Hotel Sakamanga Antananarivo

Voilà, c'est vraiment terminé :-( Nous arrivons au Sakamanga pour passer une courte nuit (levé à 2h du matin pour prendre l'avion à 6h ...). Dommage car c'est un très bel endroit où passer du bon temps. Heureusement, nous pouvons nous restaurer avant cette terrible courte nuit.

Warning: the following entry was typed on a Malagasy keyboard ( not QWERTY) and so please forgive me for the huge amount of typos that will no doubt follow Well I have arrived and, i must say, suprisingly easily. After an uneventful flight ( which i slept all the way through) my luggage and I arrived in the dinky little airport that is Madagascars main port of entry. My first excitement was becoming a millionaire within minutes of landing (the Ariary is a whopping 2800 to the pound). My secon...

Friday found me waking at a very bracing 6am and i thought i would head out for a wander aroud the streets of the Haute-Ville where i am staying. Even at that time the streets were bustling and the temperature was up. I wandered aimlessly for an hour or so observing the city waking up and a very different rush-hour to the kind i am used to back home!! The streets here are indeed very hilly and make Edinburgh look flat as a pancake. To move between streets you are often climbing hundreds of st...

Madagascar 18th April 2008 We took the 1 hour 45 minute hop across from Mauritius to Madagascar and arrived about 5.30pm. It was very apparent to us that there was a slight drop in temperatures from 32 degrees to a cool 25. We queued up for the visa which cost 58 Euro for a 3 month stay. Unlike Mauritius we did not have to show proof (at immigration) of our ticket out of Madagascar although this time we made sure we had one before arrival. A taxi was there to meet us with driver Albert and Ve...

Well, I arrived! Upon arrival into the airport, I waited in the line of people who already have a visa, which was apparently the wrong choice. I watched everyone who had to purchase a visa upon arrival obtain their visa and then pass alongside of me as they sped through their line. But, in the long run it didn't matter, since the luggage belt broke and we had to wait about 45 minutes for our luggage to start coming through. Ahhhh.....TANA!! Luckily I had friends waiting outside the airport so...

Our trip got off to a rather complicated start. The night before we were due to leave Maputo, an army armoury near the airport started exploding. I doubt there will ever be a definitive account of what happened, but the consensus is that due to inappropriate storage and safety checks, something started spontaneously exploding, and it spread. It was quite scary and went on for hours. Some of the explosions were enormous, and buildings miles away felt the blasts. By the end, the death toll was ...