Palm Hotel Antananarivo

... fish for rice with villages in the mountains when they could. However despite the apparent poverty the people were very welcoming and friendly, they seemed genuinely pleased to see us there. We felt a bit like celebrities as they would all say hello and some wanted to shake our hands as they were curious about us.

So this is where our real lemur reserach work begins and this will need to be continued, as i now have to do some research on Kenya, the next bit of our trip.

... either end on the outside of the booth and two seated inside the booth. The process seemed to go along the lines of: Check the entry visa payment; check the passport; check the entry visa payment; check the length of stay; check the entry visa payment; check the address of the stay; check the entry visa payment; check the photo; check the entry visa payment; ... finally stamp the passport [over the entry visa payment]. Now to collect our bags which by ...

... the 'barber street'. Little wooden huts. Dr T does not have the guts and he does need a haircut! The purple trees, like we see from our hotel window weep!!! It has not rained but they drip. Homeless people are sleeping next to the river. A man is selling stuff, carried on his head. Children are playing, no adults to watch them. Unfortunately, child prostitution is big here. Madagascar is trying to abandon sex tourism complete. I cannot ...

After a shower and 40 winks we took a short drive through the city. We passed red brick houses, wooden market stalls and steepled churches all muddled together. Locals, bare foot and in varying quality of clothing, stared at us as we passed.

The roads were well made close to the centre of the city, then cobbled and even unmade as we moved towards the outskirts. The roads were dusty, noisy and crowded with taxis, taxi brusses (minibus taxis), men pulling ...

... are you going to grab the 'Quicker Picker-Upper" or the off brand in a the yellow wrapper? Who cares, you ask? You do! Don't act like you don't know I'm talking about Bounty... and you know that because at least three times a day you see some idealic American mom with perfect hair happily mopping up the mess made by her adorable child with a missing front tooth. But, when advertising goes international, these ...

... not spent the extra money. Still, I was fairly exhausted by then, having had little sleep the night before, and done the driving, as it was my car, so the bit of extra comfort was nice. In the newspaper handed out on the flight, there was only a very small paragraph on the explosions. Lisa had travelled ahead a couple of days before, and she had sorted out a whole trip for us, including a pick up at the airport, which was a ...

... and mountains. Ended up in an isolated village where few foreigners are ever seen and again was very popular with my hand tricks and LCD screen and my version of "Allouette". I forgot the lyrics to "O Canada". But I was entertained by the kids singing the Malagasy national anthem. Slept in a tent under a thatched roof where rice is pounded ...

... fruit. (Some of which was stolen by a sneaky little boy who wriggled through her "fence" (see photo), whom Amy, after a line-up of all the boys from her school, discovered to be from a nearby village and not her own. Amy then picked the remaining fruit and made delicious jellys and jams, and then used the left over peaches as a reward / incentive in her English class for those who could ...

... seem quite stupid), and children going to school. The road (dirt, clay & some rocks) has recently been constructed by villagers through a Food for Work Program, so it is fairly level and has nice bridges. However, because of the steep inclines in several places there are no vehicles. The road meanders along the main river in town, where women wash their clothes, cattle graze along the banks and on really hot days children swim and play on bamboo rafts. Once we get closer to ...

Photos soon!!! just can't send at the moment as connection is too slow but keep checking! (all of these are written on my laptop and get sent when I get near a connection so they might be out of date. I'm in Fianarantsoa at the moment after spending a coule of days in the capital Antananarivo. It's a woman called Karen's birthday tomorrow so we're trecking in the rainforest and hiking up a mountain to eat cake ... coz that's how people celebrate ...