I may have to wait until next week to post more photos.  In addition to the wifi being slow to upload photos, I was taking a water taxi on the ocean to a nearby village in Anakao and got water damage to my phone/camera, which was in my shorts pocket.  It still takes pictures but now wants to upload every single picture I have again, and the volume indicator constantly displays in the middle of the screen.

​I'm going to get a new phone when I get to Johannesburg next week before I start a 16 day safari to Botswana and Zimbabwe. I hope the exchange rate works in my favor...

​Day 6 - After breakfast, some guys who worked for the hotel took me out on a small sailboat to a reef area where I tried snorkeling for a little bit. Then I went swimming in the pool and read the election results.  My driver, Nix, took me to the village and I had lunch there on the beach.  In the afternoon I toured a Baobab Tree Reserve for about an hour and then had dinner with Nix at the hotel.

​Day 7-9 - In the morning, we drove about half an hour to Tulear, which had an ATM machine.  A lot of the hotels don't take MasterCard or AMEX, so I've been trying to pull out money whenever there's a machine available.  Nix headed back to Tana and is going to pick me up at the airport on Sunday.
​
I took the hotel shuttle boat for about an hour to Anakao, which is on a peninsula in the Southeast corner or MDG.  I was on the boat with a 20 person tour group from Slovenia. 

The Anakao Ocean Lodge is a nice place on the beach, but secluded from everything.  This is a good place to go if you don't want to be found.

They only serve local seafood here for lunch and dinner, so it's a good thing I like seafood.  They cut the electricity off at around 11pm, so everyone goes to bed by 11...

The first day I had someone from the hotel take me to the nearby village which was about a 15 minute ride in choppy water.  There wasn't too much going on there, and on the way back water splashed all over my clothes and partially fried my phone.  All of my photos, except the past two days, are on the cloud already so I didn't lose anything. 

​Tomorrow I fly back to Tana and spend a night before flying back to Johannesburg.  I need to find a place to stay in Johannesburg as my safari doesn't start until November 19th.

Wifi has been spotty during this tour so I'm only posting every few days.

​On day 5, We drove from Isalo to Ifaty, which is on the beach.  Along the way we stopped at a village where they make their own rum, and then at an arboretum to tour and have lunch.  Lunch was good. I'm not big on botanical gardens but they talked about the different medicinal plants that they had, so it was interesting.

​The hotel in Ifaty was right on the beach and had a nice restaurant and swimming pool.  The only downside was that it was about 15 km from the nearest village and my driver didn't stay there the first night, so I was kind of trapped there for the evening.  The sunset over the Mozambique Channel was very nice.

After lunch, we hiked another hour to a remote deep-water swimming hole and cooled off.

Today I got a lot of exercise.  We went to the Isalo National Park and did two hikes.

​In the morning, we hiked for an hour to a shallow swimming hole.

We got to the lodge late afternoon, and it's supposed to be one of the top 10 in MDG, called Le Jardin du Roy.  It's hidden in between rock formations near the national park.  They have resident tortoises that live beside the courtyard above the pool. The water is on all of the time, but the aircon and outlets turn off between 11 pm and 6:30 am.  I guess they ration electricity in this town.

​Along the way we stopped for another short visit to watch how paper is made.  All of these places have gift shops for the tourists but it's a lost cause on me because I have two backpacks for five months of travel, so I don't buy anything.

Then, we visited a park where you can see ring-tailed lemurs up close and I got some much better pictures. 
We spent a little over an hour in the park and in addition to a lot of lemurs saw a boa constrictor and a few chameleons.

​Yesterday, we headed toward Isalo, which was about 300km away.  There were more rice fields along the way and we snapped a photo of some kids walking along the road. We were traveling on the main highway #7 and I also snapped a photo of how bad the road can be in places, which is why it takes forever to get places here...​

I took a few picture of the Villa I stayed at in the rainforest near the Ranomafana national park, and then we walked for about two hours in light rain to spot lemurs.  We saw three different species:  The golden bamboo lemur, the red-fronted brown lemur and the black and white roughed lemur. They were pretty high up in the trees and it was raining so it was hard to get good pictures.
​Then we drove to Fianarantsoa, which was where my second hotel was.  A guide took me around the old part of the city and to another train station.  I think that they make up things to show you in between national parks here.  When I checked into the hotel they told me that the water doesn't come on until 7pm.  The city has some sort of rationing schedule going on.

 I'm on a tour alone, with a private driver, and private guides when I visit parks.  I would have preferred to join a group tour but given that I organized this trip in two days with a travel agency, it wasn't possible. 
​Most of today was consumed with driving from Antananarivo to my hotel in Ranomafana.    We left at 7 am and got there at 7pm, with some stops on the way.  We visited a foundry in Antsirabe where they make aluminum pots, and then a workshop where they carve things out of zebu horns.  I stopped for lunch and had braised zebu.  There was some good scenery, a lot of rice fields, and bad roads along the way.  Before we got to the villa we took a walk with flashlights outside of the national park and looked for mouse lemurs (the pictures didn't turn out well with the iphone).