Tag: 2014 World Tour

Our Air Madagascar flight yesterday was delayed from 4:20 until 7:40 PM, so after returning by boat from our island we lounged at a restaurant for several hours before heading to the airport. Once at the airport we boarded the plane, but thirty minutes later were told to disembark (no reason was given). An hour after that we noticed the Malagasy passengers queuing in front of the ticket counter, and when we went in to find out what was going on discovered that our flight was cancelled and that we would be given hotel vouchers. Another hour passed waiting for our voucher, and minutes after we got it we were told not to leave the airport because a new plane was enroute, and that we would actually be flying out just after midnight. When all was said and done we ended up departing at 1:30 AM, nine hours later than originally scheduled, and arrived at our hotel in Tana after 3:00 AM. We apologized profusely to the driver who was waiting for us (luckily he had been informed of the schedule changes and hadn’t been waiting all day), but he merely shrugged and said “Air Mad” – apparently everyone expects a little chaos from the national airline.

This morning we rolled out of bed at the ungodly-late hour of 8:30, and then ate breakfast with several of the other guests at this B&B. The Tripadvisor reviews had noted that this place is popular with NGOs and researchers, so unsurprisingly our meal companions were a girl doing anthropology research from Colby College and a guy working for an NGO to protect a very rare duck. Their experience of Madagascar has been much different from ours, and the stories were good ones. We did mention the “lemur on your shoulder” experiences that we’ve had, and the duck zoologist weighed in by noting that when he and his colleagues have talked about such experiences, the general consensus was that “having a brown lemur perched atop your head is, no matter how you look at it, a very, very cool thing”. Also of note was that his girlfriend weighed in on the Malagasy diet, stating that she had nothing against rice at lunch and dinner, but remained “quite offended” at seeing it for breakfast. In her words: “serving it with a sausage does not make it breakfast food”. Needless to say, the company was appreciated.

Tana is a bit of a rough town – the air is filled with auto exhaust, the streets aren’t clean, and everything seems a bit jumbled together – so while we did take some time to walk around today, this is probably the best way to end our visit to Madagascar, since it will be hugely sad to leave this amazing country, but far less sad to leave its capital. The alarm is set for a 2:50 AM wake-up, with a car set to zip us off to the airport at 3:00 AM in preparation for what will hopefully be a 6:00 AM flight departure, barring further shenanigans from Air Mad.

This entry is being written from inside of the Nosy Be airport as we await our flight back to Antananarivo. Earlier today we caught the boat from Nosy Tsarabanjina back to Nosy Be, thus starting the long trip home. We scheduled a full day in the capital, just in case Air Madagascar decided to try anything funny with the flight schedules, so we’ll be in Tana all day tomorrow, and we then depart for Johannesburg at 6AM the following day. We’ve got about thirty-six hours in South Africa (again, just in case Air Madagascar does anything funny), after which it’s two back-to-back eleven hour flights, with a four hour stop in between in London. At some point four days from now we should be walking through the door of our home back in Los Angeles.

There have been a few random observations that didn’t make it into past journal entries, so the end of the trip seems as good of a time as any to record them:

• Nearly everything in Madagascar is handmade, since people don’t have spare money and thus just make things themselves. One exception are the shirts – almost without fail, everyone wears a t-shirt that appears to have shown up in a donation bin from America. Most of the French and Malagasy-speaking locals seem to have no idea what the writing on these shirts says, so we’ve run into everything from an old woman with a local high school JV softball sweatshirt to a very old man on a bike with “It ain’t bragging if you back it up” written across his chest.
• Everyone who has anything to do with tourism wants to learn as many languages as possible, and never misses a chance to practice. Until you figure out what’s going on it’s very confusing as to why every driver is so very interested in your thoughts on the weather, if you’ve seen lemurs yet, and whether or not you like mangoes.
• The fishing boats are always handmade wooden structures, and usually tiny. Only one has had a name painted on the side – in Nosy Komba we saw three young kids in the smallest boat we had yet encountered, which seemed to be taking on water as fast as they could bail it out. The sail was the size of a beach towel and dragged in the water, but the kids clearly loved their boat. As they pulled it up onto the shore the name written on the side finally became readable: “Titanic”.
• Zebu herders come in all sizes, from old men down to tiny kids. Just like bar patrons back home, the smaller the herder the meaner they are – a three year old with a stick is a zebu’s worst nightmare. In the south we actually saw one youngster beating on a zebu’s back while holding the poor beast’s tail and riding along behind like a waterskier.