either that morning he thought it best we did something a little tamer.  So we decided on a trip to the vanilla coast, via Andasibe national park for some lemur watching, and ending up on the island of Sainte Marie, before flying back to Tana for our flight back to South Africa.  The trip was going to cost a fair amount by Malagasy standards, as at a basic level we were hiring Jean as our tour guide.  This is less of a problem for me than for Ro, but he agreed readily to Jean's quote and we spent an entertaining time trying to withdraw enough Malagasy Ariary notes to try and pay him.  The cash machines only let you draw 40 notes at a time so we had to make 6 visits in succession.  We were multi-millionaires and had only a few hundred quid in our pockets.  This country really needs to sort its currency out (amongst quite a few other basics that need sorting too).  

After lots of faffing (nothing in Madagascar happens without at least 4 or 5 unnecessary steps to achieve it) we eventually set off on our tour, with our own driver in a car that actually had seat belts and an engine that didn't sound like a Stomp performance, at about 4pm.  We wended our way down one of the good roads in Madagascar (the RN2), although even this is regularly potholed.  As the evening set in and we entered into the Malagasy countryside we could smell burning wood, and entered in to a thick fog of wood smoke.  People were illegally burning the forest, making way for crop production.  This, along with logging, is principally responsible for most of the disappearance of Madagascar's forests and rain forests.  The political instability over the years has not helped, and this resource-rich land has and is being slowly stripped of its assets for almost no return to the indigenous people, who get by on almost nothing.  So it's no surprise, in this context, to smell the forest burning.  How are people to feed themselves?  Make a living?  

Of course the answer to this question is that if the rich mineral deposits and remaining rain forests were properly managed by the government there would be plenty to base the construction of a viable economy on.  But the government don't, and since the coup in 2009 all international aid has been suspended.  The roads are crumbling, the people live in poverty, forest continues to burn and foreign mining companies have moved in to claim the mineral resources with no government requirement that profits be invested back into the local communities.  What doesn't leave Madagascar seems to end up in the military junta's pockets.  Quite depressing.  So it was good to pull in to the Feon'ny Ala (voice of the forest) lodge in Andasibe national park after a few hours of perilous pot-hole avoidance.  This represents one of the few initiatives in Madagascar where the benefits from the project are clearly being ploughed back into the local area.  We were shown to our cabin and slept to the noise of unfamiliar bird and animal calls echoing through the forest.

LEMUR WATCHING

We woke to the view of the rainforest from our cabin.

It was cloudy but quickly the sun burnt through.  We had breakfast overlooking the forest.  

We were whisked off just down the road to the entrance to Andasibe national park.  The great god Ciprofloxacin had entirely cleared up my gut problems and I felt great.  Western medicine.  You really can't beat it sometimes.  Just sometimes, mind.

We were introduced to our very friendly guide (called Rojer) and shortly we were off into the rainforest, looking for lemurs!

And find them we did!  We were very lucky I think as within 10 minutes we saw one sauntering along the path towards us.  It stopped, calmly looked us up and down, then turned its behind towards us and sauntered away.

We followed!  

These are photos of common brown lemurs, but we were lucky enough to find the rare Indri lemur, and find a whole family group- Mum, Dad, baby and two teenagers, all in a group in a tree!

We stood there for about half an hour!  Entrancing!  The little baby was about a month and a half old according to our guide, and spends most of its time attached to its mother’s front.  The young will stay with the mother for about 6 years.  Indri lemurs live from 25-45 years, only have one baby and the mother’s will only have one baby every threeish years.  It is not hard to see why these species are threatened.

We trekked on through the forest, seeing other lemurs too.  They keep to the middle of the canopy, leaping adeptly from branch to branch.  They were completely unphased by our presence, looking down at us with quizzical expressions, probably seeing us as a nuisance, which of course we were.

I think we both came away from that trip feeling exhilarated!  I certainly did.  It was beautiful to see such rare and noble animals, especially a family, existing in their natural habitat.  I felt humbled, sad that so much of their habitat has been destroyed, and happy that this place exists, where the lemurs can live in relative peace, and the local community is benefitted in a way that means they don’t have to destroy their surrounding environment.  If Madagascar is to thrive, this is one of the ways it will do it.

Later that day, Jean took us for a walk around the local village in the Andasibe national park.  By Malagasy standards this is a pretty advanced place, with electricity, a school, a football pitch, basic healthcare, even a tiny internet cafe.  All this is funded from the proceeds coming from the National Park.  Nothing from the government.

The life here is so palpable, so vibrant.  In their poverty the people seem to shine through.  They help each other, help themselves and smile as they do it.  They make life seem so simple, which of course it is.  The kids love it if you take pictures of them with your camera and then show them.  They crowd around and point and whoop and laugh and squeal with delight.  It is a truly lovely be able to give them so much pleasure with so little effort!

After wandering through the village for an hour it was dusk, and it was time for the second part of our tour through the national park, this time looking for nocturnal lemurs.  I didn’t actually expect to see any night lemurs, and nor did we.  Our guide had absolutely amazing vision and spotted a few with his flashlight, but by the time I had focussed where he was they had gone.  We did see some cool chamaeleons and tiny frogs though!

THE VANILLA ISLE (PART 3) or FROM PARADISE TO HELLVILLE (AND BACK AGAIN)

THE VANILLA ISLE (PART 3) or FROM PARADISE TO HELLVILLE (AND BACK AGAIN)

From our discussions with our new friend Jean, we had decided to take him up on an offer of a tour of the west of Madagascar, including a trip on a boat down to the coast.  So we visited the Air Madagascar offices the next day to book our flight back from Nosy Be that evening.  We spent the rest of the day on Andilana beach and we were sad when it came to the evening and we had to get into our taxi to the airport.  I vowed to return here one day to myself.  

The taxi was a beaten up old Renault 5 and the taxi driver had a teenage girl in the front with him who he seemed to be showing off to.  He was quite aggressive about the fare and I decided not to argue since we had a plane to catch.  He started throwing his badly maintained car around the corners of the one, very windy road that went from Andilana to the airport.  There were no seat belts.  As we rounded one bend at breakneck speed I could see he had seriously misjudged it.  It was one of those instances where if he had held his nerve and not slammed on the brakes then he would have probably been ok, but he slammed on the brakes.  The car skidded and the left front side slammed into some concrete at the side of the road.  In a moment that will live with me for a while I expect, I saw the girl in front of me (no seatbelt either), sail through the front of the car and collide with the driver as the car bounced off the side of the road.  We came to a halt in the middle of the road.  The girl was ok.  So was the driver.  We had been jammed up with our luggage in the back and the luggage, it seemed, prevented us from moving far when the car hit.  I was fine.  Ro had a bruise on his left leg, but otherwise was ok too.  We were shocked though.  I was annoyed with the driver for being so reckless (but didn't think expressing this would help) and relieved that everyone was ok.  But what to do now?  It was dark, we were in the middle of nowhere and there was no passing traffic.  The plane was in an hour and a half.  We looked at the damage and his driver side tyre was scraping against the back of the wheel arch, and seemed to be slowly deflating.  The car started again but the the wheel was so out of alignment that it was going nowhere.  I felt a bit selfish feeling predominantly concerned about getting our flight, but then I also felt that it was not my fault that the car was a wreck.  The taxi driver, to give him his credit, did get on his mobile and phoned a friend.  About 45 minutes passed and this guy turned up, concluded the same as we had that the car was going nowhere and dutifully drove us off to the airport.  

25 minutes to take off we arrived to an airport that was as dead as any I have ever seen.  No people, no lights, no sign of life at all.  No flight certainly.  The icing on the cake.  I felt a bit like Krusty the Clown in the Simpsons in one of his depressed sigh moments.  We asked the taxi driver to drive us back to the capital, Hellville (which is so named after Admiral De Hell rather than being descriptive of the place itself, although there isn't much for visitors there) and we had to book into a noisy, nasty guesthouse overlooking the main road.  The taxi driver tried to criminally overcharge us for the taxi drive and I almost lost my cool in a fairly major way at this point.  I think he might have realised this actually as I expressed my indignation, and he knocked off a significant amount.  It was the end of a pretty hellish evening and I was in no mood for people taking advantage of our misfortune.  We tried to blank out our room by applying ear plugs and eye shades before sarcophagising ourselves in our silk sleeping sacs on our very dirty bed. I slept fitfully.

I woke feeling a bit unwell next day and had the runs.  The previous day I had received an answer phone message on my mobile (we have bought local SIM cards), but Madagascar being Madagascar the top up cards weren't working on my phone so we couldn't access it.  We bought some more top cards and tried them in my iPhone.  This worked and I then listened to a restless Malagasy lady from Air Madagascar telling me the flight last night was cancelled.  No shit.  But then it seemed to say it was rescheduled for 10:30 this morning.  It was 8:30.  We rushed into the nearest taxi.  Another mistake.  This was an even older Renault 5.  It required hot-wiring to start it and, even more to our disquiet, the fuel tank consisted of a water bottle with a fuel hose running out of it next to the passenger's leg in the front.  Nice and safe.  I thought Bob Crow could've done with a drive around the island a few times in it actually.  It might have had the decency to blow up.  The car kept stalling and cutting out.  I was stressed.  Finally it cut out completely and the driver jumped out, produced an old rag from somewhere and rushed over to a nearby shack where he persuaded the people sitting inside to let him dunk the rag in a barrel of water.  He then trotted back to the car, opened the bonnet and clasped this sodden rag over some part of the engine, before sealing it shut with the bonnet and trying again.  The car started and whatever he had done seemed to do the trick as we then made it to the airport without major problems.

No plane though.  Dead airport.  Again.  Eventually I managed to ascertain the plane is in fact scheduled for 6pm. To be fair this was because I and my could-do-better French had misunderstood the answer phone message.  Another Krusty style sigh.  It was a nice day so we decided to just wait it out at the airport.  I was beginning to feel more ill, and fell into a listless sleep after snacking briefly on a few Doritos and a bottle of water.  It was all we had.  6 hours later the Air Madagascar staff turned up and it looked like the flight was actually going to run.  Whether we would get on was another matter, and added to which I had managed to mislay the tickets.  Happily they were able to trace our booking and we waited with baited breath in the departure lounge.  An hour or so later than scheduled a bigger plane than expected touched down and we boarded.  I was feeling really ill by this point- fevers and chills probably compounded by lack of food.  Two glasses of Air Mad supplied coke didn't help.  I passed out twice on the plane and remembered thinking as my brain metabolism faltered for the first time that this is what it must be like in the first stages of dying.  This wasn’t an entirely self-generated morbid thought as I had been reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which tends to go on about such things.  As I remember it the place I briefly occupied was rather beautiful (just like the book suggests it is).  Anyway, I came to with Ro trying to rouse me and looking very concerned.  I was sweating, pale and my heart was racing.  I felt better for a while then it happened again as we were landing.  I wondered if had malaria or something else nasty.  As a doctor one tends to catastrophize about such things.  Ro helped me off the plane and retrieved our bags.  I am very grateful to him for helping me otherwise it could’ve been a lot more difficult.  It underlines why it’s good to travel with someone.  We were met by Jean, who could see I was unwell.  He had brought a driver with him (another lifesaver).  He took us back to the hotel we had stayed in before.  Thankfully they had a room.  I felt very weak but managed to eat something, stuck myself on a three day course of Ciprofloxacin from Dr Jim's self-prescribed pharmacopoeia pharmageddon that occupies a small yet significant proportion of my bag, then collapsed into bed and slept like the dead for 12 hours.  It had been a pretty taxing 36 hours.

I guess, writing this in retrospect (I am much better now btw :)), that this illustrates something I remember from traveling before, and that's how lows and highs juxtapose themselves often with little in-between.  Compared to our comfy lives in London we have less to 'buffer' our existence here and went from the paradise of Andilana to the hell of our return to Tana with giddying speed. But really, it is both the excitement and the fear that come with this that make the traveling experience what it is, and worth doing.  We've only been gone a little over a week and it feels like we've experienced more in the time we've left than I would normally experience in a couple of years.  Sometimes I feel so cosseted by my western lifestyle.  Along with all the risk and randomness seems often to go all the emotion- the excitement, the fear, the trepidation and tremulousness of not really knowing what is going to happen in the next 10 minutes, still less the next day.  But that same emotion makes me feel more alive.  Maybe it’s the threat of death in all its guises that makes life worth living, and puts the other existential trifles that I otherwise have time to dwell on in London into perspective.

Oddly enough I have no photos of the past 24 hours so here's one of the sunset at Andilana.  It's better to remember the good times :)

The Vanilla Isle (part 2)

THE VANILLA ISLE (PART 2)

Today we are off to Nosy Sakatia, which is an even more remote island off the already quite remote island of Nosy Be.  To get there you have to persuade someone to take you (there aren't any scheduled services).  This isn't a problem in itself, as every second person we met claimed to offer magical snorkelling/diving trips to this or that island.  The problem is more who to trust to actually get you there and back.  For better or worse we ended up succumbing to a trustworthy seeming chap who approached us near our hotel.  He promised, in dulcet tones, a taxi, a boat, snorkelling, lunch, more snorkelling and return by late afternoon.  Given that we had to give him half the money up front the day before, there was a quite a big degree of trust on our part, although Malagasy are famously trustworthy people.  It is 'fady' to be dishonest and I would say that my experience of the people bears this out.  They are charming and friendly and honest.  

And indeed he turned up the next day at the agreed time and we trotted off to the beach where his friend had the boat to take us across to Nosy Sakatia.  I guess it helps in a place like this to be fluent in the language, which in this instance would be Malagasy although everyone we knew spoke good French too.  My French is very rusty, although I've felt it returning a bit as I've been forced to use it.  It's been quite a good experience actually, but the spin off is that whilst I am happy to try and get by in faltering Francais, it by no means translates into a firm understanding on my part of what's actually being said, which probably underlay our experience.  The taxi driver handed us over to his friend with the boat, who dutifully ferried us over the water to Nosy Sakatia.  The problem came when he deposited us on the island and then got back on his boat and sped off.  I had thought he had said he was returning, which I think he did eventually, but an hour went past and there was no sign of anyone.  Eventually we decided that perhaps something had gone wrong, and headed around the bay towards the Sakatia Lodge, which is the one hotel on the island.  On the way we met a loquacious but completely unintelligible Malagasy man who stank of stale booze and who followed us around to the hotel.  When we got there we eventually met the owner of the place, a South African guy called Jose who spoke English, French, Italian and probably more besides.  He thought we'd probably been ripped off.  He offered to lend us snorkelling gear for free, which was really pretty good of him!  Snorkelling is awesome in warm water, better still with pretty fish and coral to look at, better still with an underwater camera to photograph it with.  

I think in actuality that the coral here is not terribly healthy.  It is such a delicate thing, and when you see a speedboat gun its 150hp motor and zoom straight over the patch of water where you know it is, and you imagine that happening time and time again, it is easy to understand why it degenerates.  Nevertheless we saw some stunning coral and the camera did itself proud.

I forget the name of this fish, but it lives in the anenome and will attack you if you get too near.  

Clouds of little fish mingle in the coral, often seeming to form colonies around particular crops.  They retreat inside if you get too near, and re-emerge when you move back.

Beautiful colours

We spent about two or three hours snorkelling before the tide started to come in and we thought we should probably head in.  We were both quite cold.  However as we returned to the shallows nature provided her own jacuzzi with water that was creeping in over the sun-baked sand and forming a natural hot bath.  It was by far and away the warmest sea I have ever been in.  I lay back in the shallows and felt like I was in a flotation tank, but with the sun warm on my chest.  Truly beautiful.  We had some lunch at the Sakatia Lodge and then spent the rest of the afternoon in the deck chairs by the beach.  Jose organised a boat to take us back to the beach where we came from on Nosy Be, and there we found our taxi dutifully waiting for us.  This made me think that they had not tried to rip us off, and it was more just a misunderstanding.  We chalked it up to experience.  Anyway we had had a brilliant day!

THE VANILLA ISLE - Part 1

Tana is quite run down.  The city sign, with one letter having fallen off, is a good representation of this.  The one hostel in the city is full so we check into a budget hotel, which actually feels luxurious since it has hot water, a comfy bed and a little sunny courtyard where you can sit.  It costs about £10 a night.  Huge spiders spin golden webs between the fronds of unfamiliar plants.  The sunlight is bright and clear.  We even have wifi!  Such infrastructure I had not expected, although I learn later that the cyclones that so regularly devastate the island are not felt so strongly in the capital, more affecting the north and south.  We set off for a walk, and are engulfed almost immediately into the chaos of city life.  Cars and carts weave about the streets, intermingling with crowds of people.  Everyone seems to have something to do.  Pleasant and noxious smells intermingle whilst fetid water runs through the rubbish in the sewers running just below our feet.  We walk through a market.  You can seemingly get anything here.  It reminds me a bit of the New Covent Garden market in London.  Vegetables and cheap flip-flops are being sold next to sub-woofers and amplifiers.  Whilst we seem to be the only tourists in the village, we are not initially bothered much by people.  This doesn't last though.  By the end of our stay I'd say there was an average entourage of about 10-20 people in our wake at any one time, all at different stages of trying to sell things to us.  Kids begging, people selling vanilla, post cards, strange musical instruments, wooden boxes, cigarettes, anything really.  The problem with such things is that if you buy anything 20 more people will engulf you looking for a sale.  I give a kid my soda and he runs off laughing.  Everyone is pretty friendly with lots of smiles.  I don't feel unsafe, but sometimes the decay and the poverty gets to me.  It gets dark quickly here and we end up ducking into a more up brow looking middle-Eastern themed bar/restaurant where we eat, drink, smoke shisha and chat for a while.  The local beer (three horses) is good, and cheap.  We wander back through the cool night air.  We are both knackered and fall asleep quickly.

We sleep late into the morning.  Both of us have been exhausted since arriving in Joburg.  Travelling is tiring.  We have breakfast in a little bar on the main central drag- L'Avenue De L'Independence.  A man tries to sell us a copy of a French newspaper supplement.  I explain we are English and he wanders off, only to return with a copy of the Herald Tribune which he tries to sell us.  My French doesn't run to explaining that I don't want to read the news whilst I am away, so we just tell him no thank you.  He saunters off, only to return with a copy of The Economist, and then Time magazine.  You have to admire him for his enterprise and persistence, but unfortunately he has not picked a winner this time.  Eventually he gets bored, only to be replaced by another man trying to sell us first Vanilla, then cigarettes and then weed.  The latter is the only thing I am tempted to actually buy.  You end up feeling quite pestered by sellers.  It is not so much that they are too insistent or even unfriendly, more that when one finishes, another seems to immediately take their place.  It makes walking about the place a bit tiresome after a while.

The taxis in Tana are often beige coloured cars, French models.  Particularly wonderful to see are scores of old Citroen 2CVs.  We make friends with a taxi driver called Albert who drives us about the city that day in his 2CV.  It feels like a retro limo in a way.  We end up at the zoo, which like everything in Mad is crumbling and dilapidated, but again the friendliness and joie-de-vivre of the people shine through.  A group of twenty somethings are singing together in a cafe with a guitar and they invite us into their group and we drink beer, sing and chat in broken English and French.  They are lovely.  The cafe closes and we part with pictures and hugs.  Like so many people here they are so warm and friendly.  

We wander on through the zoo and find the lemur enclosure.  A man beckons us into a door around the back, which I am instantly suspicious of, but it turns out to be the best experience of the trip so far, as they are the lemur keepers and lead us in the back of the lemur enclosure, give us honey and then open the cages so that the lemurs leap up onto us and lick the honey off our fingers.  It is a stunning experience and for about 10 minutes we have all sorts of lemurs cavorting on our shoulders and backs, squabbling with each other as they compete to get at the honey on our fingers.  Lots of pictures and videos.  Of course the the keepers aren't doing this for the joy of our smiles, and we give them 15,000Ar (about £5) for the experience.  Well worth it.  Very happy :D  Another zoo worker gives us a tour around the arboretum, chatting away in French so I only pick up the gist of why he is saying.  He keeps getting us to try and pay him more money which sours the experience really, but it is interesting learning about the native flora.  We walk back from the zoo, get lost and we (I) get devoured by mosquitoes.  I haven't bothered with malaria prophylaxis, and may come to regret it.

The currency in Mad is mad.  The highest denomination note (10,000Ar) is worth £3.  The lowest denomination note (100Ar) about 3p.  They have coins, but no one seems to bother us with them, change usually being given to the nearest 200 or 500Ar.  Having no small denomination notes is a constant problem.  When you get money out you get a thick wad of notes.  You can eat really well here for a couple of pounds.  Most people here survive on less than $2 a day apparently.

The next day we decide to book our flight to Nosy Be, an island in the northwest of Mad with the promise of sun and stunning beaches.  Everything takes a long time here and this takes most of the day really, notwithstanding getting something to eat and trying to find a museum with the directions 'near the railway station'.  It isn't as it turns out and by the time we get there it is about to close.

On our way back from drinking beer a young Malagasy man starts talking to us.  I instantly warm to him but Ro is suspicious, which is unusual because it is usually the reverse.  We end up agreeing to meet for dinner and Jean, as he is called, becomes quite a friend.  Curiously enough he knows Hilary Bradt who wrote the guidebook I bought and produces a picture of her.  He also studied in Oxford as part of an exchange program and talks animatedly about all things Madagascan. He has semi-persuaded us to do a week long tour going from Tana to the west of Madagascar, involving a three day journey down a river to the coast.  It all sounds amayyyyzing, but since we have booked our flights to Nosy Be we can't commit to anything.  But we have his number, and our own Malagasy SIM cards now so communication is not so difficult.  

The next day we are up early to go to Nosy Be.  The flight is uneventful except that at the end my rucksack does not arrive.  I surprised myself by being quite phlegmatic about this (usually this sort of ting would make me very anxious), but I think it was largely because Ro is here with me, so we can help each other in such situations.  We take a taxi to Amantoabo, which Jean has told us has a reputation for sex tourism.  So, it turns out, it does, and the seedy looking taxi driver drops us off at some seedy little dive which, if it weren't for the fact it was cheap and we hadn't booked anywhere, I'd have run a mile from.  The beach is gorgeous but the undercurrent of sex tourism, and the constant people trying to sell you stuff, takes the sheen off.  But it's good to see a white sandy beach!  We drink beer, swim and generally wile our time away.  The sunset is gorgeous.

In the evening we eat at a Malagasy road side cafe, which all feels nice and authentic, and then drink beer in a local bar.  Lots of over sexualised young girls mill about.  Some are accompanied by, mostly old and mostly French (Mad being a French colony once), men who leer and grope and generally look distasteful and degrading.  The whole place has this air.  It is a shame, and sad to see.  At about this time a young man tries to crack on to me, which Ro finds hilarious since he can see I have no interest at all in this guy.  He is a sweet Malagasy guy (I'm ashamed to say I've forgotten his name) and we chat and drink for a while.  I doubt it is easy to be gay in Madagascar.  He puts his hands in all the right/wrong places and after a walk on the beach I tell him I'm not interested and he looks sad and rejected, which makes me feel sad for a while.  We retreat to our room and sleep under mosquito nets with holes in them, although I think even the mosquitoes are put off by the general feel of this place.  I don't think I got bitten that night.  Perhaps they get too many STDs sucking on the blood of the people here.

Morning comes and we take a taxi to the airport to pick up my bag.  There is no guarantee that it will be there but the airport has no phone number.  Thankfully it is.  The night before we spent some time contriving to get out of the place we are staying and so having found my bag we get the taxi to take us to head to the north west tip of the island, still with the prize of clear waters and white sands, this time unfettered with sexual ennui.  

And boy do we find it!  In Andilana.  The waters are clear, the sky is blue, the sand is white and the palm trees reach out into the sea.  Truly we have found a paradise on our travels.  

The little hotel costs about 20 Euros and looks out over the bay from the hill.  

The bed is comfy and the water runs and there is a fan and a mossy net.  They even give you breakfast.  A little restaurant down on the beach feeds you a beautiful three course meal for about a tenner.  It's a hard life but someone's got to do it.  I reflect that other times in the next ten months might be as tough as this is easy, so I am enjoying every minute of it.  

It is truly a wonderful, peaceful, tranquil place.  You can sit in the water and it is so warm you almost forget you are in the water.  I can't quite get over the fact that we have managed to find paradise after only six days of travelling.  I make a mental note to return here.  One particular palm tree leans out over the bay and puts us in the 'Club Tropicana' mindset, so we amuse ourselves for a bit making cheesy photos.

There are geckos everywhere.  They all have a little smile and some are beautiful colours.  They eat the mossys so are very welcome.  The mosquitoes are the only annoyance about this place, and even they are pretty tame compared to some places.  Apparently you can't get malaria in Nosy Be.

Tomorrow we are planning to go to Nosy Sakatia, an even more remote island off the island of Nosy Be, and go snorkelling.  What I'm coming to learn in Madagascar is that life happens whilst you make other plans.  So hopefully we will go, but maybe we won't and something else will happen.  Whatever, it's all good :) xx