Seeing the country

Two out-of-town trips of late, one by air and one by van. This country is hard for travel but when you make it to a destination it’s pretty cool.

Work’s been nuts, and once the bone-crushing deadlines passed, I took a flight to the west coast city of Mahajanga. Accompanied by a visiting friend, we hit the beach, a couple of caves, a park with a legit baobab tree, and of course lemurs.

I’d originally planned to go alone but one of my friends contacted me in April and asked if she could visit in April or May. I was like, you mean *this* April or May? Most people don’t plan trips to Madagascar on the spur of the moment, but Foreign Service people aren’t “most people.” But since I had the bone-crushing work project, it wasn’t possible for her to visit before May 15, and I already bought a flight ticket to Mahajanga. Luckily, she was up for not only a trip to the capital but there, so she managed to get on the same flight as I had.

Since I’d originally only planned a super boring weekend, I had to step up the plans and arranged a guide and driver. As a result, we had a real itinerary, as opposed to the “read books by the beach” I had figured on. It was a lot more fun with another person along, that is for sure.

The Cirque Rouge was possibly my favorite, outside of being within sight of the beach. The Cirque Rouge is just a really cool valley-ish walk in an area with red clay walls. Due to erosion, there were a lot of these little stalagmite-type things, little baby towers (some of them really small) that each had what appeared to be a rock sitting on top of it. But they weren’t rocks – that was just how they eroded. For me, it was just fascinating. I felt like I was scouting ideas for a Pixar movie – there were scads of these things, and they almost looked like little cities.

My friend hadn’t seen lemurs and we went to two different places with them. They’re cute little suckers; I think we saw two species. At one of the same parks, there was a huge baobab tree, too. That was my first one, and it was so big I could climb up in it and sit back leaning on the trunk. It was huge, and, according to the guide, about 200 years old.

But just seeing the beach was lovely and peaceful. My friend collects seashells and we just walked up and down the beach looking at them. At one point, I waded out what seemed like a distance, but it was low tide and I never made it to water deeper knee-deep. I just sat and watched the waves.

 Last weekend, I went with a group to a place south of here called Antsirabe. There were about 10 of us and it was in conjunction with a work thing that I coordinate, so it was sort of a work trip, but not really. Or at least that’s what my intent was – to go for fun and not work. Except on the way there, there was awful road construction (which was new and we didn’t know about) that screwed up the trip by hours. Like three after we started – where we should have been over halfway – we were still in Antananarivo. So I was on the phone with my colleagues, who were in another car, trying to figure out how to change the plan with the least amount of stress for everyone. We wound up flipping the days we were going to do stuff and did the “on the way back” stuff on Friday and driving back a completely different (but longer and windier) way back on Sunday.

The trip was sightsee-y and culture-y,  and we saw demonstrations of stuff like how these really pretty papers are made, how they create aluminum pots and make some stone items and what work goes into creating a little model bike, which is made from mostly recycled parts. We ate traditional foods (and cooked a meal) and saw a performance of dance and drums.

And we froze. The place didn’t have heat and the place was colder than Tana. I was so far under the covers sat night and did not want to get out of bed. Heck, the first night I didn’t even take a shower because I didn’t want to take off my clothes.

Winter is officially here and I’m already colder than I was last year. I have no idea what’s going on. I can’t believe I am the same person who lived in both Minot and Minsk. It’s about 45-50 in the mornings and I’m so bitterly cold. Seriously, at that temperature in ND or Belarus, people are still wearing shorts.

Today for some reason I decided to buy broccoli and on the spur of the moment, I decided to make soup with it. It turned out really good and it’s been nice to have something warm.

But now the days are getting a little longer. My dog doesn’t like waking up in the dark, and since we lave for our walk around 5:20 a.m. and the sun hasn’t been rising until 6:20, she is not happy. Then it’s dark by 5:30 p.m. and we don’t walk until 6. This is why on the weekends and we go out in the afternoon, she just plops her but down in the sun and doesn’t move. Can’t say I blame her.