What started out as a nice, early morning ride, watching the light gradually come on as the sun rose over the spiky silhouettes of the euphorbia in the surrounding landscape, interspersed with magnificent baobabs, turned into a fun little adventure... of epic trucking proportions! (hmmm ... sorry for using the word epic, it's way too common these days).
First up, it took us around 1 1/2 hours to actually leave Morombe, the driver doing a few laps of town in the dark (4am!) to pick up the various passengers, the truck still quite empty. When we eventually left, the road was rather sandy and bumpy in places, and we rattled along, stopping here and there to pick up other passengers along the way, our driver getting out to chat to just about everyone in every little village. Eventually we reached quite a major town, where a number of people boarded - but we were grounded there for over an hour, loading onto the truck what seemed like over 50 bags of rice. Many of them were piled onto the roof, but once its capacity was reached, the bags were loaded underneath the seats. Not so good for our already cramped seating arrangements! The little wooden benches with their metal edges weren't so comfy, and we now had very little leg room for the remainder of the trip - and we completely underestimated how long that would be...
The scenery between villages was quite beautiful and helped to take our minds off our rapidly numbing legs: rice padis smattered with hard-working villagers, busily thrashing out the valuable seeds; large swathes of dry, prickly forest dotted with pregnant baobabs. But it passed quite slowly as we seemed to stop so frequently to pick up passengers, our socialite driver who knew anyone and everyone paying scant regard to getting on the road. Soon the truck was full, not only of people but of ducks, chickens and turkeys in large round cages. These also went up onto the roof, along with the other large items such as crates of bottles, suitcases and bicycles, and any spare feathered creatures were stuffed under the seats with the rice. At a guess there were around 100 chickens travelling with us! We had to stop a few times to make them a bit more comfortable, when their squawking became loud enough over the din of the reggae music blaring out of the speakers, the general chatter of the passengers and the revving of the engine.
From here we were really starting to feel the seats biting into our arses, the roughness of the crappy road, the whipping of the trees reaching into the windows, and the repetitiveness of the same reggae record being played over and over again. We asked our fellow passengers how long it would be til we reached Mangily, and they said 'only three more hours' - to our dismay. Night was falling and we were starting to feel a bit worried ...
A half-hour stop for an invisible obstacle that grounded 5 trucks on the road, a dinner stop and mechanical tinkering, and after what seemed a million years, we reached Mangily; not that we would have known it - in fact we almost missed it, the driver not realising we wanted to get off! - and we were dumped unceremoniously on the road in the middle of the night, our bags thrown down from the roof top. It was 1am on Easter Saturday. And what faced us? Darkness. Everything closed. A pumping nightclub, not the place we really wanted to sit until daybreak!
So we decided to head towards our the hotel and see if they would take us in. There were no street lights or signs, and we felt a bit lost about what to do next. We heard some singing coming from a nearby church, and headed towards it in our dazed and confused state, asking if anyone could help us with somewhere to sleep for the night. Thank goodness it was Easter Saturday, and that they were practicing for the big church service the next dayotherwise no-one would have been around at all!
We were very grateful when one man came forward and said he was the security guard both at the church and the hospital up the road, and that there was a guard's room that we could stay in til sunrise. But we'd have to leave then, as foreigneres aren't usually allowed to crash there! Given it was 1:30am by this time, and all we wanted to do was stretch out and sleep this was a Godsend. (literally? Who knows.)
So we followed him up the sandy path to the hospital. It's not every day I can say that I spent Easter Saturday night sleeping in a hospital. They even had foam mattresses, a candle and a bathroom that we could use. Sweet!
We got up at first light the next morning, packed our bags, profusely thanked the security guards, handed them 10,000 Ariary and headed toward the beach. To our dismay when we arrived, the hotel was closed. Noooooooooo....! But to our delight, the old man watching the place said he could open up one of the bungalows for us; while it didn't have running water or electricity it was perfect - it looked out over the ocean, and had a well for water just up the hill. SOLD! We were happy with anything after our little trucking adventure. And so we settled in Mangily for a few days, to rest our weary bones. Phewwww....
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