Cycling Madagascar

We’ll do a bunch of more in-depth posts when we return, but since we have an hour to kill before the restaurant opens, I’ll get this up to date. We finished the 400km ride much more quickly than we expected. In some cases the roads were great, in some cases they were ridiculously terrible, but in most cases they were quite ridable and went through many little coastal villages with bamboo huts and children in the yards shouting ’sali vazaha!’ over and over. We’ve slept in everything from shacks on stilts with tilted floors to big beautiful bungalows on the beach. We’ve enjoyed many zebu steaks and more white rice than I ever care to see again… I must quote Dave the Aussie that “All the Malagasy do is eat rice, [reproduce], and raise chickens!” The chickens are everywhere and there is not an ounce of meat on them! We spent 3 expensive days on Masoala with Dave and Andy the Scotsman, and got to see some wild lemurs and pretty birds; the snorkling there was excellent. We find ourselves with a few extra days to fill so we’ve bought a taxi brousse ticket to Andasibe and we’re going to go see us some indris and visit some swank nature lodges. For now we’re drinking citrus fanta in an internet cafe and looking forward to a good supper of soupe chinoise or…. you know it… more rice!

We have the tickets, the insurance, ID cards, and a promise that bikes will be allowed on all the flights!

I have raided the library for books on Madagascar, and Antipode by Heather Heying turned out to be a fantastic read. She spent a lot of time in Maroantsetra and Nosy Mangabe researching mantella, tiny colorful toxic frogs. It gave an excellent overview of the culture in the region that we’ll be spending most of our time in.

French lessons at the Alliance Francais have started, and hopefully by the end of April we’ll have enough French to get ourselves around (or at least get through customs). For now, this is all I have: “Bonjour! Je m’apelle Kelsey. Je suis etudiante. Je suis canadienne.”

If nothing else, everyone one we run into will get to know my name!

After contacting 3 travel agents about airfare to Madagascar, and only getting a response from one quoting an extortionate price, we were starting to get pretty fed up. Who wants to hand over $3000 to a lady who needs a week to make one phone call? I was almost resigned to navigating the scary world of layovers and cargo fees online… but not just yet.

So while strolling through Kensington at lunchtime on a nice winter day, we decided there was no harm in stopping by Travel Cuts to see if they could help. After all, with three useless travel agencies under our belt, what was the harm of one more?

It turned out to be the the second-best decision we’ve made so far (the first being, of course, the decision to go to Madagascar). Malcolm at Travel Cuts spent half an hour typing away, and we walked out of there with a flight itinerary, a quote of $2700, and a whole lot of weight off our shoulders.

As it stands, we’ll leave Calgary on May 6th, fly to Montreal, from Montreal to Paris, from Paris to Antananarivo (Tana), and we’ll arrive in Toamasina at 8:30 in the morning on May 8th. How we’re going to ensure that our bikes make it onto all the same flights we do is enough to give me a serious headache, but that will come later I guess.

There are a few things to take care of in the next few days before the flights are offically booked: insurance, International Student Identity Cards, actually producing the cold hard cash. Hopefully by Thursday, everything will be official!