NDBT

17 – We got early the next morning and got a taxi back to Toliara. The day was supposed to be a day of errands. This was hard for 2 reasons – the blistering hot weather, which in turn caused a city-wide siesta for about 2.5 hours in the middle of the day, and the rolling blackouts that the town is apparently used to, but we weren’t. So – lots of walking around and sweating trying to get money, burn photo CDs, check email, and whatnot. We gave up for a while and ate at a place called Melinda’s that had the absolute best zebu steaks I had in the whole country, plus the owner gave us free rum orange after (I chose vanilla – it was yummy). We also rode in a pousse-pousse (kind of like a rickshaw), which I did not enjoy – I felt like I was going to fall backwards the whole time. Then we went to the local museum, which was a pretty random assortment of things, most without English labels. However, they did have an aye-aye skeleton, because some of the Southern tribes believe that men descended from the aye aye (a far cry from the northern tribes that try to kill them), and the guide gave us a blow-dart demonstration (they aren’t poison arrows). It was very cool. Then we wandered around the local market, which had great mobiles, wood crafts, pieced together elephant bird eggs, and sarongs. Also an unfortunately large number of animal products. I got a silver bracelet, which is usually worn by men, but oh well. Patrick was accosted by some gem dealers who tried to sell him raw semi-precious stones.

18 – We left in a taxi brousse at 7am. The taxi brousse finally managed to get out of the city without stalling at about 10am. We had the front, so we got great scenic views of the countryside, which was dry and rocky, with palm trees or baobabs occasionally. We also saw a couple of tombs by the roadside, some with zebu horns on top. As we got towards Isalo, there started to be some very cool rock formations. We stopped for lunch in a mining town that has sprung up, and has kind of wild-west feel. We stayed at momotrek, whose logo was a backpacking ring-tail. The place had black widows in the restaurant, frogs in the shower, and a big snake that went along the path at night. Despite the language barrier, the woman who took care of us was super-nice.

We took an afternoon hike with Marquid to the piscine naturelle (natural pool). The hike was pretty easy. We saw some temporary and permanent tombs within the park, but these didn’t look like houses, they were more like crevices or caves, sometimes filled up with rocks. We also saw some baby scorpions and a falcon. The scenery was very cool and kind of otherworldly – sort of jurassic park like. But drier. The pool was sort of oddly in the middle of a dry area, so you go down through all these tropical plants to get to it, and it feels a bit like a greenhouse. There were some whirlygig beetles in the pool, and it was a really lovely way to cool down after hiking. Plus the sun started to set as we walked back, which was really gorgeous.

19 – We spent a leisurely morning at momotrek before being picked up by our brousse and going to Fianar. It was dark by the time we got there, so we stayed at the hotel arinofy again.

20 – The next morning we got to the taxi brousse stand. Patrick has wanted to get our tickets the night before, and we met a very nice tout, Njara, so we had already paid for a company. When we arrived, the brousse was not near full, nice, or anywhere close to departing. So we hung out for a very, very long time. We did talk to Njara for a while and we met a French lady, Morgane, who just gave up a financial job in Paris to move to Madagascar and run a hotel. We stopped in Ambositra, left our bags in the grand hotel, and went wood shopping. Ambositra (Am-BOO-stra) is the capital of crafts in Madagascar. There was a lot of nice inlaid work, and I got a picture of tintin in Madagascar, because they cracked me up. Ambositra also had the most persistant and annoying child (and sometimes women) beggars. After lunch at the grand hotel we left for Tana. After several hours of French soft rock, Patrick and I were both desperately praying for something in English. What do we get? Country. Real Tammy Faye “my cowboy done left me” stuff. Awesome. We tried to sleep as much as possible and got into Tana about midnight, where we dropped in at the moonlight hotel. Our giant room and comfy beds meant that we decided to stay in Tana for a day just to avoid a 4th straight day of taxi-brousse travel.

More later. All of the Madagascar photos are up, but I still have some videos to upload. Unfortunately, youtube isn’t working, so it’ll be a while on those.

Tags: Travel

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