Christmas in Panama (Retrospective: December 2019)

Click here for a Google Map of our Panama trip

Guillestre, September 22

Life here in Guillestre has settled into a comfortable routine of cycling, hiking, eating well and reading.  We are in a bit of a holding pattern as we wait to see whether my New Zealand visa will come through, or whether we will be able to head to Africa to resume Stanley's Travels.  In the meantime, my thoughts are drifting back to those long-ago days when international travel was simple and we all took it for granted.  I realize that I never wrote up my Christmas 2019 trip to Panama with Terri to meet up with my mother, and with my sister Saakje and her partner Henkka, so here is an attempt to remedy that situation.

The Plan 

My mother turned 80 this summer, and we 4 kids decided that we should make an effort to get everyone together for a big celebration.  The plan was to rent a cottage on a Canadian lake in late July, and once we had decided that, we also thought that we should plan a Christmas get-together as well.  The original idea was to fly to the Cape Verde islands, and initially flights looked pretty reasonable, but prices soon rocketed up and it looked like a long, miserable connection for my mom coming from Canada.  We quickly pivoted and decided to fly to Panama instead, since it's an easy connection from Canada, not too expensive from Europe, has great nature, and none of us had been there.  Not everyone in the family could make it; my sister Audie and my brother Evan both had bail out, but we still had my mother, Saakje, Henkka, Terri and I.  My mom insisted on renting a comfortable beach house, and we settled on a house on Bastimentos Island, in Bocas del Toro province, for a week.  Terri and I would fly in first for five days of exploring on our own before we rendezvoused with the others.  Once we'd bought tickets and guidebooks, we were more or less set.

Panama City and Santa Fe

Ruined Dominican church, Casco Viejo

Terri and I took a very roundabout route to get from Tbilisi to Panama, flying Qatar Airways to Doha and on to Miami before hopping across to Panama.  It took a long time (two nights) but it saved us a few hundred dollars.  It also allowed Terri to buy a new mobile phone in Doha airport before we grabbed a few hours of interrupted sleep on our air mattresses in the terminal, and then to catch up with my friend Rob for dinner in Miami before a few more hours of catnapping in Miami airport.  We were pretty bleary-eyed by the time we got to Panama mid-morning on Sunday, December 15th.  We caught a bus into town and, sleepy as we were, we hopped onto the wrong bus, one of the brightly-painted Diablo Rojos local buses that took the scenic route into town.  We alighted in the centre and walked half an hour into the Casco Viejo neighbourhood where our AirBnB was located.  The contrast between the crowded, slightly dingy area around the bus terminal and the charming upmarket gentrification of the old colonial Casco Viejo neighbourhood was striking.  Our room was just what we needed, and we passed out for a few hours of much-needed sleep.  

Colonial architecture, Casco Viejo

We woke up in time for a dinner date.  One of Terri's former teaching colleagues in Switzerland had subsequently joined the US State Department and was working at the American embassy.  We met up with him, his Colombian wife and their two children at a seafood restaurant, Finca del Mar, right on the waterfront three blocks from our accommodation.  We had a good evening of stories and reminiscences and ideas before our eyelids grew heavy and we had to wander back for our first sound night's sleep in three days.

Swimming hole, Santa Fe

We didn't have to be in Bocas del Toro for until Friday, so Terri and decided to head west to the town of Santa Fe in the interim, as it sounded like an interesting town in the highlands.  A couple of buses got us to Santa Fe by mid-afternoon, where we took a room in an almost-empty hotel just downhill of town (the Hotel Santa Fe).  We had time for a walk before it got dark, so we wandered along to a swimming hole just east of town.  It felt good to stretch our legs after too many days spent crammed inside airplanes and buses, and there were plenty of wildflowers and butterflies and birds to attract our attention along the way.  It felt good to swim, although the air was surprisingly cool and we were almost chilly.

Cerro Tute

Terri atop Cerro Tute

The next day we set off on a hike up to the summit of Cerro Tute.  It was a long way up under a pretty fierce sun, but the views from the top were worth the effort of getting there.  The landscape sloped away to the south towards the distant Pacific Ocean; it was a bit disconcerting to realize how much of the native forest had been cleared for farming and ranching.  The villages we walked through had tidy-looking homes surrounded by fruit orchards (the oranges were in season, and we scrounged a couple of fallen oranges from the ground before being invited to pick some from the tree by the owner.    We had a picnic lunch on top of the granite boulders at the top before trudging back down, a bit footsore, to have another swim at a different swimming hole (this time we were warm enough to appreciate the cooling waters.)

Alto de Piedra

Our hike the next day was another long, sweaty affair, this time up to the waterfalls of Alto de Piedra.  Sadly our trail was mostly along a paved road, but the views were fine and the waterfalls were really quite pretty.  We swam in a couple of them, trying out Terri's new GoPro.  The trudge back to town was a bit unappealing, so we ended up flagging down a passing pickup truck to shorten the walk and save our knees.

Alto de Piedra

Alto de Piedra

We spent much of Thursday on the bus to Bocas del Toro.  Crossing the central spine of Panama from the well-populated Pacific slope to the much wilder Caribbean slope take quite some time.  We had to retreat from Santa Fe south to the Panamerican Highway at Santiago, trundle along the Panamerican to the town of David, and then catch a third bus up and over the watershed to Bocas.  It ended up taking most of the day as we dozed in our seats listening to podcasts and nodding off.  The road across the mountains was chilly and foggy and quite dramatic, before we dropped into the lowlands.  It was noticeably less affluent on this side of the country, and the villages we passed through looked much scruffier.  We arrived in the banana port of Almirante (dominated by a Chiquita banana processing plant) just too late for the last commercial ferry across to the island of Bocas del Toro, but we managed to catch a lift with a small water taxi that was taking a few other stragglers back to the island.  It was slightly disconcerting to make the crossing largely in the dark, but we arrived without incident in the main town of Bocas del Toro, found a small, inexpensive hostel for the night, had a delicious seafood dinner and fell into bed tired out.

Bastimentos Daze

In the harbour

We spent the next seven days on the island of Bastimentos, in a big beach house called Casa Shorebreak.  Terri and I stocked up on groceries in town before meeting up with the property manager and catching a boat across to Bastimentos.  While Bocas del Toro was sizeable, full of restaurants and shops and people, Bastimentos was small and far less populated.  We lugged our grocery bags and backpacks into the house, met the caretaker (a rotund local man who stayed in a small room underneath the house as a nightwatchman), got settled in, then went back to the main island to wait for Saakje and my mother to arrive at the tiny airport.  We ordered lots of Indian food from a restaurant run by a Canadian expat (Bocas is full of expatriate Americans, Canadians and assorted Europeans, then walked over to the airport to meet my mom (whom I hadn't seen in over a year) and Saakje.  We ambled across, picked up our food and caught a water taxi back to Bastimentos to settle in for food, rum and catching up. 

Sundowners during a rare sunny patch

Bocas del Toro feels very distinct from the rest of Panama.  As in Costa Rica and Honduras, the Caribbean coast of Panama has a definite English Caribbean feel.  More people speak an English-based pidgin than speak Spanish, and the sound is pure Jamaican.  Many of the people are either black or indigenous, rather than the mestizos who prevail numerically on the Pacific slope of the country.  It really feels like a different country, and for me and Terri it was our first-ever taste of the Caribbean.  

Terri paddling into the mangroves

Saakje, my mother, myself and Henkka

Sadly, it was an exceedingly wet taste.  December is part of the rainy season on the Caribbean coast of Panama, and this week was exceptionally rainy.  We were glad to have a solid roof over our heads, and also glad that the house was built up off the ground on concrete pilings, as the yard turned into a flooded swimming pool around us.  Luckily it didn't rain all day every day, and we did manage to get out and see the local sights, but it was generally very soggy.  

Our days passed with lots of good food cooked by whoever was seized by inspiration at the moment.  We ate well, and drank lots of pina coladas.  Henkka arrived from France the day after Saakje and my mother and the five of us played cards, told stories, read books and generally relaxed entirely.  It was precisely the sort of vacation gathering that my mother had had in mind.

Trying to do stand-up paddleboarding

We did manage to get out to explore, although our first expedition, hiking with my mother to Red Frog Beach, had to be abandoned as the path turned into a treacherous mudhole that eventually defeated my mother.  A more successful expedition was taking a water taxi out to Sloth Island to take photos of the iconic animals.  Our first trip gave us 2 sloths to photograph, but a later trip yielded 7 or 8 individuals.  We also took a water taxi out to Starfish Beach one day to snorkel; there wasn't much to see, other than the multitudinous starfish, but it was great to have calm water for swimming.  Casa Shorebreak had some pretty sizeable waves pounding in from the open Caribbean and was not a place for a peaceful paddle.

My mother adopting the island lifestyle

The owners of the house were surfers, and there were surfboards and a standup paddleboard stored in the rafters.  We took the paddleboards out a couple of times on the calmer inland side of the island and rented kayaks to go along with them.  We explored some of the mangrove swamps leading inland, and saw lots of interesting birds.  We also tried surfing the waves one day, but it was not enormously successful, as we were on quite short boards suitable for experts, which we were not.  It was fun but frustrating.

One day we dolled ourselves up and wandered along the beach to the Firefly restaurant, a Bastimentos institution run by a couple of Americans.  The food was great (if a bit pricey) but the highlight was a live musician who played a mix of calypso and reggae, including a few of his own original songs, while bantering good-naturedly with us.  

Sloth island inhabitant

And then, suddenly and all too soon, our week was up and it was time to take the water taxi back across to Bocas del Toro town, walk my mother to the airport and say goodbye.  It had been a fun week, and we were already looking forward to the summer's full-scale reprise.  We had a couple of hours before our bus to Boquete left, so Henkka, Saakje, Terri and I rented bicycles and explored the main island in a rare patch of sunshine.  We realized that beyond the somewhat seedy main town, there were dozens of beautiful beach houses looking out onto surf beaches that we hadn't seen at all during our brief visits to the main town.  Maybe, if we ever come back to Panama, we can explore that part of the archipelago.

Bicycle expedition on the main island

Boquete Hiking and Mariato Surfing

On the Sendero de los Quetzales

With my mother on her way back to Ottawa, the rest of us decided to head away from the rain into the central highlands, to the town of Boquete, well-known for coffee plantations and retirement communities for gringos.  It was a longish afternoon on a somewhat overpriced tourist bus to get back over the central cordillera to David and then onto a smaller road leading north again into the highlands.  We had rented a small house on AirBnB that proved perfect for our needs, with a couple of bedrooms and a well-equipped kitchen that we put to good use.  

Our two full days in Boquete, a town with a very cool hippy traveller vibe, were devoted to hiking.  The first morning we caught a taxi up to the end of the road above town to access the Sendero de  los Quetzales (the Quetzal Trail), a famous hike.  Many gringo tourists get talked into taking a guide (at considerable expense) to walk the trail, but we figured that it was pretty well marked and couldn't be that fearsome, so we went by ourselves.  It was a lovely day of walking, leaving behind the coffee plantations cleared from the native bush and entering some fairly undisturbed cloudforest.  We never spotted any of the resplendant quetzals for which the trail is named, but we did hear several of them calling, leading to long minutes squinting through the dark canopy for birds that had no interest in being seen.  The walk was pleasant but by no means challenging, and we returned to town happy with a relaxed day in nature.

Saakje and Henkka were keen to climb Volcan Baru, the highest peak in Panama, the next day, which meant leaving at midnight to catch clear skies at the summit at sunrise.  Terri and I were less interested, so we waved them goodbye and went to bed.  Instead we slept late and welcomed back the conquering summitteers that morning before heading out for a much easier walk, up to the Lost Waterfalls.  It was a fun but very muddy hike leading to a series of spectacular cascades fountaining down out of the mountains.  As we got back to town, we arranged to meet up with Saakje and Henkka at the Boquete Brewing Company, a fabulous  brewpub, for a farewell to the town.

One of the Lost Waterfalls

A Lost Waterfall

Although we had enjoyed our time in Boquete, Saakje and Henkka were keen both to see more of the Pacific coast and to try their hands again at surfing, so we decided to make our next stop somewhere on the Pacific coast on the way back to Panama City.  It was approaching New Year, and so we were competing with all of middle-class Panama for accommodation.  We were almost despairing of finding a place when we finally located a hotel with rooms available in the little town of Moriato.  It was a long series of buses (to David, then along the Panamerican to Santiago, and finally a crowded local line to Moriato), but we got there in the end and decided that we had made the right decision.  Our little hotel (curiously empty given the season) was just inland of a beautiful natural beach with waves breaking all along it, and with an estuary full of seabirds at the far end.

Another Lost Waterfall

Playa Reina

Brown pelican

Our three days on the beach passed in a bit of a blur.  We rented much longer boards than we had had on Bastimentos with much better flotation, and it made all the difference.  We were much more able to paddle fast enough to catch waves and started to stand up on them.  Saakje proved herself to be the fastest learner, while Henkka wasn't far behind.  I was the least gifted of the three of us; Terri elected to watch from the beach.  We surfed as much as waves and tide allowed, and the rest of the time we wandered the beach and the estuary in search of bird life, or walked into the town centre of Moriato in search of pizza and fruit juice.  It was a relaxing time, punctuated by chats with the other guest in the hotel (an American guy on a motorcyle trip around Panama), card games in the evening and yoga sessions to loosen up muscles that were tight after the unusual activity of paddling a surfboard.

Cool toad from our hotel restaurant

Ibis and cormorants

Panama City, Pipeline Road and the Canal

Crimson-backed tanager

Crimson-crowned woodpecker

Our days in Panama were rapidly running out, and so regretfully we bade farewell to the coast and caught a bus into the city.  Terri and I booked a room in the same place as before in Casco Viejo while Saakje and Henkka stayed in a sister property a couple of blocks away.  Terri and I raced off to the Parque Metropolitano, the magnificent patch of rainforest in the middle of the city, and had a fun speed hike around the park before it closed, spotting lots of turtles and various birds (including a dramatically coloured crimson-crowned woodpecker, Campephilus melanoleucos), but none of the giant anteaters that Henkka had seen a couple of weeks before on his way through the city. An agouti (a large and rather endearing rodent) had to serve as a consolation prize.  We dined together with Henkka and Saakje in Finca del Mar, then arranged to rendezvous early the next morning for a day of birdwatching in the Canal Zone.

Black-striped woodcreeper (by Henkka)

Chestnut-mandibled toucan (by Henkka)

An Uber drove us inland from the capital along the main road through the Canal Zone, and we were soon deposited just past the town of Gamboa, at the start of a dirt road with the rather prosaic name of Pipeline Road.  This is known as the best birdwatching spot in Panama and one of the best in the world, so it seemed like a good place for Terri and I to spend our last full day in the country.  As soon as we stepped out of the car, we were already surrounded by wading birds in a marsh beside the road.  After spending a while photographing them and trying to identify them (our favourite was the rufescent tiger heron, Tigrisoma lineatum), we ventured into the embrace of the forest.  There were birds galore to be seen, including Central American specialties like antbirds, motmots, antwrens and caciques.  Since this is such a famous birding spot, there were a number of parties of serious twitchers, some with local guides, and we shamelessly parasited off their knowledge and their tips.  

Hideous facial deformity on baby howler monkey

Perhaps the most memorable encounter of the day was also the loudest.  We passed underneath a party of black howler monkeys and while we were watching them and trying to get a decent photograph, they began their howling.  For ten minutes, the forest was filled with their deafening calls until they ran out of interest and returned to eating leaves.  We managed to get a few monkeys to pose in small patches of sunshine, including a mother with a youngster on her back.  It wasn't until a couple of weeks later, looking at the photo more closely, that Saakje realized that the baby had hideous facial deformities, probably due to papillomaviruses.  I hadn't noticed them at the time through my binoculars or my telephoto lens, but once I'd seen them, I couldn't forget their nightmarish appearance.

Female slaty-backed trogon (by Henkka)

Juvenile rufescent tiger-heron

Terri looking pleased with herself at Miraflores Locks

In addition to birds, there were leafcutter ants wearing paths through the undergrowth, spectacular butterflies and big dragonflies to admire, and sooner than we would have liked it was 1:30 pm and we were hungry, thirsty and tired.  We trudged out back to town and raided a convenience store for overpriced snacks and cold drinks which we ate in a nearby city park that was itself full of bird species.  Henkka and Saakje were staying in Panama after we left, so they had booked a room in Gamboa so that they could return to Pipeline Road the next day.  (They had spectacular birding luck the next day, leaving us quite envious and keen to return one day.)  Terri and I headed back to Panama City, but with a stopoff at the Miraflores Locks of the Panama Canal.  Terri was keener than me to see them, but I ended up glad that we had stopped in and paid the 15 US dollar admission price.  We spent a good couple of hours sitting in the bleachers watching huge freighters make their way through the locks (and even bigger super-Panamax container ships passing through the expanded second set of parallel locks), and wandering contentedly through the excellent museum.  Terri's father had been fascinated by the Panama Canal and had taken a round-the-world cruise largely to experience the Canal, and he had passed this fascination onto his daughter.  We both really enjoyed the experience and were wowed by the engineering feat of building the Canal.

Sloth crossing Pipeline Road (by Henkka)

And then it was all over.  We returned to the city, had a delicious final meal at a Chinese restaurant, and the next morning caught a flight to Miami and on to Doha, where we splurged on a hotel room and found time to explore the Museum of Islamic Art just before closing time, and had a memorable Indian meal.  Six hours of sleep, and we were back at the airport, checking in for our Tbilisi flight, our Christmas holidays enjoyably spent. 

Little did we imagine that within two months, the world of international travel would be completely changed by covid-19, and that this would be our last trip in the world of the BC era (Before Coronavirus).  We have yet to do a real trip in the AD era (After the Disease), but Panama was a good spot to do our last trip for a while.  If I were to go back, I think I would want to have a vehicle (or a bicycle) to explore a bit further off the beaten track, and I would spend more time in the rainforests and cloudforests looking for birds and other wild creatures, as that's what I found most spectacular about the country.

 

Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

Madagascar Part Three: Ankarana and Nosy Be

Nairobi Airport

I continue to make relatively rapid progress at capturing our Madagascar trip in print.  When I last left you, we had just tumbled, shell-shocked and covered in dust, off our 4x4 trip from the lower reaches of Hades into a hotel in Ambilobe where we did battle with the forces of evil embodied in our driver.

The razor-sharp limestone of the tsingy

Ambling around Ankarana

Perfect camouflage

We slept pretty well that night, although not nearly long enough, as we hadn’t gotten to sleep until well after midnight.  The next day, Wednesday November 23^rd, dawned bright and sunny and cheerful, and when we cautiously put our heads outside our room, we found that our murderously angry driver of the night before had vanished along with his infernal vehicle.  We felt stiff, dry-throated and tired and decided to walk around to find water, food and more money from an ATM.  Ambilobe was a slight shock to the system after tiny Daraina, with actual pavement on its main road and several ATMs downtown.  We caught a local taxi into town, found an ATM, then found a small restaurant for breakfast.  By 10 am we were back at the hotel and had rented a small tuk tuk to take us 30 km north along the highway to Ankarana National Park.  At 50,000 MGA (about 15 euros), it was a bit extravagant, but after the previous day’s horrorshow, Terri was very reluctant to try to cram herself into another overcrowded taxi-brousse. 

Hook-billed vanga on his nest

It was an uneventful, mostly flat drive north along the highway, past dry, overgrazed wasteland.  This western side of northern Madagascar is even drier than Daraina, and the human population pressure has resulted in very little wilderness surviving.  The land looked tired and unprosperous, although I assume that when the rains come in December things perk up a bit.  We got to our destination, Chez Aurelian, a rambling cottage complex at the main eastern entrance to the park, checked in and then set about a fairly lazy afternoon.  I went for a long run across the empty fields across the highway; I didn’t see another human being once I left the main road.  Afterwards we lunched with Bruno, the 2CV driver we had met in Daraina; I was once again astonished that he could drive such an underpowered, lightweight, low-clearance car through such a challenging obstacle course of boulders, mud and vehicle-sized holes.  I spent the afternoon working on a blog post about Botswana, then went off with Terri, Bruno and Bruno’s sister and friend to go to the Ankarana Lodge, where the better-heeled tourists stay for 100 euros per person per night, full board.  We bought a round of caipirinhas and had a delightful swim in their swimming pool, chatting up a storm with our French hosts.  When it got dark we put-putted back to Chez Aurelian in the little yellow car-that-could and had dinner, a delicious mangrove crab feast that reminded us that we were not very far from the swampy west coast.

Terri on one of the bridges in Ankarana

Great camouflage!

The following morning we got up and had breakfast in a restaurant that had two speeds of service:  slow and slothful.  Terri was unimpressed with the staff’s very lackadaisical attitude, but it was a nice place to sit and watch birds in the garden.  By 8 am we were at the park entrance, paying the extravagant 65,000 MGA (about 19 euros) entrance fee per person, plus the 90,000 guide fee.  At 210,000 MGA (about 63 euros) for the two of us for a day’s outing, it was not a cheap day out.  It was, however, worth it.  Our guide, Laurier, was knowledgeable and keen (as was usually our experience with national park guides) and the forest and landscape are distinctive and wonderful. 

We started out trudging along a road that led eventually to the original entrance post to the park, now derelict, and a new entrance building that is under construction.  The forest was dry but pretty dense and full of birds.  It was a flat, easy walk, and along the way we spotted plenty of crested couas and paradise flycatchers.  We went first to the Perte des Rivieres, a sinkhole that in the rainy season swallows three separate rivers into the thirsty karst topography of the park.  In the dry season there is no water, and the sinkhole looks like a menacing portal into the underworld.  As we stood watching, we spotted a pair of hook-billed vangas taking turns to sit on a nest high in a tree while its mate went foraging for insects. 

Crested coua

We continued on our way into the park along the main trail, spotting a couple of sleeping Ankarana sportive lemurs (Lepilemur ankaranensis); these nocturnal lemurs spend the day sitting nestled in a crack in a tree trunk to protect themselves from predators, only their faces visible.  Laurier claimed that they are blind during the day, but that seems unlikely.  They rate highly on the cuteness scale, and we got a few good photos of them.

   

Bat in Ankarana

Eventually our path abandoned the cool shade of the forest and ventured out onto the bare rock of the tsingy.  This is a landscape typical of western Madagascar, consisting of bare limestone that has been eroded by rain into a series of sharp ridges that are almost impossible to walk across, shredding shoes and feet and bodies.  The Malagasy name comes from an expression meaning “to walk on tiptoes”, which pretty accurately describes how you would want to try to traverse them.  The heat up on top of the tsingy was tremendous, with the light grey of the limestone reflecting the fierce sunlight up into our faces.  There were a few hardy bushes which had pushed roots into the rock, some with violently red blossoms that contrasted sharply with the monochrome stone surroundings.  The tsingy were a strange and alien world that extended far away to the horizon.  Much of the national park consists of tsingy, and the park was established to preserve this distinctive environment, although there is a big area in the centre of the park that has been invaded by thousands of sapphire miners and is now off-limits to tourists for security reasons.  Madagascar’s national parks are under threat all over the country, but this seems as stark an example of this as you could ask for.

Male paradise-flycatcher

Our path picked its way a bit through the knife edges, down into small canyons, across small hanging bridges and eventually down through a dark cavern.  Inside the cave we came across a couple of bats hanging peacefully at the exit which made for good photographic subjects.  From here we turned back towards the forest and its shade, escaping the furnace-like conditions we had been in for the past hour and a half.  We wandered back through the woods, running into groups of a new species of lemur, Sanford’s brown lemur (Eulemur sanfordi), as well as some of the crowned lemurs we had seen a few days earlier in Daraina.  We wandered out of the park back to Chez Aurelian after five very enjoyable hours of walking and wildlife spotting.  We were a bit drained by the heat, and after lunch we napped before heading out in search of mangoes; the forests near Aurelian are full of mangoes which were in season, and we found a number of ripe ones to eat.  In the process we ran into another party of Sanford’s brown lemurs who were also in search of mangoes.  Another mangrove crab dinner and we were off to bed early.

Ankarana sportive lemur

Overall Ankarana was a very worthwhile (if overpriced) park, with a landscape that was completely new to us, along with new lemur species.  It’s an enjoyable place for walking, and the village is very quiet; we could have spent another day or two there quite easily.

A splash of colour in the limestone of the tsingy

A Tropical Idyll in Nosy Be

The next morning, Friday November 25^th, was a day of getting places.  We were keen to head south down the coast to the little island of Nosy Be, and we were keen to make it as painless as possible.  Our tuk tuk driver of two days previously came to pick us up for another 50,000 MGA and we asked how much it would cost to bring us past Ambilobe all the way to the ferry dock at Ankify.  Given that it was about 3 or 4 times as far as the run to Ambilobe, we thought he might offer to do it for 150,000 or 200,000 MGA, a price that Terri was willing to pay to avoid another taxi-brousse ride.  Instead, after prolonged consultation with the guys from Chez Aurelian, he asked for 1.5 million ariary, ten times what would have been reasonable.  We decided to take the lift to Ambilobe for 50,000 MGA and hop a taxi-brousse from there.  It wasn’t too painful, as we got the front seats to Ambanja and then seats in a car that wasn’t even full for the short hop from Ambanja to Ankify.  Once there we hopped onto a speedboat for a pricey 30,000 MGA per person and almost immediately regretted it, as we were near the bow and got absolutely hammered by the boat crashing from wave to wave in the afternoon chop.  Terri in particular suffered from getting her spine pummelled.  We hopped onto a tuk tuk in Hellville harbour and had him drive us to Madirokely Beach, about 8 km west of town, where we had the name of a good, cheap place to stay from Bruno, our 2CV friend.  His place, Chez Senga, was full, but they directed us next door to the Beluga Apartments where 87,000 MGA a night got us a big, bright, quiet apartment right on the beach.  We took it, not knowing how good a choice it would prove to be.

Late afternoon light over Madirokely Beach

Quite quickly our life on Nosy Be took on a pleasant, easy rhythm.  We bought baguettes, butter, honey and jam, along with lots of fresh fruit, and would start the day with a leisurely breakfast right on the beach in front of Beluga.  Some days we would go out and do touristy things, while other days revolved around mornings of running and swimming and doing yoga on the sand.  Whatever we got up to during the day, we tried to be in the water for a late-afternoon swim, and then to watch the sun set over the ocean in a riot of reds and oranges either with a cold beer or a homemade caipirinha.  Dinner was often fish kebabs ordered from a little restaurant just behind Senga and consumed with another beer and some cold gas water.  It was a pretty easy existence to get used to, and hard to tear ourselves away from.  After the grimness of Madagascar’s towns and cities, and the pain of getting to Nosy Be, it was hard to face leaving our little corner of paradise. 

After a couple of fairly lazy days at first, Monday November 28^th found us undertaking one of the best things you can do on Nosy Be in November and December:  swimming with whale sharks.  There is one outfit, Rand’eau Baleine, based at Chez Senga, that runs trips every day to snorkel with these gentle and endangered giants of the ocean, the largest fish in the world.  A Belgian marine biologist, Stella, is combining studies of the whale shark population at Nosy Be with working as a tour guide, and she was our guide.  Between her and the keen eyes of our boat captain, Captain Black, we had constant encounters with the whale sharks.  We must have swum a dozen or maybe 15 times, and each time we went into the water it was an adrenaline-filled adventure.  I swam with whale sharks back in 2007 in Donsol, in the Philippines, and had enjoyed it, but this was better.  Donsol had very murky water and it was hard to see the whale sharks clearly enough to follow them.  Off Nosy Be the water was very clear and we could see every detail of the sharks’ markings, and we could follow them for minutes on end, finning furiously to keep up.  We had a few swims where we went in after one shark only to find a second one swimming past at a different angle.  A couple of times I had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid being run into as the big fish cruised past.  Terri and I got the hang of following the sharks, and often we were the last ones to give up the chase far from where the boat had dropped us.  Just before we gave up for the morning, Terri had one particularly memorable swim in which she got into the whale’s slipstream and was pulled along almost without effort on her part, while the whale shark turned its eye to look up at her.  She was absolutely elated when she climbed back into the boat. 

On our way to Lokobe

Stella would always jump in with her camera equipment, including a pair of laser pointers that showed up as two dots on the shark’s back to help give a scale.  The pattern of white and blue dots on a whale shark are enough to identify an individual unambiguously, and scientists maintain a worldwide database of such photos to try to keep tabs of whale sharks’ movements around the world.  She also from time to time went in alone with a biopsy probe to take a small sample of skin from the shark’s dorsal fin.  It was exciting to be part of ongoing research, and wonderful to see the rare whale sharks in such numbers.  We finally called it a morning around noon and bade goodbye to the gentle spotted giants to head to Nosy Sakatia, a nearby island, for a huge and delicious banquet lunch.  After lunch we changed our focus to reptiles as we went snorkelling with green turtles in encouragingly large numbers.  A few of them were really big, old turtles contentedly sitting on the bottom munching on seagrass, while there were a couple of really small youngsters swimming around much more actively.  We returned to shore in the afternoon absolutely elated; Stella told us that it had been easily the best day of the season so far.

Female black lemur

The next day found us renting a motor scooter and setting off to see another species of lemur, the black lemur (Eulemur macaco) in the Lokobe Nature Reserve on the southeast corner of the island.  We drove into town, past the inevitable traffic police bribe stations (we were only stopped twice, and showing my license and the scooter’s papers got us through for free), and then turned north from Hellville along a paved road.  After ten kilometres or so, we turned off onto a dirt track, pursued by three would-be guides on bicycles.  Since the track was in poor shape (surprise!), the trio had no difficulties in keeping pace with us.  We ended up hiring them once we got to the tiny village at the end of the track, where we parked the scooter.  The three guys loaded us into an outrigger pirogue and paddled and pushed us (it was extremely low tide) south along the coast for a few kilometres to the entrance to the reserve, a fairly sizeable village.  It was scorchingly hot, and even walking into the forest’s shade did little to cool us down.  The forest was all secondary growth, much of it overgrown fruit orchards from before the days of the nature reserve.  The fruit attracts lemurs in reasonable numbers, and we had little difficulty in spotting several troops of black lemurs.  Despite their name, the females are in fact brown and white and very striking in their appearance, and leap about the trees with their youngsters on their backs with typical agility.  We got some good photos of them along with a decent view of two grey-backed sportive lemurs (Lepilemur dorsalis), nocturnal species that sleep by day in the hollows of tree trunks.  The only problem with our excursion in the forest was that for the first time in Madagascar we were plagued by clouds of mosquitoes, a problem that resulted in us cutting short our walk and retreating to the sea breezes and lavish fish lunch awaiting us back in the village. 

Female black lemur at Lokobe

Sated to the point of exploding, we were paddled back to our scooter through much deeper water (the tide had come in), paid off our guides (it cost about 60,000 MGA, about US$ 18, for the two of us, including transport, guiding and entrance to the reserve, although I sincerely doubt that the reserve will ever receive a single ariary from our trio) and set off on our return scooter ride.  We rode home the long way, around the north of the island, a much less populated and less visited area than the south.  There were big plantations of ylang ylang, an essential oil, and tiny villages, along with a few nice views. 

We spent Wednesday, November 30^th in complete sloth, punctuated by some running and swimming along the beach, a long siesta and some reading.  Madirokely Beach was an easy place to while away a hot tropical day, with caipirinhas and fish kebabs at the end of the day.

Thursday, December 1^st we went out scuba diving for the morning with Silvia, the irrepressible Swiss woman who runs Forever Dive.  We were joined by three French divers, one of them an accountant living on Reunion, the other two dive instructors from France.  We went out to Nosy Tanikely, a marine reserve island about 30 minutes off our beach.  On the way across we again spotted Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins frolicking in the waves.  We did two very relaxed 1-hour dives that were pretty and pleasant without being spectacular.  We had quite a few hawksbill turtles (always a good sign of the health of the marine environment), healthy coral, lots of blue-spotted rays, a large lobster, a pipefish and several decent-sized tuna.  It was good to visit the underwater world again after a few months away.  We returned to a lazy afternoon of reading and strolling along the beach.

Shadows of lacework, a Nosy Be specialty

Friday was a frustrating day of logistics.  Travel in Madagascar is made more complicated than it should be by a lack of information.  We wanted to get back to Antananarivo while spending less money than a flight (200 euros) and having greater comfort than in a standard taxi-brousse (Terri was still experiencing PTSD after the ride to Ambilobe).  We had asked about arranging a car and driver to take us to Tana, and after much time-wasting, we were quoted a price of 1.4 million MGA, or about 400 euros, which was so ridiculous that we had little choice but to laugh.  We had heard that there were “premier classe” minibuses to Tana, but nobody seemed to know where they left from, what their schedule was or how to contact their offices.  We rented a scooter and headed into Hellville through a cloudburst that flooded lowlying section of road.  We got to the offices of Evasion Sans Frontieres, a travel agency, and found the same lack of basic knowledge that we had encountered elsewhere.  The clerk with whom we talked promised to phone around and find out if there were any departures for Tana in the next few days.  We had an excellent lunch in a downtown restaurant and returned, hopeful that we could escape Nosy Be cheaply and painlessly.  A phone call from our helpful clerk, however, shattered our hopes by saying that the company she had contacted didn’t have any departures for the next week.  Finally, however, another company which we had contacted a couple of days previously got back to us to point us towards an outfit that ran daily minibuses.  I tried to talk to them on the phone, but it was impossible to make out what was being said as Telma’s mobile phone network makes it sound as though you’re talking to someone at the bottom of a deep well, possibly underneath the water surface.  I drove back into town and managed, at last, to book seats for Sunday to Tana.  It cost 80,000 MGA per seat, and we splurged and bought 3 seats for the two of us to give us extra room, so it cost us 120,000 MGA, about US$ 35, per person.  Cheaper than flying, but not particularly cheap given the price of everything else in the country.

One very sizeable spider!

At any rate we now had only one day left on Nosy Be, so we booked a snorkelling trip out to Nosy Iranja for the next morning.  We set out late on a boat full of Italian package tourists (Italians seem to have a real love affair with Madagascar in general, and Nosy Be in particular) and our 90-minute speedboat ride was punctuated by a series of encounters with big marine creatures.  We stopped to look at a pair of whale sharks that were circling lazily near the surface; one of them did two complete leisurely laps of our boat, close enough to see all its markings, with one eye turned upwards to watch us.  While we were stopped, a pair of Omura’s whales, a species only recognized and described a decade ago, breached near the boat, while a pod of spinner dolphins erupted from the water in displays of amazing aerial acrobatics.  We were buzzing with adrenaline from seeing three species of aquatic megafauna in one place when we finally set off again.

Nosy Iranja is a picture-perfect tropical island, or rather two islands connected by a very long sand spit that is submerged at high tide.  The blinding white of the sand and the aquamarine water of its shallow are very pretty indeed.  Terri and I spent a couple of happy hours snorkelling in the shallows; it was such a low tide that we were reduced to pulling ourselves along on our fingertips rather than kicking our feet.  There were lots of small fish, including shrimp gobies guarding their shrimp’s burrows in the sand.  At one point I heard a panicked shout from Terri and raced over to see what was wrong.  A big animal had surfaced near her and then gone down again and Terri thought it was a shark.  We could see it nearby in the shallow water and it did look big and menacing, but eventually we realized it was a big turtle who had surfaced for air.  Panic over, we slowly drifted back towards the beach and then headed over to the immense lunch that was included in our 90,000 (US$ 29) MGA price per person.  It was a feast of ridiculous proportions, with shrimp, mangrove crab and two entire huge fish to go with rice, vegetables and pineapple.  We could once again hardly walk away from the lunch table, and after a short second spell of swimming, we climbed reluctantly onto the speedboat to head back to Madirokely.  It was a great way to end our eight days on Nosy Be, and well worth the price of the day trip.  We had a final sunset on the beach, a final feed of fish kebabs and then packed our bags, ready for an early departure.

Male black lemur, Lokobe

Sunday, December 4^th saw us breakfast on the beach one last time, pay our room bill and then climb into a taxi to take us to Hellville.  We dropped our luggage at the minibus office and walked to the pier to wait for our taxi, only to have a big argument with the porters who carried our bags and who wanted 10,000 MGA a bag; if we had known it would be a problem, we would have carried our own bags.  A much longer, more heated and even more pointless argument between the boat captain and the minibus company man delayed our departure by almost 45 minutes before we finally set off.  The morning sea was much calmer than on our outward journey, and soon enough we were at the pier in Ankify and transferring into a Mercedes Sprinter minibus for the short hop to Ambanja.  We had a couple of hours to wait there; we were two of the few passengers coming from Nosy Be; the rest of the passengers were joining us at 1 pm in Ambanja.  We passed the time eating lunch and wandering the dusty streets of the town before finally getting underway.  It was a pretty comfortable ride, much better than any taxi-brousse we had taken so far, and having the extra seat made a huge difference in terms of leg and shoulder room.  I put on my iPod and listened to podcasts most of the way.  It was an overnight bus, and after a stop for supper at 8:30 pm we drove through the night.  I slept reasonably well, but I was glad to make it into town at 7:30 am.  We booked seats on another “premiere classe” line for the next day to take us south, then caught a clapped-out Renault taxi through the teeming, unlovely streets of Tana to our usual base at the Hotel Sole for a day of catching up on sleep.

The tsingy landscape of Ankarana

Overall we both enjoyed Ankarana and Nosy Be, although the cost of visiting Ankarana seemed a bit excessive.  The one big downer to Nosy Be is that, like Thailand, the Philippines and parts of Cambodia, it is a major sex tourism destination for French and Italian middle-aged (and elderly) men.  The other end of Madirokely Beach from where we stayed has a series of bars and nightclubs that run on this trade, and the late-afternoon passegiata on the beach features dozens of sixty-something European men holding hands with eighteen-year-old Malagasy girls.  That said, it’s certainly on a much smaller scale than in places like Pattaya and Angeles City, and our end of the beach was much less sleazier in this respect. 

Yet another wonderful chameleon species in Ankarana

Nosy Be was a welcome vacation-within-a-vacation, a place to unwind from the rigours and annoyances of life on the Malagasy road.  It was nice to be able to drive ourselves around on a scooter (at 25,000 MGA, or about US$ 8, per day, it’s a relative bargain) and staying right on the beach was good for our soul.  Swimming and running along the beach were good ways to get a bit of exercise, and having breakfast and sundowners on the sand made great bookends to our days.  The excursions available were all worthwhile, and the whale-shark watching is absolutely world-class and worth a special trip to Nosy Be.  I’m not sure I would live full-time on Nosy Be, or for a few months every year, as quite a few French expats do (there are certainly much more appealing tropical islands to choose from), but if you’re on Madagascar, Nosy Be is certainly a great place to spend a week or so.

Practical Information: 

Madirokely is a good place to base yourself on the island, and both Chez Senga (if you can get in) and Beluga are good bargain choices; you can get slightly cheaper rooms inland from the beach or in the sex-tourist village at the other end of the beach, but I think location and pleasantness are worth paying a bit extra for.  Rand’Eau Baleine is a very professional outfit for seeing whale sharks, while Forever Dive is a very well-run dive shop with good equipment and a very knowledgeable and professional owner, Silvia.  There are a dozen or more boats offering snorkelling trips to various islands; Nosy Tanikely has great coral, while Nosy Iranja doesn’t have as good marine life but is incredibly pretty.  Hiring your own scooter to go to Lokobe is the way to go, rather than paying for a tour, as it’s a lot cheaper and gives you a lot more control over the situation.  The way to eat on Madirokely is not in the more expensive beachfront restaurants but rather in the little locally-run gargottes.  We had one good meal down the beach at a nameless beachfront gargotte, but mostly we bought take-out from the gargotte right behind Chez Senga; we would have the food delivered to Senga, which doesn’t have a restaurant, and we would eat our food washed down with a cold beer from Senga’s bar.  Senga is a gathering spot for long-term French expats, and they mostly do exactly the same thing.  When in Rome…..

Crested coua

Getting to Nosy Be, either fly if money is no object (or if Nosy Be is your port of entry to the country, as is the case for Air Austral, the airline of Reunion), or else take a premiere classe minibus.  Taking a regular taxi-brousse overnight to save 10,000 MGA is an act of desperation.  I cannot for the life of me recall the company name of our premiere classe minibus, but its office is in an Orange Money wire transfer office at the extreme far end of the main street of Hellville, next to the hospital and just before the road turns downhill to the ferry pier.  There are probably others, but good luck finding them!

Another beautiful sunset over Madirokely beach