After doing the previously mentioned trips, we felt confident that a visit to Madagascar was in order; Carmen started, almost daily, looking up flight prices. Some very attractive things came up — 24-hour layovers in the Seychelles and what have you — but they were priced at 1500 beans a person (at the time of this writing, one bean = one USD). Then, she found a deal through Ethiopian; 740 beans per person, which was basically a two for one deal. SOLD! Well, “bought!” was more like it. This is about where in the process I usually check-out, save for providing a simple “sure” or “nahhhh” occasionally as I browse reddit and ideas are fired across my keyboard. I’m not really being facetious here; Carmen does well over 95% of the planning on almost all our trips. I cannot thank her enough for the research, time, effort, and enthusiasm she puts into these trips. Not a single one has been bad.

The tickets were bought, which meant it was time to figure out just exactly what we were going to do. Normally, we would rent a car and traipse all over the place, hooting the hooter (this is what my friend Matt, from the UK, called beeping the horn) at other people beeping their horns, stopping at places for photos, all that stuff. Unfortunately, in Madagascar you need to hire a driver if you want to rent a car, which made it seem like a better option to just go through a tour company. Carmen chose Jean Be Tours who were very fairly priced. We basically mashed two tours together for our 12-day trip. The entire trip, with the exception of two days, was going to be with our tour guide Manda.

This is the point I got to writing a week and a half ago. I don’t know why it takes me so long to finish these posts, I’m not Edgar Hemingway.

Jean Be and Manda picked us up from the airport, which had one runway; we got to the end of the landing strip and our plane turned around to get back to the terminal. Customs was a fiasco; luckily we were first in line, then second in line, and after we got to fourth in line, we decided to do as the Malagasy do and just cut in line back to first. We changed over some money, got a huge stack of half a million ariary and walked out to meet Jean Be and Manda. I’m very impatient and Jean Be decided to recount the entire trip pamphlet for us even though Carmen had already meticulously read the tour itinerary. I pretended to listen many times. We finally hit the road to head to our hotel to get some snoozydoodles done before heading to the bus station in the morning.

At the hotel, we got our first taste of Madagascar, where there are power outages every night. The hotel was ok — not good, not bad, and worked just fine for our purpose: sleeping. In the morning we met Manda and Jean Be and went to the bus depot, which was a dirty market that happened to have mini buses leaving from it. We were there for about two hours before we finally hit the road with a bus packed with people.