We landed in Antananarivo about 23:00. The entry process was long and inefficient, with poor queue management and slow processing. 90 minutes after arrival, all of our luggage was still not unloaded. But eventually we made it through, found our driver, and arrived at our hotel, the Riviera Garden. I had slept some on the plane, but Dona and Sid had not. So we checked in and crashed.
Antananarivo, a.k.a. "Tana," is located in the highlands, fortunately, so it was not oppressively hot. But we noticed immediately all the smoke in the air. We did not have a single really clear day the entire time we were in Madagascar. Our hotel was situated on one of the lakes in the city. We enjoyed a nice breakfast out on the lawn overlooking the lake. We watched as a few locals harvested something in the reeds along the shore, and checked our birds flitting about the hotel grounds.
We spent the morning with Ony Rakotoarivelo visiting a satellite school of Ankizy Gasy (see next section).
In the evening we had dinner with the son of some friends in Montana, who is married to a Malagasy woman and has two cute kids. We had a wide-ranging conversation, from the epic tail of how they met to travel to how Tom became a "world-renowned gemologist" to environmental issues. One of the problems Madagascar has is extreme deforestation — all of the highlands used to be covered with forest, and they are now almost entirely bare, with few indigenous trees left. At some point Tom said "Madagascar's primary export is dirt." He meant soil, from erosion. We also talked about all the smoke, which comes from several sources:
We learned a few words of Malagasy, which I had tried to learn at home some with miniscule results.
The next morning we were off to Peyrieras Wildlife Park and Mitsinjo National Park, for a quick look at the eastern rainforest.
When leaving Madagascar, we couldn't help but notice the "Montana Bar" in the airport. Lova would be delighted.