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Day 24. Mahambo - Ile Sainte Marie
After a game of Jeux de Boules with Oliver, a diner of lobster
carpaccio, zebu and a good night's rest we head back to Soanierana-Ivongo
the next morning.
Today are the elections and people are queued up in lines in front
of the voting booths. As said before the roads are paved here,
which is for a a lot of drivers - most of them having driven for
hours over pothole invested dirt roads - a signal to seriously
hit the accelerator.
Our driver forms no exception, constantly driving 80 kilometers
per hour, not braking for crossing chickens and ducks, but also
not slowing down in villages where people hastily step out of the
way after continuous honking. It's perilous and we see the first
proof when at some point a crowd has gathered around a Taxi Brousse
and a 4WD in a frontal crash.
Another 15 minutes further down the road, things really went bad.
We see an elderly woman lying dead on the road, covered with a
kanga, in a pool of blood. One of her arms sticks out of it
in an unnatural way. With a twisted stomach we reach the notorious
harbor where by now the rain is pouring down merciless.
Unlike 2004, there is now a descent boat, the Cap ste
Marie, which is not being overloaded and even watertight. We say
goodbye to Oliver and as soon as it stops raining we get in, and
within the hour we reach Ile ste Marie without problems. What a
contrast with the trip from 2 years ago. The Rosina 2, the boat
we took back then, doesn't exist anymore. There's now a boat called
Rosina 4. No doubt about what happened to edition 3 and 4...
We are picked up in the harbor by a van that takes us to the booked
Masoandro Lodge, a quite remote but nice hotel situated
in a bay. It's still raining and we really hope we wont have 4
days of rain, like 2 years ago.
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