My team with the LDS Charities arrived to Tulear by a local Air Madagascar.
There is only one airline in the entire country/island of Madagascar and it is Air Madagascar. Passengers walk out to the plane and up the ladder to board the plane from the back. Luggage stored in the front of the airplane.
We were met at the airport in Tulear (Toliara) by Temple, an in-country coordinator with the Maternal/Neonatal project of the LDS charities. She got us to the hotel to check in then to a restaurant to eat. I had crab with malagasy sauce and it was an entire crab, not very easy to eat without using your fingers.
After lunch, we went by taxi to the Baobap forest. Baobap is an indigenous tree of Madagascar and its juice tastes like carrot juice. We went there by van (the air conditioner did not really work). The van was stopped a couple of times during the forty minutes trip where the driver had to pay the local agents money to pass.
When we arrived to the entrance to the baobap forest, there was a crowd of malagasy children who tried to sell us local hand carved objects of baobap.
We travelled by cart pulled by 2 oxen (remind me of hay rides at Christmas time in Syracuse) from the entrance to the areas of baobap. The children ran along the cart. The oxen were not moving very fast, considering the number of Americans sitting in the cart.
The official local guide of the baobap forest was very knowledgeable about the trees, the insects, the birds, the plants in the forest. All insects were a little bit oversized such as the scorpion, the nocturnal cricket, the spider in the web up in midair.
We saw a couple of tiny little lemurs at the end of the tour. The countryside of Tulear showed electric lighting in the middle of nowhere. They use a lot of solar panels when these were imported from China and the prices were affordable to the more affluent people of Tulear.
We stayed at Hotel Amazone in a nice area of Tulear. It is a 3-4 star hotel and services were very good. We conducted the training in the conference room of the hotel. At midday, all windows were opened and fans were working all the time to circulate the breeze coming from the ocean so it wasn’t bad.
Surrounding the hotel and all around town, there are lots of pousse-pousse or cyclo-pousse. They are cycles pedaled by a driver in the front of the cyclo. They reminded me of the cyclos that I used to ride around with my mom in Vietnam.
There are fresh open-air markets everyday where live chicken, ducks were available to buy along with fresh meat, vegetables, fruit and other stuff. Except for the visit to the baobap forest in the first day in Tulear, we were too busy everyday with training to see more of Tulear. We went to a couple of really good restaurants near the hotel. Etoile de Mer and Blu were our favorite.
On the way to the airport on the day of departure, I saw a lot of kids going to school in uniform. Many were driven in pousse-pousses. I met quite a few of really nice people in Tulear through the training and hope to see them again in future trips.
