c and m

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 .