Antananarivo
We spent the night in Antsirabe in MENABE’L Hotel. The grand building was like a palace with spacious hallways and a spiral staircase but had no elevator. The pompous hotel was probably built by the French long time ago and it looked out of place in rather modest surroundings. The room was huge, the enormous bed was wide enough to sleep across it.
Breakfast was at 6 a.m., the same for everyone – an omelet and black coffee with bread rolls. At 6.30 a.m. we all were in the bus ready to leave. Our destination was the Mozambique Strait. The asphalt ended as soon as we left Antsirabe.
We passed a number of villages stopping in some to give away to local kids candy, the bread rolls saved from the breakfast and assorted toys that we brought with us. The children eagerly grabbed all presents while the adults ensured that everyone got an equal share.
We noticed a gold-digging place by the road and stopped. Madagascar is rich in natural resources. It mostly exports graphite, nickel, rubies, and sapphires. The extractive industry is not highly developed because of the general backwardness of the country. These diggers were simply the locals who were trying to make some money by primitive physical labor. They struck the rock-hard soil with poles, collected the dust, and panned it in the stream. We were showed the process in detail. The locals were friendly and welcomed the contact despite the language barrier. Some of our group members tried themselves in gold digging but quickly ran out of steam.
We had lunch at the restaurant of a roadside hotel. After that, we practically did not stop until we reached the city of Morondava late at night. We got up early in the morning, spent all day on the road and reached our hotel exhausted but nobody in the group complained. Having a slow dinner with drinks relaxed us a lot. The rooms at Select Hotel were again very decent. Each of us even had a separate room. The guides told us that we could sleep until 9 a.m. on the following morning. We were going to see the famous Avenue of the Baobabs.