Antsirabe

Last weekend I headed south from Tana to Antsirabe for the weekend with 6 of the french medical students that are living in out accomodation. The journey took 3 and a half hours to 160 km along roads across the haute plateau.

Having decided on a restaurant called the pousse pousse to eat in, choosen from the guidebook, we headed there accompanied by a collection of pousse pousse drivers intent on our custom. IN the end, two of the boys offered the men a ride in their own pousse pousse's and pulled them to the restaurant given they were so intent to follow us anyway. However, on arrival the main courses were 8000 arary each (2.20 pounds) and they decided it was too expensive (!) so ended up walking a full circle around town with a following of pousse pousses and ate in a restaurant opposite our hotel for 6000 arary for a main course, with accompanying poubelle rhum! After a long week in A&E I was quite glad when the 2 people I was sharing a room with decided to call it a night.......the others headed off to the local disco!

Saturday morning started early with Franck and Fanny deciding to hire bikes and cycle to thermal springs. Sounded like a good idea so was happy to go along with their plans. Franck had found some decent bikes ti hire (these ones even had v brakes that worked!). I was more than a little surprised that once we had hired the bikes that they turned around and said it was a 63 km round trip given that they were dressed in jeans! Did a bit of a rush job on food and water buying and we set off.

It started off with an interestingride out of town, through a market, avoiding pousse pousse, taxi, bikes and pedestrains followed by what seemed like an entire batallion of soldiers who were more than surprised to be overtaken by vazaha on bikes! However, we only made it 3 km out of town before Francks derailleur broke in such a spectacular fashion that it took out half the spokes too! He managed to get in contact with the hire shop who sent out a boy on a bike to replace the broken one, which actually arrived very quickly for a country where everything is moramora (slow!).
It took us the rest of the morning to get to the thermal baths - which were quite literally lots of stone baths sunk into the ground, enclosed by little huts and had hot water running into them. The source was a similarly impressive (!) pipe running out of a stone wall in which all the local were washing their clothes!!!!!!!
WE then started the climb back up to the nearest village - quite steep, midday african sun - just what we needed. In the village we ate in a very malagasy restaurant. Rice, a few bits of meat on a small plate and a bowl of sauce to pour over your rice. This wasnt too much of problem having lived with a malagasy family for a month but both fanny and franck seemed a little confused by it all and hardly ate any of their lunches!
After lunch, Fanny got the taxi car back to Antsirabe (with bike) while Franck and I had the long uphill ride home with a detour round some pretty lakes. WE left out a small section of the ride and only did 55 km but by this point we had both had enough, especially given i had a mans saddle. i did fair slightly better than Franck who had had to tie his fleece over his sadle half way home and had so me interesting sun burn!
Late afternoon we walked around some of the saturday markets in town, learning from oneof the pousse pousse drivers that our friendshad returned to the hotel at 3.30 am so we were quite glad not to have waited for them to do stuff in the morning!

On sunday, we wandered around the artisan market whch was fun and also the precious stone stalls. Seems you can get most stones of varying shapes and sizes and colouts to get set as various peices of jewellery at very low prices - so if anyone has any requests, let me know and i'll see what i can do. Export regulations seem to suggest we can export 1 kg of stones each!

Headed back to Tana in the afternoon, ate dinner in town before heading back to the accomodation!