Category: Morondava, L’Allée des Baobabs & Miandrivazo

I’m not sure if I mentioned it earlier but before we reached Manja, two warning lights on the dashboard came on indicating what we later found out was an alternator issue and a diesel fuel-filter issue.

In Manja I had a “mechanic” have a look and he had no idea about the diesel indicator but agreed with me the alternator could be giving out. The battery was being charged to a higher level than it should have been so he suggested driving with the lights on, running the air con and using everything electrical to reduce the overcharging.

Okay I’ll try this but it sounds a little iffy and temporary to me.

From Manja things went smoothly, relatively speaking, and once we arrived in Morondava and were getting our suspension repaired I asked the guys about the warning indicators. They agreed, alternator and fuel filter but not to worry, you should have no problems getting back to Tana.

“Not to worry”. I hate those words, especially coming from an “expert”.

Our next stop out of Morondava was Miandrivazo, a 298 km drive and we made it without a hitch and then departed the next morning, October 9th and headed to Antsirabe, our last pit stop before heading back to Tana where we would drop off the truck and head north for some beach time. The truck started and off we went.

We have two LED battery level indicators in the truck. One is for our little fridge and the other is for the truck and one of them indicated “low” so I turned off the fridge thinking it was draining the fridge battery. The other indicated all was okay.

I was never really sure which indicator was for the fridge and which was for the battery but as it turned out, the battery indicator was low and indicated around 10.9 volts and the fridge was 12.0 volts.

We drove along through barren hills and semi-mountainous landscapes and at one point decided to stop on the side of the road for a stretch. I intentionally parked on a downward slope as something in the back of my mind told me things may not be right. We hopped back in after a stretch and the truck wouldn’t start so I did the old glide down the road and pop the clutch trick, the truck started and we continued on.

After a short time we noticed the air conditioning was no longer working and then noticed the speedometer was stuck at 60 and the RPM was stuck at 2,000 and the odometer wasn’t working either. This was not looking good.

In the back of my mind I tried to remember if a car will still run normally even if the battery was dead and somehow I didn’t think so. Then we seemed to be losing power on the hills, then, chug, chug, cough, cough and the truck died.

We had just passed a very small village, the road was flat and there was a small patch of gravel on the side of the road to pull over and roll to a stop.

Now what?

Earlier in the day we called our truck rental company to report the truck not starting incident, and we were advised to continue to Antsirabe where a mechanic will fix the problem. I called again to tell them we were dead in the water and they told us they would send a rescue team and I told them I would try to find some tools. Preferably a heavy wrench to smack the head of whoever would tell me “not to worry” again!

I needed the tools to see if I could swap the fridge battery for the truck battery.

I asked some young men who had wandered by about getting us some tools but they spoke only french. They wandered away and then after about an hour of resigning ourselves to waiting for the rescue they showed up again and I decided to show them the battery and used sign language to describe to them that I needed a wrench.

No wrenches in the nearby village they signed back.

By now every women and child in the area had congregated around us and our chairs in the shade on the side of the road where we were waiting for our rescue. Joyce was holding a baby and everyone was jolly and from nowhere came a very jovial women. She showed up, shook our hands smiling and everything was wonderful.

She didn’t have any wrenches but, she indicated, the little household just right over there no more than 100 metres away did. She then told this to the boys and the women and waved goodbye.

Aha! they must have thought, they need some tools and within minutes we had several wrenches and a giant adjustable crescent wrench.

I/We went to work. I removed the battery from under the hood, the boys removed the refrigerator battery from the tight confines of the back of the truck and we put the fridge battery in place. It was larger than the original and the positive post was just an inch or so too far out of place to secure the terminal.

Jesus, what kind of luck is this?

The boys had some copper wire so we figured we could connect the positive terminal with the wire. Nope, it melted as soon as I tried starting the truck and I kind of figured this would happen considering the amount of current that is drawn when starting an engine

. We tilted the battery, we wiggled the wires and we tried everything and then, we got the terminal connector within a hair’s width of the terminal.

With a little smack with the large adjustable wrench (that I wanted to use on the earlier mechanics) we were able to connect the cable. With much anticipation I went to the truck and voila!. It started. The battery level showed 12.0 volts, how long that would last we didn’t know but we hoped it would at least get us closer to our next stop and ideally all the way to our lodge.

We gave three of the boys 10,000 Ariary each and the women who had the tools 20,000. Their smiles were as wide as the world and we felt good. This is a lot of money to them, less than $20.00 CAD but to us worth every penny and more.

We made it to the lodge about two hours later than planned.

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Not long after we arrived at our lodge, Residence Madalief, a local mechanic showed up and proceeded to repair our vehicle.

Again, great service from Roadtrip Africa. Peter from RTA tends to be of the “don’t worry, be happy” type which I like and to date he has been correct but sometimes just a little too nonchalant but you do feel they have your back.

We departed Morondava on the 8th of October for another relatively short distance drive but as always seems to be the case it takes about 5 hours to cover. We easily found our accommodation, Princess Tsiribhina which was located right off the side of the RN34. The drive was uneventful, the roads were good and the scenery as usual was spectacular.

We arrived at around 1:00 pm and it was stifling hot outside. We unloaded our bags and wandered over to the restaurant for a bite.

There were no fans and any air that did move felt like a blow dryer and the beads of sweat started to form.

We had a nice chicken sandwich slightly salted from the sweat that was dripping off of our brows and were really hoping that the evening would cool off. It didn’t and we probably had the worst sleep so far since arriving in Madagascar. We had a small fan in the room that operated intermittently between the generator and solar battery change-over so it was very uncomfortable.

Surprisingly after so much sweating I still had some fluid in my body so I got up at some point to take a pee. As I lifted the seat I noticed something fairly large disappear up and under where the water would come out when you flush.

I warned Joyce to be careful and in the morning I took a bowl cleaner brush that was beside the toilet and ran it under the rim. Lo and behold, a small frog jumped out. He landed on the floor and hopped off.  After some coffee I returned to the toilet quite comfortable in sitting down. I flushed and out of the  toilet edge popped out a much larger frog! He collected him/herself and proceeded back to his/her hiding place. We didn’t get a photo because, well he disappeared quickly and toilet bowls are not the best things to photograph. Nuff said.

We departed around 9:00 am the next morning looking forward to another scenic drive. As I started the truck I noticed the battery LED indicated a low battery. Hmm…

Having to do something with our down time in Morondava we took a tuk tuk (I always love saying that) to L’allee des Baobab, the area that hosts baobab trees lining the dirt road that heads north to the Tsingy and is famous for the photos that probably everyone has seen when looking at or reading information about Madagascar. Us and about 100 other people had the same idea so you know you will not get the National Geographic photos that you expect. Something like the famous photo of an elephant on the road in Kruger National Park with a traffic jam of photo seekers. We expected this however the site was a bit anticlimactic. It was beautiful of course but the photos everyone sees are taken without people and just the right lighting but I must say, if you Google L’allee Des Baobabs I think Joyce’s photos are just as spectacular as the Google pics. So there!

We got our shots and decided to leave before the crowds. It was a dusty road and we didn’t feel like eating dust for dinner.

The final leg of our 4×4 journey took about 4 hours to cover approximately 90 kms.

There were a few good stretches of sand tracks and very few rocky stretches which was nice but we encountered some of the worst washboard stretches we have ever driven. Our truck has heavy duty suspension so washboard is the worst possible condition to drive.

We encountered several deep mud crossings and a couple of fairly deep water crossings so the thought of getting stuck again was always in the back of our minds.

About 20 kms away from pavement, and feeling a little more relaxed, we encountered more mud, and it looked really deep. I picked a route and as I accelerated through the quagmire we hit what sounded like a large rock submerged in the mud. Yikes!

The truck kept a rollin and we escaped unscathed and continued on but wait… what’s that scraping sounding noise that is emanating from the right front wheel-well whenever we hit a large bump? Must be mud stuck on the mud flap, no?

No it wasn’t. We stopped and upon inspection I could see the right front wheel had zero clearance in the wheel-well. We must have blown a shock absorber.

Fortunately this happened at the very end of the day of our driving adventure and we were getting close to tarmac. Had we had more mountains to climb and rivers to cross a blown shock could have been a very serious situation indeed.

We proceeded on and finally, just up ahead, tarmac! Civilization! We had accomplished what no man has accomplished before, we, oh never mind, you get the picture, we made it.

We limped into the town of Morondava, picked up some phone data from Orange, withdrew 1.2 million Ariary (worth about $420.00 CAD) from Bank of Africa and then pulled in to a local automotive mechanics shop.

They identified the problem immediately, it wasn’t the shock absorber but I think a steel suspension link or something and they didn’t have the part on-hand but they could get one delivered quickly.

After about 1 1/2 hours of hanging around the oil stained hot and humid car repair pit and hot garage we finally got a ride to our hotel and we prayed the truck would be fixed by tomorrow.

To our surprise and relief the truck was delivered around 8:30 in the morning. Our Pisteur, Antonio showed up to tell us. What a guy! Excellent service!

We don’t know the cost of the repair as it was picked up by our rental company, Roadtrip Africa/Madagascar. Their service and response to any issues we have faced along the way has been great. More on that later in my final Madagascar review.

We spent the first two nights at Chez Maggie, a nice lodge with bungalows near the ocean side.

We had booked two nights but needed two more due to what I will explain below but unfortunately they were booked up but the lodge next door, Laguna Beach had a room and it had air conditioning. This was going to be a treat. The room was large and cool with a big shower and lots of space.

The food in the restaurant was very good, quite pricey relative to everywhere else we have been but good but this is lunch that I’m talking about. The breakfast was way overpriced and the serving staff didn’t seem to have a clue what they were doing. The first breakfast we did get our juice after asking and our coffee a little hotter after our first cup, and a napkin after asking but the second breakfast was a disaster and we walked out refusing to pay. We were first served lukewarm coffee after asking specifically for hot coffee and after having to wait 15 minutes. Then came the the first plate of food, 1/3 of a rotten banana, dried out banana bread and a whole unpeeled mango. What are we supposed to do with a whole unpeeled mango? We don’t have a sharp knife and we don’t have a napkin. Then, my so called omelette shows up.  Where is Joyce’s omelette? Where’s our bread, you brought the jam for crying out loud, where’s the bread? And the juice, where’s the juice??? We had enough, got up and left rather ticked off. We really are not that hard to get along with. Joyce and I are the nicest people in the world but at some point you have to draw a line. It sounds like we’re whining here but they really had no concept of service and not a clue of what their breakfast was supposed to consist of. It’s written on the menu, in french, english and malagasy so get with it management or you won’t understand why no one stays at your place.  Enough said. Now on to why our plans were altered.

I planned and booked our whole time in Madagascar. One evening about a week ago I was reviewing our itinerary and noticed a, shall I say, slight error. Our plan was to spend two nights in Morondava and then head north to the Tsingy de Bemaraha, a protected UNESCO world heritage site of  immense beauty but it was not to be. The drive would be approximately 8-10 hours, part of which would consist of military escort with a convoy of 4×4’s heading north to the Tsingy. We had three nights planned to allow for some time to explore the area. What I didn’t factor in was the drive back to Morondava thinking we could drive straight to Miandrivazo. That would have been a 14+ hour drive. Damn! We decided it just wasn’t worth the 16+ hour return drive to have one full day of exploration. We missed a beautiful site so we’ll save the Tsingy for next time.

Morondava is probably one of the nicest towns we have been to. The main street is wide and clean with sidewalks. One area is devoted to the food market. Fish, fresh veggies etc. Further along is a section devoted to cheap chinese footwear and other crap that will fall apart within days but hey, the price is right. It is a stop off or starting point for tourists wanting to head north to the Tsingy and those (us) who made their way from the south with intentions to continue north. It has an airport so it is a very convenient place to start your adventure whether it be north or south.

Next, a short trip to L’allee des Baobabs.