Madagascar vol. 5

At the Kringy nature reserve, we must have seen about 10 different kinds of lemurs between night and morning walks. Couldn't keep track of them all! Some are nocturnal and others are active during the day. We saw some of mouse lemurs, the world smallest primates. All lemurs have big round eyes, log tail and really furry. Extremely cute! Some of them curiously look right at you and others look away avoiding the torchlight. We were amazed by the eyes our guide as to how he could find these creatures among branches.

Most tourists and, I am sure, all Japanese ones will wait around in the park to time their return back to Morondova with the sunset along the famous baobab trees. Being exhausted from the tight itinerary, we opted for going back immediately hoping to spend the afternoon on the white sand beach we saw on the first day in Morondova. We still made sure to make a stop on the baobab street and saw scared baobab and baobab ameroux (two trees intertwined) to take some photos.

Chez Maggie Guest House was a charming little place right on the beach. We had a two-floor bungalow, which had a wonderful ocean breeze. We had nice lunch and enjoyed a stroll on the beach looking at the channel between Madagascar and Mozambique. For the dinner we had gigantic crab with garlic butter sauce. That must have been less than five dollars. Unbelievable! It was fun to struggle with cracking the shells.

Everything was great until me and my boyfriend got into a near argument about anti-malarial pills. Somehow, such a basic precaution for any travelers to tropics totally escaped our mind when planning the trip. Having both worked in different malarial countries and being vaccinated against almost all possible vaccinable diseases, we got de-sensitized to this kind of health precautions. The second part of the trip was to the country’s most wet region, hence malaria would be a real risk. We got really paranoid, which almost ruined our second trip, but anyway it turned out that the area where we were going is too remote for malaria mosquitoes to fly and reach. We missed our first chance to have a real fight!