We had heard the winding 700km road from Tana to Morondava could take anywhere from 11-24 hours to drive due to a number of factors- and it ended up being quite an adventure! To summarize... we hired a driver who spoke very rough French and left in his van on Friday morning. The road got progressively worse the further away we got from the capital. At some point near sunset we stopped at yet another army checkpoint at yet another village. There we were told it was considered too dangerous to continue on our own as there had been several violent bandit attacks in the next region recently! The guard told us we could however wait until 3 am when a caravan of taxi-brousse was leaving under army escort. We first made sure there was no cost and it was legit (not a scam), then had a meal of pommes-frites with our driver in a local restaurant before heading back to the van to sleep for a few hours (most uncomfortably)! Mind over matter. At 3 am we got up and began the furious and harrowing drive at breakneck speeds... We had an army guard with an AK-47 sitting right behind us. The road was really rough and at some point one of the other vans broke down, so we all stopped to help with the repairs. It was a tense 15 minutes, but people defused that by joking around as the guards looked about. We drove for hours til dawn broke and we reached another checkpoint at a crossroads, then left the caravan and continued to Morondava!
The area around Morondava is much more beautiful and undisturbed than the farmland further east. We found a place to stay, some cabins called Chez Maggie with a nice view of the ocean. We are going to chill out a few days and arrange to go visit Tsingy Forest as well as the Avenue des Baobabs, which are a few hours' drive from here.
The area around Morondava is much more beautiful and undisturbed than the farmland further east. We found a place to stay, some cabins called Chez Maggie with a nice view of the ocean. We are going to chill out a few days and arrange to go visit Tsingy Forest as well as the Avenue des Baobabs, which are a few hours' drive from here.