Luckily we had been in touch with Air Madagascar and they sent us an email telling us our flight to Antananarivo, or Tana as it is known, was delayed by two hours. We slept in longer and then after a leisurely breakfast we were taken by the hotel taxi to the airport. We had read in a couple of blogs that the Air Madagascar flights are notorious for being late and sometimes won't fly until they are full, so we were not disappointed to find we had to hang around for a few more hours at the airport.
From the plane we were able to see glimpses of Mount Kilimanjaro covered in thick cloud and snow dripping like icing down the slopes from the crater. It looked cold.
We were prepared to fork out $50 or $60 US for a visa and were told our visa was free to enter Madagascar. We were able to get local money from the ATM machine in the airport. The information desk was open and the receptionist contacted the bus driver of the new bus service and he offered to drop us outside the guesthouse we had booked online. There were five people on the bus and we were the only tourists. We later learnt that with the drop in tourist numbers these were two things the government was trying to get the tourists back.
There have been several coups here and a recent one saw a few people killed and this has put tourists off visiting and the government safety sites online still say "No unnecessary travel" or "Avoid travel at this time if you can". As a Dutch guy here we met said "more people get killed in riots at football games between the two top Dutch teams than at any coups here, but that doesn't stop people going to football games or The Netherlands".
As soon as we left the airport the heavens opened and it thundered down. The locals ducked under eaves to shelter where ever they could. In no time it turned the streets into raging rivers of dirt brown. Every vehicle in Tana was then on the road and the twelve km journey took more than two hours and as we neared the hotel we saw the electricity had gone down too.
No sooner had we checked in when 34 French scientists also arrived. They were a group who had been six or so weeks in the forests in Maki. They covered different science fields and spent time gathering film and information for a 3D movie that is to be made for National Geographic.
As the guesthouse was full we were placed in a house next door to the main house but linked by 49 steps. It was another hike to the main house common room of about the same number of steps and then some of the scientists were placed in a third house on the opposite side of the main house from us. Tana, (means Town of a Thousand, after a garrison that was stationed here in 1600s ) is built on many hills so lots of the narrow houses have lots of stairs.
The residential part of the city reminds me of those jigsaw puzzles where everything looks similar and the pieces are hard to place as they look so alike and could fit on any of the 1000 pieces.
We met Sawyer, an American doing some research in Tana and as he had been here several times he was able to give us some tips. Sarah, was also in the guesthouse and had been doing some Peacecorp work for two years and had signed up to stay longer. She has written a guide for Madagascar so was helpful with places to stay. None of the French scientists spoke to us in English so it was only through an American guy called Bill who tagged along with the team that we were able to get any conversation. Every day the scientists cleaned and dressed their many swollen and badly infected sores that they had got in the rainforest. One man had to be helped up the stairs as he suffered debilitating pain in his joints that would move to different parts of his body. Sawyer thought it was malaria but no one knew what it was and he had to be flown out on a special flight.
Once the majority of the scientists left it was pretty quiet. We walked a lot of the hills around the city and one day watched a concert at the stadium with a whole lot of the locals from the top of a hill. The palace that we wanted to see was closed for renovations and there was not much else to see in Tana. The market was seething with people and they even took over part of the roadway so it was a major obstacle course trying to negotiate around their goods for sale and the traffic in the streets. The stairs leading down to the main road were also crowded with sellers and you couldn't move one step without someone wanting you to buy their fruit, vegetables, wooden carvings, rubber stamps, shoes and clothing. There were loads of beggars as well. We stocked up on fresh apricots and mangos but they also had bundles of lychees, bananas, plums and pineapples.
We were able to buy a local SIM card for our dongle here too and were lucky enough to hit on a cheap promotion by a new company getting into the market. We didn't need it for Tana as the guesthouse had free internet which was so handy, but we wanted it for the rest of the places we would visit.
It rained heavily everyday we were in Tana so had to plan our activities around the rains and powercuts!
Decided to store some gear at the guesthouse and head off to a national park nearby Tana.
