Waiting for a car to be fixed is really just a waste of your day, isn’t it?! Don’t you hate it, lingering somewhere and getting itchy feet? I mean, you might as well do something with the time on your hands. Renting a car and doing more of South Africa is not an option for us, but taking a flight to Madagascar surely is! Yes, yes, yes, we are off to the country they sometimes call the 8th continent of the world, due to its biodiversity found nowhere else. So at 6 am Saranne drops us of at the airport of Cape Town, an hour later we are in the air on our way to Johannesburg where we will catch a plane to Tana, the capital of Madagascar.
On our first day I don’t do that much really. Kosta goes for a bike ride while I stay in the guesthouse not feeling a 100%. He returns knackered from the going up and down the hills, I feel just fine. LOL As we have heard public transport is a pain we try and organise a car.That is easier said than done. First of all you need to have a driver. Ok, we find one. To make a long this-guy-makes-me-loose-my-time-story very short, we end up at the taxi-brousse station anyway. And there the rumour becomes reality. When we arrive we’re jumped on like meat by hungry dogs: everybody is trying to talk to us, bring us to their taxi. Now, naive as I am, I would have thought there would be a system in their taxi offering. But make no mistake my friends, this is worse than India (and for those who have travelled there by bus, that means something). Not only do we have to wait 2 hours before the taxi fills up, we also see ten taxi-brousses going the same way and here and there someone has already taken a seat. Why fill up the first when we can make twenty people wait spread over several taxis?!!! To make a long day short: from door to door of the hotel, it takes us 7 hours. Antsirabe, our destination, was the whole 150 km away! (I am making it all a bit shorter as the long story follows LOL)
You can imagine how we are greeted by hawks when we arrive at Antsirabe. We decide to ignore them and find our way to a hotel mentioned in Lonely Planet. It happens to be not far from the bus station so easy to get there on foot. All of a sudden a guy tells us he works at reception. Yeah, yeah, where have we heard that before. As we arrive he gets the key and opens the door of the hotel. Ok, he does work here. We get installed into our room and ask Andry if the hotel offers a service of renting a car for three days. That seems to be no problem. So nice, we get that sorted out, a contract is made and a cash advance is given. Andry shows us where to have dinner at a local restaurant, in the morning he takes us to a place for breakfast. Everybody seems to know him. This receptionist is doing his best. An hour later a taxi with 2 drivers picks us up. Our first stop is at the beautiful volcano lake Triviata, not so far from Antsirabe. With a compulsory local guide and followed by 12 children we enjoy our little tour of the lake. Then we head by to Antsirabe, say goodbye to Andry and leave with the two drivers toward Ranomafana.
We didn’t make it there that day. Instead we ended up at the police station of Antsirabe. We have been scamed… and surely enough so have the drivers. As we have lunch along the way this becomes clear with a simple discussion about us not wanting to pay food for the drivers.Kosta and I never agreed on that and that is what we tell them. They have not seen any money yet, were told it was way more than we have on the contract and were also lied to about the amount of days. We understand that they are upset and off we go back to Antsirabe. The drivers call Andry but the phone is switched off. After an hour or so we get him on the phone, Andry even calls us back on ours to tell he is on his way. Of course he never showed up.
You would think the story ends here. We loose a bit of money, time as well, but ah there are worst things than that. But no. In the morning we have filled up and paid for fuel, and that is also money down the drain. As we don’t come to an agreement with the cab drivers (I mean, really, they want to give us diesel back but what the hell are we going to do with that?!). So off to the police station it is. I tell my story first to the commissioner, then he calls the drivers and they do theirs. It is quit weird sitting there in the office of the commissioner as he tries to get an agreement that both parties would agree on. I feel a bit like being on Judge Judy LOL. He writes down their names and telephone number and tells me to make a new contract and also make a formal complaint against Andry. Not that that is going to change anything but we might as well do it. With the help of the officer we come to an understanding with the drivers. They bring us back to the hotel, we make a new contract and if all goes like planned they pick us up tomorrow.
We have to say this guy Andry has really done his job like a true professional. His clothes are clean, he takes care of himself, he knows (as we learned later on) that the owner of the hotel is in France due to illness, and he acts as if all is well until the last possible minute. Like going to the lake with us, giving his number, I mean everything is thought through. Even the fact that the guy who actually works at the hotel is running the internet café is taken in consideration. The both of us have travelled the world, trusting and more than anything else, not trusting people. Who would have thought we would get scammed in our hotel. And it is hard to understand maybe how he managed to play it as if he works there when you think of hotels in Europe but this is Africa. The house of the manager is part of the hotel, the internet cafe he runs is on the first floor and has a different entrance. As Andry comes there often and sometimes brings tourists, the manager knows him. So Andry goes and tells him he brought people, the managers asks his wife to open the door. She does not speak a word of French so she just opens and leaves. The managers doesn’t come down and so obviously we believe Andry works here. I mean, we don’t even know at that point that there is actually another person working at the place.
To top it all the actual manager (if you can call him that, I would just say the lazy bastard now the owner is out of town) tells me Andry ‘has done something to another traveller before’. He saw his picture once with ‘voleur’ written under it. ‘Maintenant je m’en souviens (yeah, as if!) Now I am really pissed! I tell the guy I will put a warning on the internet and that it is also his responsibility not to let those kind of people in. And of course I tell him we will not be paying for the room this night as they could have prevented the whole situation. At least that gives us 5 euro back LOL. Oh well, total damage done: 40 euro and a huge headache.
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