Day 283, Year 5 Wild Shopping Spree in Hell-ville
Date: Thursday, August 5, 2010
Weather: More Perfect Weather
Latitude: 13 24.798 S
Longitude: 048 20.287 E
Location: Lokobe National Park, Nosy Be, NW Madagascar
Staying on the boat in the Hell-ville harbor overnight turned out to be just fine. The place has gotten a really bad name with cruisers as theft has been common, but we have everything locked down tight and we had no hassles. Everything was going fine until we checked our email this morning. Yesterday I had written to our son Justin and his wife Jo and Ziggy to welcome them home to New Mexico after a month’s visit with Jo’s family in England. Justin wrote back explaining that they are not home but are still in England. When Jo went to get on the plane to come home they wouldn’t let her on as there is problem with her Green Card. Evidently it expired while she was out of the country and as of this morning’s email they don’t think she will be able to return for at least six months. We haven’t heard an update so we can only hope that something could be worked out to let her return.
After receiving the email, I didn’t have long to sit and worry as Barry and Tina of Dream Catcher arrived in their dinghy to pick us up before I could even get an email sent back to Justin and Jo. The taxi was waiting on shore, so off we went. We paid 10,000 Ariary or about $5 US an hour to have the taxi driver stay with us, wait while we shopped or filled up fuel jugs, take us back to the dock to deliver fuel to the boats, wait while that load was delivered, and then take us back into town again. We got six 5-gallon jerry jugs filled three times, Barry got three 6-gallon jerry jugs filled two times, we got propane for Ed and Lynne and Barry got propane, and Tina and I filled huge bags with fresh veggies and eggs and then carried those bags to the SuperMarche. We then realized we had no way to contact Mark or Barry and Tina didn’t have enough money with her to check-out. We waited and waited and the taxi never came back for us, so I finally left Tina with all the bags of food and walked back up to the fresh market. It is in the center of town and I figured I’d see our white station wagon taxi eventually. The strategy worked and I found out the reason for the delay. The guys had to go out of town to get propane for Barry because he had a tank that he was trying to return and the taxi driver took them to a place that might take the tank. So while they were filling the tank, the taxi driver came back to look for Tina and me. But other than that little glitch the morning went brilliantly. In three and half hours we were back on the wharf with cases of beer (these plastic cases are HEAVY with twenty BIG bottles of beer) and bags of food to be returned to the boats. Barry and Tina’s son Michael was doing all of the shuffling back and forth in his dinghy and we are truly grateful to him for that. We couldn’t have made this work without him. But we still had one more fuel run and Ed and Lynne joined us at that time. We did the last fuel run, sent the fuel out to Windbird with Michael, paid Samuel the taxi driver, and then Ed and Lynne, Barry and Tina, and Mark and I went to Nandipo for lunch. This is a small restaurant/bar in Hell-ville that is the favorite hang-out of the local sailors and ex-pats. We had a great lunch, stopped to get ice-cream cones on the way back to the boat (a real treat), and then pulled up anchor and motor sailed the four miles to our present location. Tomorrow we are hoping to walk in Lokobe National Park and on Saturday will move over to Nosy Komba to revisit our lemur friends. Someday we are going to slow down, but not just yet. We are having too much fun.
