surprise!

hmmm, where did we last leave off?

i think we were in the central highlands, where it was a huge relief to wear warm clothes and not feel stupid for bringing them (even the hat). we used the highlands as a place to arrange a trip down the Tsiribina River. It is supposedly a typical Madagascar trip, but no less cool because of it. especially at a time when there are so few vazaha (tourists) in the country that you have the river to yourself. we took a taxi-brousse to Miandrivazo, the actual jumping off place, which of course took us an entire day. the next morning, after a candlelit dinner (because the electricity was cut, but dont think that it was romantic, the candles attracted lots of bugs and this soon added some flavor to the meal) we headed out on a pirogue, or dugout canoe, with two boatmen. one spoke french and a fair bit of english and the other only malagasy. over the course of the next three days, we navigated down over 120 km of river, spotting lemurs and sifakas, passing cliffs with hanging bats, cruising down a small gorge, and seeing many small villages without access to roads, electricity or other services. the boatmen sang the entire day as they paddled and we thoroughly enjoyed our evenings drinking rum and local moonshine and chatting the night away. local rum loosens the tongue and after a few sips we would be telling jokes and stories in french, english, malagasy, and a little spanish under the southern hemisphere stars. since he's always got to do something different and manly, of course michiel killed the chicken that became our dinner, along the banks of the river.

at our pull-out point, what waited for us? a zebu cart. the ride was rocky, the water at some points along the "road" was so high that we stood up in the cart and put our backpacks on to keep everything dry as the zebu swam and grunted. but after the novelty, it was more fun to hike barefoot behind the cart through the mud and water.

another full day of taxi-brousse travel later, and we arrived in morondava, on the west coast. we had originally planned to use this as a jumping off point to visit a world-renowed site nearby (the Tsingy de Bemehara), but found ourselves with too little time to make the trip. true to form, we rented a motorcycle and headed out to see the avenue de baobobs, a line of these wild but stately trees along a rough dirt road; all of the trees are nearly 1000 years old. We made the 1 hour, 20 kilometer, excursion through rough roads, pot holes, deep sand, and passed zebu to the site where we waited for the red sunset sky that Africa and Madagascar are famous for. As the red took over the sky, trees, flowers, and clouds, we snapped pictures of the millenium old giants scattered among feilds of rice, casava, mud huts, and zebu. The ride back was delicious as Michiel had to navigate sandy terrain at dusk, when all the bugs come out, looking tasty and just happening to enjoy funneling themselves into his mouth as Michiel drove his lady back to town.

after a lazy day in town and at the beach, we boarded a taxi-brousse for the long 18 hour ride back into the capital to get ready for our flight to nairobi. we arrived at 4:30 this morning and they graciously let us sleep another 1.5 hours on the bus before unleashing the taxi drivers on us. this afternoon, we mozied over to the airport to confirm our flight. the lady at the desk had a perplexed look on her face. eventually after 10 phone calls and 2 air madagascar desks, we found out that our flight had been cancelled and they had rescheduled us on another flight...a week later. would have been nice if they had told us this beforehand. we have some ideas up our sleeves, and can surely take advantage of more time here in madagascar. at the same time, we would have done it a little differently had we known, and we'd already switched gears a bit to thinking about east africa.