Madagascar 4b - Buying Vaseline and Diving in Ifaty

Buying Vaseline

Right. Well. Anyhoo. It's one of those things. If you have facial hair and you are a diver you need a way to make your mask form a seal around your upper lip which, at this point in the story has around 43 days worth of hair on it. From my days leading up to being crowned the Cayman Islands Man of Movember 2005 I am well versed on the various techniques the most effective being a little bit of vaseline on the moustache usually does the trick.

Vaseline is available everywhere here. They have lots of little stands that sell essential things like cold beer, water and various snacks and batteries etc. And after the first one where I purchased the vaseline I realized it was widely available in all subsequent shops. I'm not sure exactly what they use it for but a lone traveller asking for a some vaseline earned me an extremely quizzical look from the old lady minding the shop so maybe the common uses are universal after all.

Diving in Ifaty

There is a really good story about how on Tuesday morning it was too rough to go diving so I went snorkling instead and saw my first ever octopus and then got ridiculously pissed on the local rum with a guy who I had met in Morondava nearly 2 weeks beforehand. But I'm not writing about that here. Ask me later. Most of the details have been filled in now so it makes a nice little tale.

Wednesday morning was a rough one. I barely remember the dive except to say that I had a lot more fish following me than the other divers. Here is the after photo:



Thursday through Saturdays dives were much nicer and saw all kinds of fish and stingrays and eels and some very healthy reefs in crystal clear turquoise tropical water of the Mozambique Channel. I especially like the fish they call the lion fish. They are like the bad guys and the angel fish are like the good guys in some kind of underwater reenactment of the starwars saga.

Generally Ifaty was just a nice place to spend a week so I did. When I wasn't diving I was generally relaxing on the beach reading or napping, careful to give my sensitive skin a break from the intense mid-afternoon sun. I exchanged all the books I had read to Richard the dive-master for 2 of his books. As the version of shock doctrine was missing 100 pages in the middle it was suitable karma that the spy novel I took from his collection started at page 165.

It really is quite stressful all this travelling. After 5 days on the beach and having no clear plan of attack for my remaining 4 1/2 weeks in Madagascar I was really starting to feel the pangs of stress and anxiety so I had to take a break, head into the shade, have a beer and contemplate my next move.