44. Post - Homeless in Madagascar

On May 16th, Laura and I set off for the island of Nosy Be, Madagascar (at least that was the plan).

Checking in at the airport and the whole flight went absolutely smoothly and we even got lunch, which was pretty tasty. The problems started as soon as we landed on Nosy Be : I lost money on the tarmac because I had forgotten to leave my phone's airplane mode off the whole time, and in the 5 minutes before I noticed it, messages worth €50 had apparently arrived :D Oh well, that was a shame, I thought to myself, my fault. Let's move on.

When we arrived at the tiny airport, we discovered that you couldn't buy a SIM card and there was no WiFi, so internet or calls were impossible. We were the last ones at the immigration desk because we hadn't filled out our entry forms because we didn't have a pen. But then things suddenly got crazy: We filled out the form and were suddenly put in the fast lane by the two employees (presumably they were worried about two young white girls who couldn't even pack a pen). We were put in front of everyone at our visas, our luggage and the border police and were waved through first. Then we walked briskly following the nice lady who took us to a really filthy car with a man in it. At this point, we weren't sure whether this was the fast lane to the hotel or to the human trafficking facility. Then an old woman in a hat appeared out of nowhere, opened her handbag full of Ariary notes and exchanged euros for Ariary in front of the employee. The whole thing happened so quickly that I didn't even count.

So, 30 seconds after filling out the immigration papers, we found ourselves sitting in a rickety car with a stranger, pepper spray safely in hand. We sped off towards the capital, Hellville, to buy a SIM card. Unfortunately, it was lunchtime and everything was closed, so we went to a restaurant with our unknown taxi driver to wait. We ate a little something there and had him call our hotel to find out when we could arrive. Answer: Not at all, the hotel hasn't existed for years.

So it happened that we found ourselves sitting in a restaurant on a Madagascan island with a stranger and were homeless.

We then booked the first hotel that had WiFi and was affordable. That was great, except that it was unfortunately on the wrong island. We then had Mister Taxi drive us to the harbor (if you can call this place that) and waited for the second unknown man, who would probably arrive in the next 30 minutes on a green boat. Unfortunately, our driver left us alone, which made the wait pretty scary.

He actually came and drove us to our new hotel on Nosy Komba . The boat ride took about 15 minutes and we docked right in front of the hotel ( Chez Yolande ). We were given a friendly welcome but were urged to stay for 10 days. We agreed to do this to save a bit of money (after all, we had lost the €200 for the actual hotel). We were offered to pay the next day, which turned out to be a very good thing later on.

After a long discussion with the owner about the rooms and everything else, we set off to explore the west of the island. There we lay down on the beach and watched the sunset. On the way back to the hotel we sat down in a restaurant and had dinner.

At around 9 p.m. we fell dead into bed and were just happy to have a roof over our heads.