As you may guess from the title, this is the beginning of the end, as it were. Aside from the first section of this post, there will be no more exotic holiday stuff to read about. Instead it will be mundane travel stories. Still, my amusing writing style will continue, and you never know, there might be a humorous little girl reminding you to watch her scissors!
Before tea, we had to watch an 'animation'. This turned out to be a song and dance, somewhere between the Betsileo campfire songs and One Direction. It was alright, but watching for 45 minutes when I was hungry wasn't exactly welcomed. I would have been more appreciative at virtually any other time.
Tea was pretty good. I went for prawns in coconut milk and rice. It could've done with a bit more flavour in the sauce, but the prawns were lovely. Pauline and John were staying in the area instead of flying out with the rest of the group tomorrow, so I stayed up until 10pm chatting with everyone.
I couldn't even manage to sleep till 8:30, so I got up at 8 and went for breakfast (which was the same as yesterday, except the juice was pineapple and orange mixed, and the fruit was banana). As I was eating, a slightly smaller specimen of the polka dotted butterfly showed up. This one was not lofty and proud like the other, in fact it was a real show off! It went hanging around some orange flowers for about 5 minutes, occasionally landing and flapping its wings in a showy manner. As such, I got a lot of photos.
Another mid morning walk along the beach ensued, basically to kill some time. I didn't want to go all the way to the village, due to the hassling children, but got most of the way there. I was rewarded with one of the odder things I've seen; 3 boys playing football with a dead puffer fish! No photos as a) I was quite far away, and b) I don't really like taking photos of people, as they often come up and hassle you after.
Lunch had been done especially early for our party as we were leaving before the normal lunch hours. I just went for 'Barquette de lagon'. I had no idea what it was when I ordered, save for the fact it had shrimp, fish, and calamari, as these were specified separately. It turns out a Barquette is a boat. Unfortunately this one was made out of cucumber, and the rest of the meal was salad. Oh well, the salad was really just carrot and lettuce, so nice. The cucumber escaped consumption though.
We then got on the bus to drive the 45 minutes to Toliara airport for our internal flight. On the way we dropped off Pauline and John at their new hotel, where we saw a Madagascan built car! I can't remember the name, but the badge was a zebu. It looked... robust. Also on the way into Toliara there were some baobabs with fruit on. Old gits!
We drove through a different part of Toliara to get to the airport, and I must say my opinion of it has been downgraded from 'pretty mediocre place' to 'downright awful place'. Half of the buildings were built from corrugated metal, there was a lot of rubbish, it smelled fairly ripe, and the roads were dreadful. Seriously, do not go there.
The airport at least wasn't the worst I've seen. Not great, and severely lacking in electronic means of doing things (a LOT of the process was by hand), but pleasant enough. The queue however was not. We arrived 2 hours before the flight, and got checked in 20 minutes before. Luckily security was 2 guys vaguely rummaging through your bag. They didn't even do a metal detector, or even look at you really. I feel like I could've had an assault rifle strapped to my chest, and got on the plane.
Somehow, despite there being 40 odd people behind us in the queue, the flight departed only 15 minutes late. It was unallocated seating though, so I got trapped between 2... hefty gentlemen. At least it was only for an hour.
Everything about the flight went fairly smoothly, so we got into Tana with no problems. The baggage collection was a bit of a scrum, but mine came out quite early (before the airport wide power cut. Only lasted for 1 minute, but I really do hope air traffic control is on a different connection).
We once more had an exodus person to get us to our hotel, and the hotel this time is 15 minutes max from the airport, which is great for me since it means the taxi will be less expensive. We arranged to have tea at 6:30, as almost everyone else was leaving the hotel at 11pm for a nice 2am flight to Nairobi, and so I returned to my room to blog for an hour.
There is wifi here, but it doesn't actually do anything, so this will be out tomorrow, probably, when I return to the airport.
Also, since this blog post has been very photo lite, I have decided to pick out some unpublished items from earlier in the trip:
Hope you got home safe and sound. Thanks for the blog.
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