Madagascar 8 - La Dernier Chapitre

Ok so I´ve left Madagascar and am now in Chile. Big deal. I´ve got a couple of unaccounted for weeks on the blog so instead of writing a chapter on each event (which would be amazing but time consuming) I´ll sum it up with a paragraph on each.

Parc Ranomafana

Amazing park. Greenest place in the whole country with lush rainforest and beautiful waterfalls and rivers along with lots of lemurs and a nice campsite. As I arrived in the middle of the night on a taxi-brousse it was an amazing awaken to the sight of mist rising off the rainforest and birds chirping. That´s right birds. Going tweet-tweet. Not roosters cock-a-doodle-do-ing or dogs barking just nice tranquil bird song. The main problem then was that the hotel was in the village and the parc, my destination, was 6.5kms away. According to the guide book it was a slightly windy road but I figured it must follow the river or something like the road near the hotel so I thought I'd walk it. It turned out to be entirely uphill. Lucky thing I was in training for Aconcagua climb and I had just made an awesome "On-the-go" playlist by selecting 2 songs titles beginnig with each letter of the alphabet. I arrived at the park in the middle of Lenny Kravitz´s "Lady". 13 songs. Not bad time considering it was all uphill. The well deserved honey rhum (a bit on the sweet side though if you ask me) went down a treat and was still in time to tour the park and see some lemurs. The brownish ones.

Ambositra ("Boringtown, Madagascar)

If boredom could be exported and capitalized upon then Ambositra would be the richest town in the world. The guide says something like "all the fresh mountain air you can gulp" and that made me think that since I was going past there anyway, why not stop for a couple of nights and check it out. Except for the scenery and the half decent although seriously difficult mountain biking there is "rein chose a faire la."*

I tried and tried and tried but I just couldn´t make the "woodworking captiatl of Madagascar" interesting. Sure, the little wooden trinkets are hand made but so are pirogues and bricks and just about everything else in Madagascar where labour is cheap and the zebu cart represents cutting edge technology. I think it was a good eye opener for me and reinforces why I am not a writer for guidebooks. If I were under Ambositra I would write "this town sux. Don´t go there. Ok sure. If you really really really think woodworking is interesting and want to buy some mass produced trinkets carved and assembled from wood then stop by for lunch on your way through, but by all means don´t go out of your way". One thing that was cool was that I could pitch my tent in the yard of the hotel for only 2 euros a night and there was a baby tortoise sharing the yard with me I named him Georges because the Malagasy lady and child who welcomed me either didn´t understand me when I asked them his name or they ignored me.

28 Hours in a Taxi-brousse and the Search for Nosy Mistrio

Madagascar is ridiculously huge. So if you want to see the north and you are currently in Boringville, you either need to fly there, (rubbing fingers and thumb together indicating that it's a bit pricey) or suck it up and take to the road. 1,200kms is a long way to go on windy mountain roads at the beginning of the rainy season but in the end after leaving Snoozetown at 9:00 on Thursday I got to, where I thought I wanted to go, at 1:00pm on Friday, Ambilobe, gateway to the north and where the streets are paved with, well, nothing.

Before you read this just remember one thing. I am an idiot. Also, language barriers suck.

The guidebook says that Nosy Be, while amazingly beautiful with world class beaches and diving, is also infested with vazahas, and the island even has direct flights from Italy and France to facilitate vazaha visits. No thanks. Not my cup of tea. The guidebook also says that Nosy Mitsio has even better worldclass diving and hardly any vazahas but it is hard and therefore expensive to get to. BUT, the guidebook map has a dotted line indicating a ferry that goes from Grand Mitsio Island to a mysterious place called Ampasanantenina.** People in and around Ambilobe generally agreed with this and so they dropped me at a place called Port St. Louis. Language barrier issue 1) Is this where I catch a "bateau" to Nosy Mitsio. Technically no. it isn´t but it was where I could catch a pirogue which for some reason is not considered a "boat" even though it floats and has sails and whatnot. Ok then, I´ll go to Ampasanantenina where the "ferry" goes. I knew something was wrong. There was no road to get to this place. Wouldn´t a ferry carry trucks and supplies and stuff? No there was a tiny zebu path and some very surprised children and villagers when I arrived. Luckily, the villagers were friendly and welcoming and let me set up my tent on the beach and it was only after 20 mins or so when they tried to get money out of me. Luckily again they are not that smart and after about 2 hours of negotiations I made them think they got me when in reality I scored a 75% off "boat" trip to the island. One catch, it leaves at 3.00am. For me, I had just travelled 28hrs on a taxi brouse, then 2 hours in the back of a pickup truck, then walked for 90 mins and forgot to eat or pick up extra water and now I was going to sleep on a strange beach in the middle of nowhere and no one knew I was there and then wake up and get in some dudes carved out canoe and sail 31kms offshore to the big island where I had no hotel reservation or even knew if there were even any hotels.

When I got there, the hotelier said, "sure you can stay here (though I don´t think he was expecting guests!) but there is a problem with the food. There is none." What? I said. Well what about water. I mean I haven´t eaten or slept in a while and just spent the first 6 hours of the day in the sun on a "boat". Nowe have no water either. Oh man I felt like crying. I think he could see the deflated look on my face he instructed a guy to climb a tree and get some coconuts and I tell you what that was the best coconut I´ve ever had in my life and maybe even the top beverage ever as well. After I was sufficiently hydrated we established that the problem with the food was not lack of existence but lack of variety which was a much much better problem when you are in the middle of the mozambique channel on a tiny island that you arrived on unexpectedly and unannounced. Hell of a beach though. The guidebook got that bit right.

That night, one of the staff at the hotel, a bit wasted and talking loads of crap, asked me if I was married. I said no. He said was I interested in Malagasy women. I thought he meant generally and I said that they were generally quite pretty and smilely and friendly and then he left and I forgot about him. A while later, after dinner once I was in my room I heard a knock, and so there is this guy with "my choice" of two local village girls.***I had to decline. It was just too weird. Also the 3 carb meal (spaghetti, with fries and a side of rice) combined with no sleep for nearly 2 straight days had me a little on the tired side. Maybe it would have been a night to remember, as it was it was quite memorable, but I´ll never know and I´m ok with that.

Communication problem 2) yes i would like to "plonge" meaning dive. But they also use the same word to mean snorkel. I don´t want to fucking snorkel. I want to dive so I add "avec boutaille" (with tank of air) but for some reason this also got lost in translation. So instead of being taken to the dive store. I was taken to a remote smaller island to snorkel where I felt quite lucky that they didn´t just leave me on it and take all my stuff. After explaining that under no circumstances was I going to leave all my bags and money with my priogue crew while I go snorkeling off a deserted island we headed inland.

Dave is a big stupid idiot: right so we sail all afternoon and get back to the mainland. Port St. Louis where I originally landed. It´s only 27 kms from Ambilobe. If it comes down to it I´m a hardened backpacker and I´ll walk it. (What? that is stupid! don´t be an idiot!) Oh look it might rain. I´ll just get my rainjacket out. That should help. (You are a retard) Ok I´m off I´ll just start walking by myself in rural Madagascar on the verge of darkness on a sunday when there are no taxis this should work out fine (It is a wonder you were´nt mugged and left for dead!). Right well anyhooo, long story short after a brief conversation with a complete physcho I managed to pay a ridiculous but worthwhile sum to a private taxi driver (guy with a car) and just as I got inside it started to piss down rain like I´d never seen before. And lightning. Holy crap the lightning. What great weather this would have been to walk 27 kms with over 30kgs of luggage. Theres roughing it and then there is being stupid. This was a million miles into stupid.

Result: Nosy Mistrio found. Dives completed: 0. Amount of stuff I had left:all (what a ridiculous miracle)

Diego Suarez

This place is like a proper city. Except for the number of old french expats with young Malagasy women****, the city makes sense and is tourist friendly with lots to do. While updating the blog I met up with Nero the poker instrcutor at the local casino and stopped in a couple of times to play. I also climbed my very first real rock face to a ridiculous height of 28m, hung out at the pool at the Grand hotel working on my tan and chilling out, mountain biked about 150kms, climbed French Mountain, would have taken windsurf lessons but a group of russians had booked months in advance for the time I wanted to do it and went on an amazing ATV excursion with my new ami and the coolest guy in Madagascar, Garcia.

Garcia welcomed me into his house for dinner 2 times and showed me the town and even introduced me to lots of ladies (he´s quite the ladies man you see) on halloween when I went out on the town dressed as, yes, Chuck Norris, even though no one else was celebrating halloween.

I ended up making the 1,200km trip back to Tana in time to hang out in the Capital on a Sunday when everything is closed and then got wasted and made my flight to France just in time to pass out and wake up mid flight with my first case of African traveller´s diarreah.

All good now though. Starting the climb of Cerro Aconcagua on Sunday, 6,962m (22,841ft) of Argentinian Mountain. I´ll wave from the top on Dec 8, 9 or 10 so have a look up.



*A phrase that I would repeat over and over while drunk and generally badmouthing Ambositra to my new Malagasy friends when one of them said they were going there. The enthusiam with which I trash talked the town was received with much hilarity and it became a running joke for like a week (ie. What´s going on? I don´t know but I hear there´s lots happening in Ambositra.)
**Amazing that I remembered the name as it´s been about 3.5 weeks now but I asked just about everyone I encountered if I was going the right way.
***He said they were 20 but who the hell knows.
****I still can´t decide whether to cheer them (nice work buddy!) or feel sorry for them (they{re only with you for your money!) I think the fact that none of them were ever smiling despite living in a tropical paradise with enough money to live like a king with a beautiful women on their arms has me leaning towards feeling sorry for them.