Antananarivo

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Next stop Madagascar, no plans, no guide book, but new travel buddy, Aussie Andrew.

Immediately the country is very different to the Africa I've seen before. The Malagasys think of themselves as more Asian than African and it's noticeable. They speak French and Malagasy, so my GCSE French comes out of the woodwork. The capital Antananarivo is quite built up and hilly, with old French cars everywhere, mainly Citroen 2CVs. It feels like going back in time or on the set of dodgy old 70s French film.

The B&B owner suggests we hire a car and drive south to Tulear and then fly back to Tana (Antananarivo) as we don't have much time, so we split up, I go to the car rental place, Andrew queues at the Madagascar Air office. We meet back an hour or so later, at 5:30, to find we have both failed. There are no flights on the day we want and the woman can't work the credit card machine in the car rental place so won't reserve the car for us. Useless! Luckily we have bumped into a Canadian though and meet him and his friends for dinner. He knows all the places to go so gives us many back up plan options, also an Aussie girl is leaving the next day so we pay for her copious glasses of punch in return for her lonely planet!
The next day we start the process again but this time with a travel agent, she books us a flight for that evening to Tulear and then a 4WD with driver to come back to Tana over 7 days, perfect! As the money is small denominations and everything is expensive here, we hand over a huge wad of money!
The flight is delayed by 2 hours and we are the only people staying at The Saxophone hotel, but they have a great drink called planteur so that keeps us amused until the owner says we are to noisy and have to turn the music down. The lonely planet is out of date so it's no longer owned by Alan with his jazz piano evenings, it's now Patrick although he is fun too. This becomes the pattern for the trip, outdated info and no people visiting even though it's high season!

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