c and m

We continued our hectic pace into the final week of the hols, as evidenced here:
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Lokobe

We stayed for one night (as it turns out) at Hogwart’s School of Hotelling and Cookery.
The place was lovely – lush huts up a mountain at the edge of a nature reserve. It was also the site of a Hotel school, with about a dozen students finishing up some studies.
The few permanent members of staff (also students) were sweet but inept; the actual student student guys were much better!
They also had a weird menu system, somewhat imposed on them be being extra out of the way, I guess. You had to have a three course meal and there were two options per course. Given that we we only tend to have mains, maybe starters too, it also meant it was quite expensive. For our second meal, we cottoned on to sharing a single three course between the two of us.
It was a bit too samey. Nothing to do in the evening, no choice of restaurants. So we left after one night.

On our first day there we had great fun.
We went for a half hour paddle in a boat

with a most excellent, fluent English-speaking guide (very much a rarity), then for a stroll through the National Park. Our spotter was also very good – we saw lots of fauna, including these two:
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The Ville of Hell

Then we moved to the capital of the island, the most excellently named Hellville.
Compared to the rest of the island it’s really busy – cars on the road, lots of shops, a big market.
We stayed at hotel Diamond 10, which had a cool rooftop chill spot, thusly:
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We liked it a lot. It was clean, cheap, friendly, helpful staff, and had unheard of luxuries for us: TV! Air Con!
We did get the impression that it may have been a bit of a… well… sex hotel, though.
Exhibit A: bedside condoms (instead of mints on the pillows); Exhibit B: Sexy bottle opener for minbar.
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There were lots of great, old colonial style-ee buildings, all crumbling and decrepit, much like I imagine Cuba to be.
And the market was bustling and bouncing and very exciting to walk around.
Other things we did there: laundry and eating at Frenchy sidewalk cafes with amazing food.

Other things that were cool: taxis.

Have some pretty landscapes:

We had no problems with Snakes on a Plane, but there were Chickens on the Beach (pics by Parfles):

Money

There were a few days of Argh at the end of our Hellville stay.
We were about to leave for our last two days (back at Sambatra, which we wuvved and were very excited about going back to – for the food, for the people, for the beach), so we needed to load up on cash. The ATM decided that it didn’t want to give us any money. So did the other one. And the Bank of Africa one couldn’t even connect to our bank (according to the robot inside it). Argh!
We discussed possibilities. We had enough money to get to pay our bill for our current lodgings, and to get to the airport, but that was about it.
Sleep in the airport for two nights? Beg for food? Not pretty, but we could do it.
We waited. We ate breakfast. We tried again.
It worked! We withdrew our massive wad and trolled back to our hotel to meet the taxi that was waiting to take us to Sambatra.
Phew!

Final Destination

Our flight from Nosy Be to the mainland was on time – yay!
But then our flight to JHB got delayed. And delayed.
Eventually we slid into the JHB departures hall at 3.05 for our 3.15 flight. Ho hum.
But, the 1time peeps were very nice, got us on the next flight via the medium of standby, and we were whisked away to Cape Town.
Huzzah!

In Conclusion

The holiday was absolutely ace.
Going on hols has reminded me that holidays can be awesome, and that we should go on them.

I don’t think we’ll be going back to Nosy Be soon. It was lovely, but we have kind of seen it all now.
Madagascar mainland sounds like hard work in terms of travelling, so I think that may be off the cards too.
Somewhere else in Africa is definitely possible, and maybe it’s time to go back to Thailand (now that we seem to have shaken our disaster bug).

We had a bit of an adventure to start our holiday with.
Our flight out from Jo’burg was delayed slightly. By more than two hours. Given that we had an hour gap for our transfer flight, we were wondering what was going to happen once we landed.
Amazingly, our connecting flight from Antananarivo to Nosy Be was held for us (and other internationals). And was also late.
Our (eventual) first, bleary-eyed, sight of our new island at about 1 in the morning, rather than 10ish, as planned:

Taxi!

We’d booked accommodation and a taxi from the airport to the place.
The taxi was not there. Luckily, a few other taxis were and we collared one to take us to our digs.
He offered to take us via The ATM (more on that later) and we gratefully accepted, having only Euros on us at the time.
We arrived at (a very dark, asleep-looking) Sambatra at about half past two in the morning.
Eep!
Despite not sharing a common language, we managed to convince the nightwatchman of, um, something, and he went off, got a key, and led us to a room.
There was stuff in it.
Like clothes. And toiletries. And a TV. And a laptop.
But it was late, after a long day of travelling, and there was a bed. So we showered and collapsed onto it.
The next morning we were woken by the cleaning lady, and moved to the room we were supposed to be in.
We still don’t know quite what happened.

First!

The beach and surrounds were lovely.

Aaand relax.

We mostly took it quite easy.

Action!

We did do one or two touristy things, though. Biking of the Quad variety:

and, um, watching guys pull boats:

Language, Food

The locals speak Malagasy and French. Almost no-one speaks English. Not even the hotel staff, which was a little unexpected.
The majority of tourists there are French, with a big wodge of Italians, but very few of anything else.
Luckily, Jo’s French (and mine to a much lesser extent) was not too rusty, so communication was not a problem. Especially with food .
The food in restaurants was by and large French. Very French. And very tasty.
We ate often, and a lot. I’m surprised any of my clothes still fit.

Money

This was more… interesting than expected.
We found one shop with a credit card machine in. Not even the giant hotel resort thingies (which we avoided) had card machines.It was cash all the way.
There are three ATMS on the island, all in Hellville, the capital. Which was an R80 taxi ride away. So, we would go and stock up on cash when we needed to.
The denominations are big numbers (5,000, 10,000), but stuff costs big numbers – 15,000 for a main course kind of thing. So the physical amounts of cash were large, resulting in scenes like this:

Sunsets

Were amazing, almost every day. It would have been easy to take a bajillion photos and post them all.
Instead, have this threesome:

Bonus photos of Jo

Ill

We spent a few days at Sambatra, then moved to the “busy” beach Ambatoloaka, where we proceed to take turns being feverish and ill for four days.
And that was the end of the first week .