The long drive on Route National 7 from Anatananarivo ends at Toliara, seeing the ocean after a many long days driving was a welcome sight, the temperature also climbed up as well. There have been some coolish evenings, but nothing cold by Canberra standards. Ask my fellow travellers from Perth and they may see things differently. The trip has been quite fast paced with very little downtime and after arrival at our “beach club” hotel, we were hastily off again to see the boababs and spiny forest at sunset.
You may have seen an avenue of nicely lined up baobabs on the internet at some stage. This wasn’t that place, but it did have a lot of baobab trees and other spiky dry climate trees. We did spot a few nightime things including an even so cute Lesser hedgehog tenrec, which is a small mammal with spikes, we were in the spiny forest after all. We also dined under the stars amongst the baobabs, with some local music to entertain us.
Our second day in Ifaty, we visited a local school to drop off some donated supplies. The teacher had a class of 63 kids. The kids sang really beautifully but also really loudly! From the school we walked down to the beachwhere the fishing boats return with their morning catch. There was a lot of action going on down at the beach, everyone wanted money for their photo to be taken as well. It was great to watch, but also great to go have lunch and chill for the afternoon.
The next day was a travel day to get back to Antananarivo. There was no way we were going to drive all that way back, so we flew, the flight was delayed, but we got on board and made it to Antananarivo, before we had a long drive to the rainforest of Andasibe, but more on that in my next post (spoiler: lemurs and other wildlife).
I love the quilted sale