Liam and Nish in numbers.

Times Nish has been bitten by a mosquito: 52
Times Liam has been bitten by anything: 1

Mofo akondro Nish has eaten: 43
Times Nish has had food poisoning: 2
Nems Liam has eaten: 430
Times Liam has had food poisoning: 2

Arguments: 1
Arguments that weren’t about honey: 0

Times Nish has been locked in the Ampefy toilet: 2
Dead insects in the Ampefy toilet: 8,000

Ants we washed off our peanut caramel brittle before eating it: 45
Giant spiders seen: 400

Times Nish has washed her hair: 16
Times Liam has washed his hands: 900

Fadys committed: 3
Experiences so horrific that we haven’t blogged about them: 1

Times Liam has eaten fish: 0
Times Liam has considered not staying vegetarian: 0

Times Nish has eaten meat: 0
Times Nish has considered staying vegetarian: 0

English songs Liam’s students have been taught: 13
Songs Liam has played on Malagasy radio: 2

Radio scripts Nish wrote less than an hour before recording: 4

Times one of us has suggested going home early: 0
Times one of us has suggested never returning: about 50

Jars of jam boshed: 10

Bags of sweets we have bought for the children: 4
…and then eaten ourselves in “dark times”: 3

Journeys in a taxi brousse: 14
Total hours spent in a taxi brousse: 48

Malagasy songs that aren’t utter, utter rubbish: 3

Oh my goodness, there’s a volcano.

Yeah, those of you with the benefits of Google Earth and wikipedia will probably be chuckling, but without an internet connection or anybody in the whole town who speaks English, we had to work it out for ourselves.

The revelation came as we were walking to Le Lac Itasy Tourist Centre, a beautiful English stone farmhouse 5km from Ampefy which has been painstakingly built over the past six years by Derek, a business lecturer from Plymouth. His wife Fleur is Malagasy, and at some point they decided to move the whole family (including dog and two kids) from Chorlton to Madagascar and build a restaurant and give guided tours to French and English tourists. Hell of an effort, we thought as we walked for an hour in the painful 7am heat.

We’d decided to go on a guided tour to “the crater” and some kind of “secret grotto” on our last weekend, because even though it was expensive it was one of those Nice Things To Do, and it sounded Christmassy. Because Derek’s family only moved from England 3 years ago, we could also pretty much guarantee that whoever took us on the walk would be fluent in English and able to answer any questions we had, which was massively convenient seeing as nobody else in the whole of goddamn Madagascar can. As we walked in the steam past the sweeping landscapes and epic mountains, Nish wondered aloud what could possibly have landed to make a crater… and it happened. Suddenly I remembered the comment made by her father on the blog, and that a volcanic bowl was also called a crater, and that this made so much more sense than an alien landing site and Nish’s family being absolutely insane. And there, after a month and a half in Ampefy, we finally realised that we lived right next to a large volcano. Fail.

The owner of the guest house Derek wasn’t home… and hadn’t been home for almost a year. You see, shortly after moving the family to Madagascar he lost his university job in the UK and he had to find another one. Since he had a large building project to continue and the Ariary is so weak it was never really an option to get a job in Madagascar, so he’s currently in South Korea, sending money home and spending a fortune cookie on international phonecalls.

Derek’s 15-year-old son Michael took us on the walk, and what a lovely kid he is. He’s very confident, cocky and self-assured, clued up on current affairs and full of useful information about Madagascar and the local area. His accent is lovely, and he’s read Lord of the Rings cover to cover about 7 times. As we walked, he told us that there used to be a large lake in the middle of the volcanic crater, and that locals believed that a 50ft mantaray used to live there and eat any birds that sat on his back. Scientists were dragged over, but no evidence of the monster-ray has ever been found. Michael was sceptical. Nish and I nodded, whispering to each other about how well grounded and mature he was.

But then we asked him what he did for fun around here. He complained that the church in Ampefy was rubbish, but that he’d found a great one in Tana that was orchestrated by some famous miracle worker who cured cancer and even brought two people back from the dead. I checked his face for any sarcasm, but no. He assured me that he only believed it after he’d seen proof – the man had produced videos showing the miracles and now he had a ludicrous following, and he has to hold his Sunday services in the cinema as it’s the only place big enough. Two thousand people show up, for seven services staggered during the day.

He also told us a lot about Madagascar in general. The new president is widely criticised because he’s done very little for the country, destabilised the currency, discouraged tourism and accidentally stopped funding from overseas. Because it was a military coup, the Americans don’t want anything to do with Madagascar, Norway (I think) have refused to pay back a large debt and the EU have stopped funding the anti-corruption and aid agencies.

Corruption does seem rife – often the Gendarme stop our taxi brousses and glance at the driver’s papers… Michael tells us that this only really happens when they are taking bribes. There are regulations on the amount of people you can fit into a taxi brousse – 4 per row (of 3 seats). We’ve been on taxi brousses with far more than that crammed in. But a license is the only thing that distinguishes a taxi brousse driver from a starving homeless fruit seller, so it makes sense that the gendarme would be reluctant to take it away… these people are too poor to pay fines.

It was so, so hot, and neither of us had done any serious exercise for about five weeks. So after twenty minutes or so when we got to the top of the crater, Nish looked just about ready to pass out. Michael pointed to a towering peak in the distance, and told us that we were going to climb up it. We nodded. It figured.

Another hour and a half of walking in the increasing heat, playing “spot the poisonous African spiders” and watching Nish slipping onto her ass every two minutes. But when we arrived at the summit we were greeted by outstanding views for miles, miles and more miles. It just went on forever in every direction. I took a few photographs, but they can’t really do it justice.

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Pretty, innit.

We returned about four hours later, to find Derek’s wife Fleur worried sick about Michael, who never usually goes out in peak sunlight despite being half-Malagasy. Apparently people are supposed to stay inside between the hours of 11am and 3pm for their own safety, which would have been a nice thing for someone to tell vampire-white-Liam about three months ago. You’re all going to hell.

Anyway, Fleur is outstanding. She loves the English, so she chatted to us about Manchester and gave us a nice discount on everything. I carefully pried into her past, and it was fascinating… born in poverty in Madagascar, she studied really hard, got her degree in English, and became an English teacher. The government of the time sent the top teachers in the country to Plymouth to get another degree in English and brush up on their accents, and she was one of the lucky few chosen. She met Derek there, who fell for her instantly and proposed straight after university so that she could get her visa. It’s a beautiful story. As a result, she stayed in England for another fifteen years or so before returning to Madagascar, which means that her spoken English is incredible.

It also means that the Malagasy have been without a good English teacher for fifteen years… which really, really does show. I mean, before we got here the kids didn’t even know who Bill Bailey was.

My Chinese birthday.

I woke up at 6am thinking about the fact that I was 24 years old. It was a really good thought, mostly because yesterday Liam had pointed out that 24 is a massive birthday for the Chinese (it’s two times twelve, which is how many months there are in the year.. or something – edit: apparently that’s really not it, but whatever), and I’ve never had a lucky Chinese birthday before! Apart from when I was 12, and I didn’t know about it then. So I rolled out of bed and into the kitchen, where Liam threw some balloons at me and gave me a card he’d made with an outstanding illustration of me as a ninja on the front (inspired by the fact that a few days previously I had swiped loads of lychees from the tree outside the Kavitaha hotel in broad daylight, stuffed them in my swimming bag and run away). And then we downed a couple of rum cocktails and deep-fried the fortune cookies we’d prepared for each other yesterday in honour of my Chinese birthday. Mine said:

You will accidentally kill Ben Elton in a freak hot air balloon accident, accidentally by accident. You will go into hiding, join Liam in Thailand and become a world-class pastry chef.

which, deep down, I’d always known anyway. Then, we cracked open the face paints I’d brought with me and engaged in some extremely intricate face art (I had a star and a squiggle, and Liam had red and blue war stripes) and then we both slapped a load of gold star stickers all over ourselves, discussed how gay Liam looked and went to our morning class. Two hours later, about 40 kids had stars, squiggles and butterflies all over their faces, all the other teachers had joined in, and we were basically all having a ridiculously fun time.

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edit: Look at the smiling girl with the pretty yellow star on her cheek. That was me. Look at the depressed little boy at the bottom of the photo with the glasses, Craig David goatee and grotesque spider on his head. That was Liam. What a disgrace.

Really not bad for some utterly crap face paints that I won in an arcade in Blackpool last summer. Then again, if your two favourite toys are an old bicycle tyre and an avocado on a string, getting your face painted is bound to rank up there on a short-list of Best Days Ever. Little do they know that we’re planning to make crepes for all 76 children on our last day. Not really sure how though, since we’re down to our last few hundred ariary and we have no flour or eggs, or milk.. so we might have to live off guacamole from now until Tana. Luckily, I’m a big fan of guacamole. I’m also not sure how I’m still only halfway through relaying my birthday fun and I’m talking about guacamole for literally no reason. So anyway.

After that, Liam brought his guitar down and we taught all the kids ‘Insect Nation’, because it’s widely believed in some parts of China that it’s unlucky not to teach a classroom full of 8 year old Malagasy children at least one song by Bill Bailey on your Chinese birthday.

Definitely, definitely, a lot more entertaining for us than it was for the kids, who had absolutely no idea what was going on – but the teachers, especially Mario and Luigi, whose real names we’ll never actually know, absolutely loved it. We ended up writing out all the lyrics and teaching them the entire song, and in return, they taught us an outrageously cheesy Malagasy song about friendship and owning a whistle, or something. Bit weird, but then again, not as weird SPIDERS. ARE NOT INSECTS. So we over-enthusiastically boshed our way through the lyrics anyway and they seemed delighted. Except then, about half an hour into our lovely sing-along we remembered that we were all of the teachers in the Dodwell Centre and all the kids had therefore been left unattended with all my face paints, acrylics, paintbrushes and jars of water. Fail. But at least the kids know the English words for the colours they smeared all over the classroom walls, which is the main thing.

Later, while making a leek and potato soup (in my opinion, the king of soups) I got a happy birthday phone call from mum, who was about to de-ice the car before going to work. De-ice, I thought. Oh yeah! Cold weather! It seemed silly to think about it, since I was covered in sun cream, sweating and sitting next to my electric fan. My summer started in June and won’t end until mid-December, next week.. so I do remember cold weather, but only in the way people ‘remember’ the ’80s – as in, not really. Though I’m sure I’ll remember it clearly enough when I get to Heathrow next week, step out of the plane, my flip-flop hits a massive pool of icy water and I suddenly can’t feel my entire face. Bleak.

In the afternoon, we dressed all the tiny kids up in all my clothes and they performed the nativity play that they’d been practising all week. The script went like this:

Angel Gabriel: You are going to have a baby. His name is Jesus.

Mary: (at the inn) I would like to sleep.
Joseph: Do you have a room?
Innkeeper: I do not have a room.

Mary and Joseph walk to the manger. Star guides wise men to the manger.

Wise men: We have presents for Jesus.
Shepherd: I have clothes for Jesus.

And they they all sang Silent Night. The whole thing lasted about 30 seconds.

When it was finally his time to shine, Joseph, who had been diligently and relentlessly saying his line, ‘Do you have a room?’ over and over to himself and everyone around him for the past three days, forgot to say it and said Mary’s line instead, and Mary was extremely cross. And the star forgot to appear. Other than that though, Liam and I think it went beautifully. A stellar cast and some fine co-directing on our parts – a stunning interpretation of a classic story. We’ll upload the video next week.

So yeah, what a birthday. And now it’s only two weeks until Christmas! YAY.

Our adventure to Ambositra (sort of pronounced ‘Am-boos-ch’).

Liam and I decided that a holiday was in order. Aren’t you already basically on holiday? you’re asking, and I’m not even going to dignify that question with an answer. The point is that for quite some time now our weekends have been cursed. It’s either because we blasphemed against the church service in Vatomandry or because Charcoal Witch hexed us both when she poisoned me in Tana. We’ll never know which it is, but either way, it means that something absolutely disastrous happens every Sunday.

Sunday 1: Tana. I am in excruciating pain and being force-fed hot bananas with a spoon, leaving Liam alone with the witch. (It occurred to us recently that this was also Halloween, which is exactly appropriate).

Sunday 2: I nearly die of heat exhaustion on a bike that says ‘Nicebike – GOODLUCK’ on it.

Sunday 3: Tana. Liam is ill. The taxi-brousse journey back is long and hot and uncomfortable and we are both exhausted. When we get to our house, we discover that a man called Francis has locked all of our doors and taken the only keys back to Tana with him, and so we sit in a classroom, on the floor, in the dark, waiting for someone to bring the keys back. For four long hours.

Sunday 4: A four-hour walk in the blazing heat. We commit a Virgin Mary-related fady and anger a local.

And that brings me all the way to this weekend, when we were in desperate need of a change of scene. Anyway, way, way back when we used to live in your so-called “England”, we received an email from Christina telling us that when we got to this so-called “Madagascar” we were going to be sent to Vatomandry and then Ambositra. It was only when we arrived here that Madame Noroso descended upon us with all this ‘you are needed in Ampefy!’ business, which was fine by us. Ambositra, Ampefy… same thing. But at the same time, we were slightly disappointed only because Ambositra had been described by Christina as the ‘arts and crafts capital’ of Madagascar, and the place to find wooden carvings and woven baskets and other Interesting Things – and since Liam and I are both planning to leave all of our clothes and toiletries here, we basically have three empty suitcases to fill with crap like that – so what we decided to do was to spend a long weekend there shopping and generally being tourists.

It kind of had to be a long weekend, because it would involve going to Tana (a 3 hour journey), staying overnight there, and then getting from Tana to Ambositra (a 6 hour journey) on Friday, spending Saturday actually exploring the place, and then doing the whoooooole journey back across Sunday and Monday. So… four days of travelling for one day of holiday. Hmm. It doesn’t make as much sense now as it did at the time. Or maybe it does, because when we finally got there we absolutely loved it. Shopping! Being tourists! Hooray!

Actually, the first wonderful thing about Ambositra was that we were staying in the Dodwell accommodation there, and the contact people were so welcoming: Madame Georgette, a huge big lady, the sort who likes to feed people – and her husband Francais, the sort whose sole objective in life seems to be to approve of everything you say and do and generally look at you kindly. When we first arrived on Friday night, cold and wet and disorientated, they ushered us into their house, cooked dinner for us, gave us mangoes, and made sure that we had all the right keys for our rooms and that we settled in comfortably. We even ate with them again the following evening, and they made us promise to send them postcards showing where we lived, because they have a collection of postcards from past volunteers. They showed it to us – three postcards, all from Keswick. Bit weird.

Anyway, the next morning we were up at 6am, ariary at the ready and raring to go. After wandering about for a while in the never-ending labyrinth of fresh-fruit-and-vegetable-lined streets and coming to terms with the fact that there was no art there at all and it had all been a hideous lie, we were finally directed towards the only road we hadn’t been down yet and there they were: lovely little craft shops full of handmade Interesting Things (or as Liam called it, the Motherload) which we could pick up and admire, and compare with each other, and then put down, and then pick up again, and then put down. I think we did that for the entire morning and most of the afternoon, and then we made friends with a guide who took us on a lovely tour of the workshops in the surrounding villages. So that was Saturday – a fantastic day, and a definite win for Team Vatomandry.

But then it was Sunday. We were aiming to find a taxi-brousse at about 6am, so at 5am I struggled out of bed – I hadn’t actually slept at all because the bed was so shoddy (so much so that I think the shape of my spine has permanently altered) so I was already stiff and achy and we hadn’t even got into the taxi-brousse yet. But when Liam emerged from his room, ashen-faced and haunted, it quickly became obvious that whatever had happened to him last night, it had been far, far worse than my trivial backache issues. He drifted absently alongside me as we shuffled down the road and flagged down a taxi-brousse, and then, about ten minutes after we’d got into one, he got back out again and threw up. It didn’t bode well for the rest of the journey. Nearly eight hours of sitting in a cramped over-heated taxi-brouse, contorted into impossible positions and struggling to breathe, while Liam threw up exactly the amount of times for the number of plastic bags we happened to have (outstanding effort), until we eventually arrived back in Tana. Bleak.

It took a few hours of lying down and recovering before we were able to communicate ideas to each other with words again. Luckily, those ideas were: go to internet cafe, find restaurant, see funny side, all of which we swiftly did and felt loads better.

I feel all Christmassy now. I didn’t think I would because of the tropical climate and total lack of any hype here, but:

• It was quite cold in Ambositra at night and in the early morning, and when we were walking through the village at 5:30am there was a heavy white mist hanging over everything, spiders’ webs draped and glittering all across everything, and it looked so ethereal and beautiful. All it needed was a little boy to emerge out of the fog with a candle and start singing ‘Once in Royal David City’ – but none appeared, so I just hummed it to myself contentedly while Liam vomited all over a bush.

• We’ve done a lot of our Christmas shopping now, which is always very exciting.

• The Shoprite in Tana has its decorations up AND a Christmas tree! It turns out that Malagasy Christmases are basically exactly the same as ours, except without all the tacky crap (and people get strangely excited about wearing new shoes to church). It’s ideal. I can’t say I’m sorry to have missed the three months of irritating Christmas songs and festive M&S adverts back in the UK… but sometimes you just really appreciate seeing some tinsel in a shop. So I came out of the Shoprite yesterday clutching my freshly-baked baguette and brimming over with Christmas spirit.

• Ever since Philip mentioned them in an email, all I can think about is mince pies. Especially because he said ‘I’m eating a mince pie – but you probably don’t want to know about that because you can’t have one. Sorry.’ So yeah. No presents for Philip.

Now it’s Monday, and we’re about to head back to Ampefy. Not massively excited about the prospect of sitting on yet another sodding taxi-brousse for the best part of the day, again, but what can you do. Only two weeks before we come back to Tana for the last time! Aaarrgh!

‘L’îlots de la vierge’, and our first fady.

As soon as we stepped foot into Ampefy, Jean-Andre had earmarked this Saturday as the day he would escort us, en voiture, to ‘L’îlots de la vierge’. We were very excited. We didn’t know what ‘L’îlots de la vierge’ meant, but we were very excited. Jean-Andre tried to explain it to me by flailing his arms about and saying ‘OUI, OUI, LE SONCH DE MADAGASCAR!’ – which I took to be French and translated it, generously, as ‘centre of Madagascar’, only because I vaguely remembered Christina mentioning something about day-trips and the ‘geographical heart of Madagascar’ – so, putting deux and deux together, I concluded that l’îlots de la vierge must be in the middle of Madagascar – which didn’t really shed much light on the matter, because that’s basically all I knew about where we were anyway. So it was a mystery. It didn’t matter though; the main thing was that we were going by car, and so we didn’t have to walk.

Jean-Andre turned out not to have a car. Liam and I nodded sadly, as if we had known it deep down all along, and started walking. And walking, and walking. We walked down the main road, through a shaded little passageway, past some haricot bean fields, past some sugar cane fields, past some cornfields (stopping at every avocado tree so that Jean-Andre could point out yet another avocado to us and we could notice how unremarkable it was compared to the last one), through a small village, along raised paths carved into the rice-fields, and up a long, long dusty red road that spiralled around a massive hill until, two hours later, right at the summit we reached a monument with a creepy white statue of the Virgin Mary slapped on top.

And there we were. In a haze of heat-exhaustion and confusion, Liam and I slowly deduced that whatever ‘l’îlots de la vierge’ was, we had just completed some sort of pilgrimage to it. Unsure of what to make of the situation but realising that the views were spectacular, we climbed the stairs to the top of the monument, took some photos of Mary, and us, and the views, and the views and us, and the views and Mary, and then one of just Mary, because she was obviously loving it – and that’s when we finally found out what a fady looks like.

A Malagasy farmer with the Rage. He appeared out of nowhere – and I mean, literally out of nowhere, as if he had been War of the Worlds-style buried underground waiting to emerge and destroy us – and starting sprinting towards the monument, screaming and spitting and shaking his fists and gesticulating wildly about. It was scary. I shuffled nonchalantly behind Jean-Andre and pretended not to notice, but eventually Enraged Local had sprinted up the steps of the monument and started directing his torrent of Malagasy hatred right into Jean-Andre’s face so it had become quite hard to ignore. At this point, I was genuinely convinced that a fight was about to break out and that it was definitely going to involve some Bollywood-style dubbed and slightly out-of-synch sound effect punches being exchanged, then Jean-Andre losing his balance, toppling backwards in slow-motion and plunging to an untimely death in the rice-field below- so I shuffled nonchalantly behind Liam and wondered how to call an ambulance in a town that has no hospital. Or phones.

But Jean-Andre, who probably wouldn’t be moved to violence even if we set fire to one of his children, just stood there serenely as he was being showered with spit and abuse, nodding with interest from time to time as if he was on a guided tour and learning about the history of his local town. In fact, all four of us – me, Liam, Jean-Andre and the Virgin Mary – just stood quietly and waited for the Rage to subside. Finally, it seemed that Jean-Andre realised that since this was going to go on for some time, we may as well head back to the Dodwell Centre and have a mango (there would be plenty of time to get back to Enraged Local later in the day). We edged towards the steps, executed a swift getaway back down the hill, and for the first hour of the walk back we could still hear Enraged Local bellowing at us in the distance. Sometimes I think I can still hear him.

I actually enjoyed the walk back very much, especially all beautiful colours around me, the brilliant reds and yellows of the exotic flowers, the acres and acres of bright green rice fields, the vibrant pink and ever deepening hue of Liam’s shoulders and upper arms. Meanwhile, Jean-Andre tried to explain what we had done wrong, if anything, but we were completely unable to understand him. Something about paying money, or not paying money, and that he’d have to write a report and send it via Tana to the Catholic Church in Andasibe… it was all totally incomprehensible, but then we saw a chameleon in the road and I think an Unforgettable Moments in Madagascar montage would probably have to end with this: Jean-Andre, registering our excitement, ushered the chameleon onto a branch, snatched the branch up and then held it in front of Liam’s camera. The extraordinary image of lovely old Jean-Andre standing there in the middle of the road, patiently holding up a branch with a chameleon on it, wondering how he was going to explain our fady to the Catholic church. It’ll make me smile forever.

So I still don’t know what our fady actually was, or even what ‘l’ilots de la vierge’ was supposed to be. But look, a chameleon!

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Oooooooh.

More food poisoning in Tana. Kinda.

What a fantastic weekend in Tana. After grabbing yoghurt, we jumped into a blistering taxi brousse headed in the right direction, taking our seats in front of a rooster in a bag. I was starting to feel wrenching stomach cramps again, and I promised myself that I’d take it easy for the rest of the day.

By taking it easy, I apparently meant eating cake and large pizzas, drinking beer and going to the zoo. On some level I probably figured that it would sort me out.

It briefly did. The zoo was great. The highlight had to be the Maki- they’re the little lemur-like things that you can see licking us inappropriately in the previous zoo post- the attendants smeared us with honey and encouraged us to pose for photographs, and then didn’t even charge us when they realised that we were volunteers. We were totally made up – we usually pay obscene amounts of money to be smeared with honey and licked back in the UK. We also had successful trips to the internet café and the supermarket, buying stock cubes and jam, and got some really nice food from the place that probably gave us food poisoning last time. And it didn’t give us food poisoning this time. Things couldn’t be better.

But then came Black Sunday. It started innocently enough – in the morning we found the most amazing patisserie ever built; a beautiful French-inspired place off an expensive hotel, which served almond croissants so delicate that we almost cried. But then the internet cafés were all closed so we couldn’t do any of the million things we’d meant to do while in Tana, and a few frustratingly empty-handed journeys to the shop later we found ourselves on a taxi brousse which seemed to be going everywhere apart from Ampefy.

The journey took anywhere from two hours to fourteen hours- we have no real idea, but it seemed like forever. I hadn’t slept well at all, and the morning’s frustrations had succeeded in sapping every last drop of energy from Nish too… so when we got back and realised that a Dodwell agent had visited to fix our water, managing to lock us out of our house and take the keys with him back to Tana, we were just about ready to cry.

So we spent the afternoon and evening failing to sleep in Jean André’s pitch black shed, with Nish being ravaged by midges and mosquitos and me once again feeling a little bit left out of the insect-action. At some point we had the awesome joint idea of eating all the sweets we’d bought for the children and watching Alien on my Creative Zen, which partially allayed the pain of the experience. Eventually we got inside to realise that although the water had technically been “fixed”, it was still temperamental as all hell and it was now an unappetising brown colour. We theatrically wrote the day off as Black Sunday, and stormed off to bed in a sulk.

By Monday my stomach cramps had eased up slightly, and after some quick elimination we decided that it was probably the yoghurt that we were having every morning in Ampefy that was causing my pain. So, being a man of Science, I suggested that I would carry on eating it to see if I got any worse.

Imagine my delight when I did! Monday night – not good. Tuesday night – really not good. By Wednesday I felt like I’d proven my case. I was in lots and lots of hypothesis-proving pain. Increasing pain. I stopped eating the yoghurt, stopped teaching and concentrated on lying in bed and not walking towards the white light for the next 48 hours.

For those that haven’t yet experienced the joys of severe food poisoning, I’ll try to describe it. Imagine (bear with me) that you’re lying in hospital, and due to some horrendous mix-up a surgeon has managed to replace your stomach with a rusty car exhaust. Your morphine has run out and the hospital staff are all on holiday somewhere really nice, and only getting back on Tuesday.

OK, now imagine that instead of a nice clean hospital, you’re in Madagascar. You are going to die, and nobody here can even pronounce your name. Many doctors here think that the cure for a scorpion bite is a dead scorpion floating in alcohol and that if one walks all the way around your stomach then you’ll perish instantly. If you get flu, then a witch probably did it. God knows what the traditional cure is for food poisoning – probably dead yoghurt floating in alcohol. Or charcoal.

At some point on Thursday Jean André (or “The Watchman” as Penelope calls him – how cool is that?) came in, looking at me with a deep, desperate sadness. He often wears the look of a man who once drunkenly bet his house on the results of our “Did You Enjoy Your Stay in Ampefy?” questionnaire, and a single tick in the “not satisfactory” column from either of us will put him and his family out onto the streets. He asked me how I was, and I smiled from my bed and tried to say I’d be okay. But he speaks little or no English, and my French was probably even less convincing than my cheesy grin. He shook his head sadly and stumbled out again, wondering what I’d said, perhaps, or what he was going to tell his children when he was evicted by the big guys at the pub.

By Friday I was a little better, and just preparing to venture outside when Penelope came in and told us that Madamn Noroso from the Dodwell Trust had heard that I was unwell and had dropped everything to come and take me back to Tana. By force, if necessary. Sod that, I said – she’s a little old lady, I can take her. There wasn’t a chance I was going to sit on a dodgy taxi brousse for two hours just so I could sit in a dodgy Malagasy hospital all night just so I could be given the same sodding dodgy antibiotics I could just get from the pharmacy down the road. Especially on cocktail Friday.

Also, the last time we met this woman she whirled around like a squat witch and lectured Nish on the finer aspects of housewifery, berating her for not taking the bins out and minor things like that as if they revealed serious character flaws which she should be deeply ashamed of. The idea of having her around the house all weekend was one that neither of us relished. I didn’t have any credit on my phone to stop the incoming Dodwell brigade, so as if to prove a point I hobbled up the road towards the centre of town to buy some. Jean André chased up to meet me with wide, panicked eyes, concern painted on his face as if I was playing with a large active bomb.

Fortunately, I had already locked the front door when she arrived. Keen not to disturb us, Jean André fetched a ladder and scaled up to our balcony before politely knocking, which probably bought us an hour or so of preparation time. Nish used the available minutes to drink half a bottle of beer and smash the rest of it on the floor, and I lay very still listening to Sigur Ros and feeling as though angels were coming down to collect me. But by the time I answered the door, I had gathered enough energy to pretend I was on the verge of a miraculous 48-hour recovery. Madamn Noroso was obviously impressed with my amateur dramatics, and decided not to force me into the waiting car against my will. Instead, she gave us biscuits and then left us alone, laughing pleasantly and talking very kind nonsense.

Since then I’ve been gathering my strength and plotting my revenge against yoghurt everywhere. Although today I went on a four-hour walk in the blazing day heat to the geographical centre of Madagascar, so I’m evidently not very ill anymore.

Just burnt. Horribly burnt.