An utterly ludicrous day. We found our way to the airport and were met by a very friendly lady called something that sounded a bit like Tina, who took us to the capital, Antananarivo (Tana) in an antiquated white Peugeot with no seatbelts. Or door handles. Driving through there was extraordinary. Tana’s covered in a kind of deep terracotta-coloured mud and smells of petrol so – a hot, red, shambolic sort of place, dead chickens hanging around street corners – I’m sure I could think of a way to phrase that that didn’t sound like groups of dead chickens gathered together looking shifty on street corners, but I’m too exhausted – and children carrying babies and asking us for money. Traumatic times.

We eventually ended up at a welcome lunch with about twelve of the Dodwell team, which was awkward. The Malagasy seem shy and over-friendly at the same time, and we don’t want to offend anyone or say or do anything wrong, so they bend over backwards to make us feel welcome without actually telling us anything helpful and meanwhile we’re too polite and bewildered and busy saying ‘thank you’ to actually ask anything helpful. Like, after some frenzied Malagasy discussion one of them turned to us and said ‘Do you like pineapple? Ananas? Yes?’ and brought us two slabs of pineapple on a saucer, which we were to eat with a teaspoon while listening to obscure bits of Madagascar-related information that will never, ever be useful for us. Then they took us to the supermarket, where we obediently bought jam.

Tomorrow, we’re going to travel for eight hours on a taxi-pousse to Vatomandry, which is coastal and apparently beautiful but – OHNO! – we might not have an internet connection there. When I say ‘might not’, what I mean is that we’re going to be living in a wooden house with leaves instead of a roof. (Though, incredibly, Liam is still quietly confident that we’ll be continuing to update the blog. Liam achieves levels of optimism I never even thought possible for the human mind.) Meanwhile, we have a lot of absolutely redundant South African rand which no bank in the whole of Madagascar will change into local currency (ariary), and we’re still wearing the clothes that we put on in England on Saturday. Eww.

No pictures yet – there’s a lot of political unrest in Tana and it’s really not the sort of place to be slinging a massive, expensive camera about. There’s so, so much more to say about this and I have about a million thoughts I want to write down but we have to get to the internet cafe before it gets dark and late (and the messsage from the Dodwell team seems to be that Malagasy people are ever so friendly and welcoming but if you’re unusual-looking they will definitely steal everything you own and set fire to you.) I’ll be more coherent at some later point. I hope I don’t sound at all anxious or upset, because I’m not – I’m ridiculously excited and I can’t believe I get to live here for so long.

Liam’s thoughts to follow. In Vatomandry, apparently.

Approaching Madagascar, the terracotta soil was a shocking dusty red, nothing like South Africa or anything we’ve seen so far. The pilot dropped suddenly, lurching and dipping at great speed until a thousand or so feet, when he appeared to remember the passengers on board and started to behave himself. He happily told us that it was 30 degrees in Tana, partially cloudy. My transparent skin let out a quiet yelp.

The Tana airport is essentially an airstrip and a warehouse, a shambling, blasted building with heavy but friendly security. Our visa check was slow, but painless- one guard tried flirting with Nish, another did a forward roll on a bench.. presumably just because he could. Everyone smiled and joked around, barely doing their jobs.

After we met our contact in Tana, she helped us into a once-white modified Peugeot. By “modified”, I mean “fatally sabotaged”. The modifications included the removal of unneeded luxuries such as seatbelts, locks and door handles, and behind the steering wheel was a mess of wires. As we drove we experienced the joys of Malagasy traffic.

The Malagasy drive, technically speaking, on the right hand side of the road. This appears to be a rule of thumb rather than a law, as do most traffic regulations. Our driver happily told us that although we were driving down a one-way street, the constant line of oncoming traffic would never be stopped by the police because there were too many of them. Utter madness.

The views outside our windows were jaw-dropping – the outskirts of Tana are awesome in the truest sense of the word. It’s a red-dust botch of a city. There is a post-apocalyptic feel to it, especially near the airport, where children wander the streets  begging for money and buildings look like old seaside shacks made by teenagers before a storm. Various small game hung on outdoor stalls, skinned and ready to buy. The smell of dust, spice, petrol and damp was and is still pleasantly intoxicating.

We stopped briefly, and a child came to my window with a tiny baby on his shoulder. He kept repeating something in Malagasy and knocking on the window, but as I had no currency I was powerless to offer help. Out of my window closer to Tana I spotted men emptying rubbish bins onto the ground and picking through paper for food. Their clothes were in tatters, literally hanging off their bodies in patches and strands.

After we visited a bank, our Dodwell Trust contact took us to the charity’s headquarters, where we were met by so many local people it made it impossible to even consider remembering all of their names, let alone the Malagasy words that they attempted to teach us. They announced our arrival by standing up and nervously singing a traditional song, which we clapped along to so as not to appear too embarrassed. We were then fed a lot of really tasty food, which was attractively presented and cooked with love and attention. There was a handwritten notice thanking us personally for coming, and they had wrapped our volunteer t-shirts in shiny paper as a gift. It was all such a beautiful gesture that I was a little overcome- our arrival was clearly quite an event for these people. Unfortunately after such an epic adventure getting to Tana in the first place, neither of us could take anything in, and we left the meeting knowing very little more than we had done when we entered.

After a visit to the supermarket at about 6pm, it was suddenly dark. Having been fed horror stories of the political climate and the soaring crime rates by everyone we’ve met, we were very careful when visiting the internet café and walking the streets. The city took on an uglier tone, with an army of prostitutes filing out onto the streets, and gangs of men loitering by the sides of the road, watching you while whispering to each other. It’s quite threatening when you don’t know what’s going on… perhaps it would be more threatening if we did. To compound our terror, the Tana accommodation is down the darkest, thinnest, most dangerous-looking blind alleyway I’ve ever seen. But we’ve had no trouble so far, and the whole thing feels a bit like an exercise in fear. There’s nothing more likely to get you mugged than looking like a terrified tourist with something worth taking.

At present we’re the only Dodwell volunteers in the whole of Madagascar, and we will be totally on our own in Vatomandry for the duration of our stay. As a change of plan we’re no longer going to Ambositra (pronounced ‘Am-boo-str’), as we’re more needed in Ampefy on the west coast, which has an IT suite and much more comfortable volunteer lodgings. It apparently also has a beautiful waterfall, a clear lagoon and some nearby rocks we can climb, which means that I’m sold. We’ve been so excited about Ambositra that it was initially a bit of a let down to change our plan, but we’re going to visit it during a weekend in early November instead, so all is good.

I’m aching to take some photographs, but Tana is apparently so volatile at the moment that children are cutting peoples’ pockets open to gather the change and pickpockets are rife. We’re advised to keep nothing of any value on us at all while in the capital, and I’d be gutted to lose my camera so early in the trip, with such amazing things to see later on. I can take some photographs of Tana at the end of the trip, as we’ll need to be back here to catch our plane. That’s assuming that our plane isn’t cancelled and we don’t have to take a connecting flight and a beautiful complimentary hotel in Mauritius… Air Kenya?

Nish and I have settled into our traveling lives quite easily and quickly. Having had to wear the same clothes for four days through Manchester, London, Nairobi, Jo’burg and Tana, we’ve had to tolerate each other even when shattered, smelly, groggy and grumpy. Our easy-going approach feeds each other, and even when things looked their bleakest in Jo’burg we’ve managed to laugh about it all. We’ll both happily sleep anywhere, take risks and rely on our seemingly limitless supply of luck without getting uptight or take ourselves seriously. I really can’t imagine a better person to be traveling with.

Also, walking around with a female friend (however platonic) seems to be really good prostitute-repellant. Much better than our mosquito repellant, which apparently makes us smell like mosquito prostitutes. We’re going to look like pin cushions when we wake up.

Tomorrow we take a taxi-brousse to Vatomandry to start our placement. It will apparently take about 8 hours to get there in the blazing midday heat, in a large vehicle carrying many other passengers. We’ll have all our main luggage with us too, so it’s probably going to be about as comfortable and fun as kissing a floor-level plug socket. I’m a closet claustrophobic, you know, which is a great way of describing it because it sets me up any one of several truly hilarious puns.

I’m loving it here. Although we don’t understand anything, haven’t got a clue what’s going on and are literally wandering around in the third world without a map or a word of the local language, we’re so excited by everything and bizarrely comfortable in our new temporary life that it doesn’t seem to matter. If we can handle this while laughing and smiling, then we can pretty much handle anything. And that idea’s so liberating.

So the eight-hour Tana → Vatomandry journey. I had no particular expectations about this, other than that it would probably take about twelve hours. (Mora-mora, they say, ‘slowly-slowly’, beaming affectionately at you as if you’re too simple to understand such a concept – but luckily for me, I’ve been living my whole life in a similarly chaotic vein so I’m perfectly at ease. Equally bizarre, I suppose, is how horrified commuters in London look the tube’s going to be arriving in six minutes instead of the originally estimated four. Different worlds or what?)

Anyway. The drive might have lasted eight hours or it might not. I don’t really know – I haven’t known even roughly what time of day it is since last saturday. It didn’t actually matter in the end – all I remember is that it was an extraordinary journey. Madagascar is magnificent. Magnificent, magnificent. We were travelling really quickly along these roads which snaked crazily around the terrain and at every bend the hedge-growth would curve away to reveal the view behind it, a bit like a French waiter standing at every bend saying ‘et voila!’ and whisking away a top-cloth to uncover the MOST AMAZING LANDSCAPE EVER. At one point it was so beautiful that my mind stopped being able to process how happy it was making me feel and I nearly burst into tears – embarrassing, but true. If I die on this trip, I thought to myself, as articulated lorries slung themselves at us around every bend at horn-blaringly, impossibly tight angles, that would be really annoying at this point because I’ve never been so aware of how much there is to see. Like, I had no idea that Madagascar looked like this. Imagine what other countries might look like! But then our driver changed the cassette, Chris de Burgh started blaring into my right ear, and I thought, sod that. Kill me.

Now we’re in Vatomandry although we’ve only really seen it at night. (In Madagascar, it goes like this: daydaydaysunshinelovelydaybrightsunnydaydaydayNIGHT, BAM. Ohno! QUICK, mosquito spray, quickly quickly, spraysprayspray, choke, pass out.) My impression so far though is that it seems a lot safer, calmer and more relaxed than Tana.. but funnily enough I’m feeling more anxious than usual. Not anxious in the horrible, slightly irrational way that people feel anxious. It’s more a feeling of being restless, or being anxious ‘to’.. I don’t know. See what Vatomandry looks like during the day? Actually teach some children something? BE in Madagascar?

I don’t know. I’m not even sure I’m forming proper sentences anymore, which, it has to be said, doesn’t bode well for my new life as an English teacher. I’ll try to be a bit more coherent in my next attempt at the blog.

I’m not really sure how to describe where we’re living. Imagine going into some woods, walking for about a million years and eventually stumbling upon an derelict old outhouse. It’s inhabited by some very well-spoken but slightly deranged squatters. One of them is blowing up a balloon for no obvious reason. The other is taking swigs of tea from a vase while rambling about how they’ve been living there for over ten years. They have a hat, two scarecrow puppets, a lot of dry shampoo and not really much else. That’s us. We’re those squatters. If you were to address a letter to me, it would have to read: ‘Someone’s shed, next to some pigs, Vatomandry, Madagascar’ .

A goose stood and watched me brush my teeth this morning. He was about a metre away from me and looked very solemn. I looked at him for a while and thought: wow. This couldn’t be weirder. Then I spat out my toothpaste onto the grass and went back into the ‘kitchen’. When I say ‘kitchen’, what I mean is.. everywhere that isn’t our beds. Actually, a lot of very normal words seem to have become euphemisms. ‘Shower’ means cranking some cold water out of the water pump into a bucket, taking it into a nearby shack and sluicing myself with Radox Green Tea Infusion Wellbeing Shower Gel using a massive cube-sponge thing. ‘Shelves’ means the bizarre contraption Liam made for the ‘kitchen’ out of a cardboard box and some masking tape. ‘Dinner’ means five Salticrax biscuits followed by a Nice biscuit dipped in jam. ‘My hair’ means AARGH. ‘Toilet’ means WHAAAAAT?! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

Simple life my arse. Well, obviously, the Malagasy people have no problems with it. They just go merrily about their daily business, eating their rice and horrific, sub-standard meat, smiling and waving at each other, shooing away the occasional mosquito. We, on the other hand, are completely flummoxed by literally everything. Every tiny act requires a thousand times more consideration. We’re having to be resourceful and ingenious just to figure out how to make a cup of tea. (The process, which takes about half an hour to complete, involves the water pump, a gas canister, a soggy match and some teabags we stole from the transit hotel in Johannesburg. Although actually, this morning we tried some Malagasy tea. Powerful. I’m a big fan.)

Meanwhile, the Dodwell Trust team continue to try to be supportive. They’ve given us about six different bunches of keys so that we can lock and unlock a variety of nearby shacks for absolutely no obvious reason other than it might be quite entertaining. They’ve also given us a box full of ‘useful supplies’, including ketchup, vinegar, spices and iron wool. Christina Dodwell seems to have failed to understand that, in a situation where I barely even have a front door, ketchup is of absolutely no value to me. This morning, Eleo popped around to ‘say hello before she left’, which turned out to mean use our stove to cook some fish, fanny about bit with the water pump, teach us some Malagasy phrases and leave. So now our house smells of fish and every single fly in Madagascar is buzzing around in it, but at least we know how to say ‘I am an English teacher’.

So, today. Feeling that our diet of Salticrax and jam would probably need supplementing at some point, we got up at 5am this morning to get to the market for 6am and achieved two tomatoes, two shallots, some chick peas and a baguette. As for the rest of the day, we plan to go to the beach, do an English club, break into Kenji’s house and use his actual working flushing toilet, find an internet cafe, buy some Malagasy wine, drink it and pass out by about 9pm.

Luckily, we’ve both discovered a talent for improvisational living so we’re perfectly happy with the arrangement. We’ll be here for the next week and all of October so I’m sure by the time we get to Ampefy we’ll be Bear Grylls-like rainforest people, living off insect meat, extracting our orange juice from tree bark and wantonly killing buffalo for sport.

What an amaz

I got cut off there because a flying monster that probably doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world just buzzed right at me and I had to do an emergency dive onto my bed so I could peer at it from the safety of my mosquito net. How pathetic. It looked like.. imagine a small chunk of very sparkly emerald, but with wings, and a really stupid face. A bit like that.

Erm. What an amazing place, I was going to say. I thought I’d get used to it really quickly and stop being so astonished by every tiny thing but it looks like there’s no chance of that. I’ve actually had to start keeping a list of ‘things to remember to write about’ because it feels like every five minutes something extraordinary happens. I’ve never seen fireflies before, for example. They also have a giant fruit here, called a word that sounds like ‘Jacques’ or ‘Jack’, that looks like a massive beach ball but with green scaly lizard skin. The fruit inside’s made up of pale yellow fleshy layers which taste like somewhere in between a banana and a mango. A banango! I’m a big fan. A big fango.

ANYWAY. Today we arrived at the Ecole Technique where Liam, startled, was led away and found himself improvising an entire grammar lesson for a room full of blank-faced adults. Liam hasn’t slept for three days. Sad times.

I, meanwhile, had an outrageously fun lesson with the primary school children. I love them. We played the ‘Go To’ game, which I’d improvised in the previous lesson, where I say ‘Go to the door!’ and we all run to the door, or ‘Go to the window!’ and we all run to the window (except that one of them had brought along her two-year-old sister, who just toddled about arbitrarily) but, as I had discovered last time, after ‘chair’ and ‘table’ you realise that there’s literally nothing else in the room. I switched to the ‘How Many?’ Game – but frankly, apart from eight windows, one door, and four walls, there weren’t ‘many’ of anything and it was definitely time for a new game.

Luckily, in my mad pre-leaving-London rush to fling as many Things For Kids into a suitcase as I possibly could, I’d randomly included a bag of Dolly Mixture and some Liquorice Allsorts, so ‘How Many Sweets?’ was born. It was a hit. It’s sweeping the nation. When I lifted the bag of sweets up for everyone to see, pointed at them and said ‘SWEETS’, a reverent hush fell over the room. The baby’s mouth fell open as she pointed and whispered ‘wee’. They were all thinking, as one, so intensely that I was practically reading it from a thought bubble above their heads: ‘Do we dare to hope that if we count enough of the sweets we might, maybe, one day be allowed to eat one?’ I nearly burst into tears and flew them all back to England. But, as Liam and I discussed later, if they were English kids they would have wolfed all the sweets down immediately and wondered why the next bag was taking so long to appear. I also remembered what Dad had said about how once during his childhood in India a foreigner came to visit their village and handed out Italian sweets, and it was probably the most exciting event of the year. Anyway, once 1 to 10 had been duly boshed, I handed out a sweet to each of the children. They were so happy. I felt like Jesus. Now, every single child and parent in Madagascar knows that the daft-looking foreign girl has English sweets and sometimes, if you count them in English, she gives them to you. It couldn’t be better.

After the lesson, we saw the beach for the first time. Vatomandry is basically a quite pretty, mostly dusty shanty town and to be honest I think we thought that the word ‘beach’ would turn out to be another euphemism (like in England). Also, since arriving here we’ve been so busy doing things like working out how to purify water, burn mosquito coils and boil an egg without setting fire to ourselves that it hadn’t really occurred to us to go and have a look. But like Liam said, it’s Amazing Paradise Land. White sand, crashing waves, palm trees. Like Mauritius, but no tourism, so no sunbeds, no Europeans, no merchandise, nothing. Just the beach. Madagascar is outstanding.

So if you can be bothered to get to Antananarivo (via EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD, if you fly with Air Kenya) and then sit in a taxi-brousse for eight hours to Vatomandry there’s a lovely little hotel right near the beach. Come and visit us!

ps. Sorry about these unfocused, tour-de-force posts. We still haven’t found the internet cafe (or we might have, yesterday, but their electricity was down.. I think that’s what they were saying anyway) so there’s a sort of a Things To Tell You backlog. Hopefully the blog will become more readable as we settle down and start to post things more regularly. But probably not.