Hotel de la Plage - Ifaty

Slept late (nice with the air conditioning and all) then went for a swim in the hotel pool. At 11am Lisa and I took a taxi into downtown Tulear to go to the bank (ATM) and market to buy some vanilla bean pods. Lisa said the vanilla beans pods are very expensive back in S. Africa and I've never seen them in the states. We walked around the central market a bit. It started getting hot and shops were ...

... find an ATM and post office. I looked at t-shirts at the expensive "baobab shop" (souvenir store for tourists). Stopped at the Air Madagascar office to confirm the flight back to Tana and they told me that everything was on time. Babba and I stopped for a beer at a roadside cafe when went back to the hotel. Due to the heat most shops are closed from noon to 3pm (siesta!). In the late afternoon when it cooled off a bit, Lisa and ...

... like "I went to the shops".Scary. Every evening we have lectures on the scientific research going on here and get to get involved. Dinner at 7.30 (rice,fish and beans.... Again) .Sometimes we go on little trips to the mangroves or collecting sea cucumbers or visiting local villages by boat to teach them about conservations. Usually we are in bed by 9pm.. Every 6th day we get a day off diving and get to do things like explore the ...

Hello all, This will only be a short entry as this I am on the only computer at the hotel. We are in Tulear on the west coast of Madagascar. Gina and I both survived the treking and are doing well. We have seen many animals and are on our way to the beach tomorrow to relax. I will write more when we get to Tana on Monday. This is the first internet connection I have seen in 2 weeks. André

It really felt like we were having a day off today. I spent the whole day on my sunbed, trying to stay in the shade. It was very hard work and I had to keep sleeping just to make sure I had enough energy to get up and go to the restaurant for lunch! There was another great sunset tonight and before dinner we were treated to a display of traditional music and dancing by the hotel staff. The girls wore ...

... and the most delicious fresh seafood on the menu. Behind the hotel, which consisted of 30 or 40 thatched white bungalows, was the spiny forest. The spiny forest has a whole range of unique plants, mostly of the prickly variety. It took less than a few minutes for me to put my bikini on, choose an empty sunbed and get stuck into my Jilly Cooper book! The day ended with a stunning sunset and more delicious seafood for dinner.

... as falling into 'heat drenched torpor' between 1pm and 3pm and we can confirm this. We just did one dive off Ifaty at an offshore reef. Sadly the area has been overfished so we didn't see as much as anticipated but there were some fantastic anemones and a handful of smaller fish. It was also interesting to swim along a kind of canyon in the reef.

... carved out in beautiful formations - we set out to find a room for the night and to arrange our trip into the park. We settled on camping at Chez Alice, a nice place with pretty bungalows overlooking the grassland leading up to the giant rocks of the park. This was our first of many experiences of hotels being booked in Mad. The island seems overrun with Italian and French tourists who all, apparently, book in advance! A lot are on tours etc...we didn't have these problems in Rwanda ...

... a meal and each had the banana fritters for dessert, which made up for eating seafood again. By that time I had a bit of a headache from all the sun and was ready to head to bed. The stars were beautiful and a thin sliver of the moon cast light across the dark ocean. Matt sat out on the porch watching the stars and listening to the waves while the calming sounds lulled me to sleep. We both woke in the night when the waves stopped crashing for some time. Who turned off the ocean?

... the sign of Chez Betty, for a good soup lunch, MP having most of both, and a lot of Coke, later regretted at a lot of loo visits. One glaring example, and one posible example of the sex tourism problem, at the restaurant. Bob checks out the availability of internet while we lunch, then back the seventeen kms, and a couple of kms down a bumpy side road to the arboretum of Antsokay, founded by ...