Day 270, Year 5 Trip to Hell-ville and MORE Info
Date: Friday, July 23, 2010
Weather: Nice Day; Partly Cloudy and Windier (10-15)
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
How much new information can a person absorb? Well, I guess a lot. Today we went into Hell-ville with John Sheppard (Sakatia Towers). He arranged an informal meeting with us and Peter of the sailing vessel Cynthia at the expat bar and restaurant, Nandiapo. By the way, it is a neat little place. But we were focused on talking to Peter to find out his opinion of sailing way south in Madagascar before heading across the Mozambique Channel or heading across the Channel further north. Peter is an experienced sailor and has been to South Africa from here four or five times and he emphatically said not to go far south. That’s a bit of a bummer as I had gotten my hopes up of seeing Southern Madagascar. But after hearing all the details of why we should not, I do not think we will go that way. We know it is only one person’s opinion but Peter had information on the anchorages south and that news was not good. So back to Plan A or is it now Plan C?
The purpose of our trip to Hell-ville was to make arrangements for our inland trip next week. Early in the morning, we called the lodge in the park where we want to stay. A woman answered the phone. Both of us only understand about half of what the other said, so we told her we would call back. We hoped to have John call for us but he suggested that we go back to his accountant, Frank, who helped us with check-in and have him call. Frank speaks French, Malagasy, and English fluently. John speaks a little French and a little Malagasy, but he knew Frank would be able to better understand. We went to Frank and he was able to successfully book a place for us at the lodge and make it clear that we wanted Goulam as our guide. Frank also went with us to see Coolie to make the travel arrangements. I don’t know how we could have done it without him because even with him the arrangements are more like a promise than a sure thing. But in this country you have to trust, and almost always, things work out. Coolie gave us a piece of blue paper about two inches by two inches which is our ticket to and from Ankarana Special Reserve. That little blue ticket gets both of us from the wharf in Hell-ville onto a speedboat to the mainland, into a taxi that will take us to the mini-bus, and then on a mini-bus for the four hour ride to the reserve. We will do this on Wednesday and on Saturday we will do the return trip. Evidently we just stand beside the road in the same place that we are dropped off and another mini-bus will magically appear and bring us back. Since we won’t be able to communicate with anyone, the back-up plan is that we will call Frank if there is a problem and he will solve the problem for us. The phone provider here is Orange and it costs almost as much to call locally as it does to call the US. So we’ll take our supply of Orange top-up cards with us and hope for the best.
Tomorrow we leave for Nosi Iranja, commonly referred to as turtle island because each year the turtles come here to lay their eggs. Some time later those eggs hatch and many hundreds of baby turtles make their way to the sea. This is hatching season and it often happens near the full moon and that is Monday, so we are hoping to see this exciting event.
