23 May – Lunch at Paradise (Tuléar - Ifaty)

This was the day that Solof headed back to Tana and I dealt with details and learned to vacation with no car.  Our first stop was the bank, where I was quickly served and changed more $$$, and then I went over to Air Mad to reconfirm tomorrow’s flight.  That took two minutes.  Why aren’t things always this simple?  We then had to extend Solof’s car insurance as the owner of the car hadn’t done it and Solof had to buy his way out of the roadblock that caught that.  I watched some children dancing in front of a little music shop while Solof did the insurance thing.

I had the hotel hire me a 4WD car for a trip to Ifaty and the Reniala Preserve which is just north of it.  I had a friendly, toothy driver who showed up promptly, and we headed up the state road.  Not much of a road.  In fact, it was so bad that most vehicles drove beside it in the dust when they could because the dust was softer than negotiating all the potholes and kicked up rocks.

I had the driver stop at the Paradise Hotel just south of Ifaty since I’d read it was pretty swank and wanted to see it.  Why not lunch there?  And it was swank, for sure.  The road was hot, but when I walked into the hotel, it was immediately cool because of all the thatch and the high roof, so I installed myself on the veranda overlooking the Indian Ocean and watched the boats of fishermen at their work with waves breaking on the reef a ways off-shore.  Talk about an idyllic setting.

Lunch wasn’t bad either.  I felt safe ordering seafood here by the ocean, so I got grilled shrimp.  What feast…and a feast of the eye.  The presentation was immaculate, and the shrimp weren’t half bad either with their slightly grilled taste.  And I’m not much of a dessert hound, but I wanted to linger, so I also ordered an île flottante, a little meringue floating in some custard.  The custard didn’t have the best taste in the world, and I was half done and feeling somewhat iffy about it when I discovered a little roach leg in it.  Oooof!  That was that for the île flottante (which, nevertheless, looked fab).

So much for luxury.  I headed back out into the heat with the sound of the poor cook being fried in the background and profuse apologies from the staff, who offered to comp my whole meal.  Next stop was the Reniala Preserve – another spiny forest, but a real forest that had been protected as opposed to one that had been reconstructed for the specific purpose of collecting species like the arboretum had been.

And this visit was very worth the effort, too.  In this preserve, there were the same 25’-30’ cacti I’d seen earlier, but they were even bigger here.  And in this environment, they were in the context of the huge trees that develop big water-storage trunks: the baobab, a type of flame tree, and another tree.  My helpful guide here gave me a lot of details.

For example, I had no idea that there were some eight species of baobab – I thought there was only one.  But I guess I can be forgiven because, of the eight, six are only found here in Madagascar.  And my erstwhile guide tried to get me to learn the difference between the three main, large-trunk trees here, but I kept flunking the test.  It seems that one tapers at the bottom like a carrot….and I have no idea about the other two.  Honestly, they mostly all look like baobabs to me.

The forest is absolutely wonderful, though.  The giant cactus trees stretch up toward the sky and lean in the direction of the wind, and the large baobabs just thrust directly up toward the sky.  These two majestic forms create the upper story of the forest and leave the understory to shrubs, euphorbia and dry forest birds.  It was a great experience to be in this environment.

As it was starting to get dark and people don’t travel the roads at night in this part of the country, my driver wanted to head back to Tuléar, so I packed it in, and we started back.  People everywhere were doing the same, including the fishermen who were coming back to shore after their afternoon efforts.  And it was then back to Chez Alain and the great garden.