July 7th 2013 Andasibe

 

Woke up at 3:00, took awhile to get back to sleep.  Other than the toilet in the other room everything is totally quiet.  Very odd sensation.  The rooster fixed that.  Managed to get back to sleep and got up at 7:00.  Spent 30 minutes or so packing things up.  The staff picked a couple of papayas off the tree outside by cabana. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, bread, and jam.  I don’t remember the juice, it was light pink but nothing I have ever had before.  Loaded all the bags up and got out of there about 9:00.  We were headed over to the island with the lemurs on it, but you need to take a canoe over and all of them were already on the island.  To kill a few minutes, we went over for the crocodile instead.  They were all brought in for the tourists, they don’t exist in this area.  But the displays and bridges we needed to cross to get around were fun.  There were 3 cable bridges, all had issues and some were down right a challenge.  The first was long but the cable rails were not high enough and you felt like if it moved much more than it was, you would go flipping into the crocodile pond.  Surviving that, the second one was also long but only 8″ wide.  The guide suggested we only have one person on that one at a time.  At least it wasn’t the croc pond at that point.  The third was just a couple of boards with one rail, it looked worse than it was.  We did see a fossa, kinda looks and moves like a cat but is related to the mongoose.  After that, just the usual assortments of creatures and plants.  The bamboo plants are huge with maybe 8″ diameter or so.  After that it was a very short drive back to the lemur island.  That was fun, the lemurs wanted the bananas that we had and would jump onto our backs to get them.  The critters were very friendly and I never felt like they would bite.  I was taking pictures and suddenly one jumped on my back and started licking my hat.  I started to grab my Canon, but the strap prevented me from even handing it to someone else.  I switched on the GoPro and took one photo before starting video mode.  The video came out rather nice, but it is about 400Megs so I will need to wait until I am home to upload it.  From there it was over to the hotel on the grounds.  It is a nice place with rooms that run about 250,000 ariary or about $100 a night.  We didn’t stay there, but it was much more like a nice hotel in the states.  We did do lunch, nice selection and I had these miniature stakes, they were good.  Back into the vehicles and on the road again for the 3 hour drive back to Tana.  Attempted to film part of the drive.  Got back about 5:20 and carted everything to room 302, one less flight of stairs than last time.  Texted Antje for a bit and headed down for dinner about 6:45.  They messed up my order, but got it all figured out.  Back to the room, I Skyped Antje for about 40 minutes, first time I got to actually talk with her since I left. By the time I got done playing with things, it was 11:00 and time for bed.