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