Travel day. Air Madagascar used to be called Madagascar Air, but since that was generally shortened to the marketing-unfriendly “Mad Air”, a name change was deemed appropriate. Despite the new name the airline remains famous for last-minute schedule changes, cancellations, and overbooking, so for our twenty-eight days here we made sure to build a large buffer of extra time around any flight. The current plane journey is from Fort Dauphin in the far south up to Nosy Bay in the far north, but since we had to fly through the capital, and since the next flight to Nosy Be isn’t until early tomorrow afternoon, we’re spending about twenty hours in Antananarivo. Sadly our hotel for the duration isn’t in a particularly scenic part of town – the view from the street looked to be mostly stalls selling mobile phone cards and auto parts – so it may be a slow few hours until our flight (hopefully) takes us north tomorrow.
According to our guidebook, the north is the home of great scuba diving, so much of today was spent researching dive shops. Madagascar is a country without a hyperbaric chamber for treating decompression sickness, so I’m leaning towards the dive shop that’s run by a British guy – while my French has gotten better, I’m not sure what the translation for “nitrogen narcosis” might be, so putting our lives in the hands of someone who won’t require foreign language skills seems like a winning strategy. In addition, our journey north includes the last chance for lemur hugging, and with luck the lemurs of Nosy Komba will be feeling amorous when Audrey and I arrive tomorrow evening.