Heres one:

Okay, next up, the beach at St. Lucia. The crowd wasn't bad.

Pretty nice surf there. It was much different than other beaches because this one had ... um ... sand ... and water ... and stuff.

I'm not much of a beach guy, to be honest.

Bananas were cheap.

Y'know, I don't know how big it was, but I bought a new Olympus camera for about $150, and it performed like a champ. I got one tiny memory chip that had capacity for 900+ photos or 45 minutes of video. When I got back, I still had room for 11 more photos.

At this point, it was back to Durban to get ready for (Ricardo Montalbon voice) Madagascar.

On the way, we stopped at Mtubatuba briefly. I really liked saying Mtubatuba.

That's so disgustingly ugly that I'm not sure why you decided to go there.

I introduced Mtubatuba to the concept of Derrick Johnson, and Mtubatuba introduced me to the concept of the Super Zulu store.

There was lots of milling about on roadsides, with people selling stuff like pineapple or honey combs by showing them to cars driving by. However, there was also lots of standing around. It took us a while to figure it out. Apparently there are lots of "independent" van drivers who go up and down the highway. They'll stop and pick up people on the side of the road if they have room, and charge them for a ride to town. Since they're all independent, the locals have to go stand on the side of the road and wait for one of them to drive by and stop.

Random view of rural South Africa as we drove by.

Back in Durban, the wifey mimics our takeoff run to Madagascar while at the "Hall of Palms" in the Durban Botanic Gardens. It was a cool walkway that had one sample of each of a zillion different species of palm trees.

Wow. How did you know Rain Man was going to post that picture?

We arrived in Antananarivo late on a hopping Saturday night. I got us the best room in the best hotel in town, the Hotel Sakamanga, for 65 Euros a night. It was notably less nice than a Holiday Inn Express in terms of furnishings and stuff, but it was clean and we got a two-room suite with a balcony. Here's our street.

Just in case you don't think it's really Madagascar...

We woke up the next morning and I went out to a deck in our hotel room to check out the view...

Left...

Note the cool old French building sticking up in the middle. Antananarivo is a mix of post-nuclear holocaust colonial France, modern hovel, and 7.6 earthquake when it comes to architecture.

Center...

Right...

Note the gas station below. For some reason, most of the country looked like it had been abandoned, but the gas stations were beacons of newness and cleanliness.

Never underestimate the power of a 128 oz slurppy. It has the ability to unite entire nations in the quest for fast gas, enormous beverages, and clean bathrooms.

We had breakfast at the hotel, mixing it up with French perverts and also the only American we would see until our last day. I kid you not, it was a professor doing lemur research. Nice guy, so we chatted over breakfast.

On the plane trip to Antananarivo, we got documents explaining that sex tourism was being cracked down on in Madagascar. Apparently, the country is a destination for French men in terms of both prostitution and child prostitution, and sure enough, we saw a fair number of middle-aged French men traveling alone or with Malagasy women.

Apparently, the practice has been aided by old Malagasy customs that promote prostitution. In traditional culture, a Malagasy girl is considered "marriage-eligible" as soon as she hits puberty, and one of two things happened: either she got married, or she could set up her own household and "entertain suitors". A suitor was required to give the father of the girl two zebu (cattle, more or less) in order to "court" the girl. Well, some savvy fathers figured out pretty quick that they could have the girl set up a household and then bring "suitors" to her at two zebu per "date". When the French arrived, they could pretty easily afford two zebu (or cash equivalent) and voila! they got to boink a 13 year-old legally. Apparently, the government decided that that wasn't a good thing, so they were cracking down on it, though we still saw our share of French men with attractive young Malagasy women.

By the way, Malagasy people are a genetic mix of black African, middle eastern, and Indonesian races, so you'd see some who looked like Zulus and stuff (very African skin and features), others who looked Indonesian, and then everything in between.

Here's our street in the daytime.

Rain Man hanging out in the 'hood.

Note the old taxis. There were tons of them on the road, and they had to be French colonial vehicles. Most were in pretty good shape for their age, too.

I love the plane window photo. I do not envy an 18 hour flight. I flew to Ireland last June from Kansas. The flight home was absolutely brutal. The human body isn't conditioned to that much air travel, no matter who you are.

Banana-carrying dude. That's got to be pretty heavy.

Yeah, I was really envying the business-class and first-class seats. I did some research and booked early enough to get us some bulkhead seats, though, and that gave us a fair amount of legroom, which helped a lot.

It also helped that they had movies on demand and also some (pretty bad) computer games in the in-seat consoles. I played mahjong for about three hours on the flight back, and was playing chess until I decided that the chess computer was simply incompetent.

He looks kind of short. I wonder if that is caused by a lifetime of carrying things on your head ?

They still had their Christmas decorations up, or at least I assume they were Christmas decorations.

At the end of the street, you'll see a park. We went into the park, which was a huge mistake. There were some of the most pathetic homeless people in there I've ever seen, and we were harassed enough that I put the camera away and kept my hands in my pockets for fear of pickpockets or robbery. I don't think I'll soon shed the image of this one homeless little kid wrapped in a tattered blanket, lying on the sidewalk and shaking. It was not a good scene.

It can't help. Seriously, that's got to be like 75 or 100 pounds of bananas.

The Antananarivo skyline.

The city is probably the most spread-out city I've ever seen. The housing is all built on small steep hills, and in a lot of the parts outside the central city the flat areas between hills are rice paddies (photos later).

Wandering the streets. Since it was Sunday, it was pretty quiet.

Off the main streets, it was a little more downscale, but with a greater agricultural presence.

I'm not sure what this was. We walked past it and it seemed like I should take a picture of it.

This was next to the red thing in the previous picture. I'm not sure what this was, either. The wife was walking over to check it out.

Our initial reaction to Antananarivo was "creepy". It seemed to have a pretty negative and scary vibe that first day. However, we came back a week or so later and were there on a weekday, and it had a much more positive feel to it.

I don't know if it'll work, but I'll try. Here's a three-minute video where I just stuck the camera out the window on our way to the airport. It's an AVI file, which is not on the list of supported files in the "Manage Attachments" menu.

Edit: Not loading, though it's a big file. Let me see if I can upload it to youtube.

Great pictures, thanks for sharing!

The pictures of Antananarivo remind me of the train ride through the poor(er) areas of Rome, or taking a wrong turn in Detroit.

Where does the trip rank on your list of world travels? I assume it ranks pretty high in terms of culture shock, since Denver isn't really known for its wildlife or abundance of African-American communities.

After a couple of trips to London and one to Rome, I've thought about maybe going to Singapore or Tokyo or Hong Kong/China... or maybe Egypt. Hadn't really thought about South Africa though. :hmmm:

Too many places, not enough PTO.

I went to India in 1989 and that still tops the list of culture shock. In part, that may be because it was my first overseas experience and it was also 20 years ago before India really started making strides, but I still think it would win. Varanasi, India, was the place that I've visited that is the most "foreign" to me. However, Antananarivo may be second on the list. It was out there.

South Africa is so well-developed that I don't even think I would consider it to be culture shock at all. For the most part, it didn't even require adjustment, and English was spoken very widely. Interestingly, too, race kind of disappears in these situations. When 80 percent of the people you see are another race, their race ceases to be an identifying feature and so you really see them as individuals and not necessarily "black" or "white" or whatever.

I went to Egypt in 2001 and would heartily recommend it as a first non-European trip. You'll get hassled by the salespeople, but that's minor compared to the spectacular things to see. Plus, Egypt has a really strong tourism infrastructure, so it's a good initial third-world trip because you get to see the Third World without really having to deal with it too much.

Sweet. I've always wanted to go on a Safari!

Okay, I was slammed at work for a while. Here are some more from the next leg.

Heading to the airport in Antananarivo. (Random photo out the window.)

Malagasy dog on Malagasy street. (Still going to the airport.)

Interesting story about the little "Orange" sign and the "Telma" sign on top of the building. Those signs were everywhere, especially the Orange signs. We also saw people with little kiosks on the street and even working out of their cars in the same industry. We think the situation was that a lot of people have cell phones, but they don't have the electricity to charge them. So there's a cottage industry built up around providing charging services for cell phones.

The suburbs of Antananarivo. Lots of rice growing in the flat parts and the houses tend to be on hillsides.

I liked this picture. I'm not sure what the guys in the flooded rice paddy are doing, but they were definitely working, not playing.

Then it was OFF (arms waving to simulate an airplane) to Sainte Marie, a small island off the northwest coast of Madagascar. We stayed at a small french resort that had about 9 huts (16 before the typhoon, and they were in the process of building six of them back).

As a bit of trivia, the African Airlines still provide food service on their airlines and give you good legroom. This flight was less than an hour, and we still got food.

This was the view from our front porch. At high tide, we were about 4 to 8 feet off the water. Off in the distance, you can see the mainland of Madagascar on the horizon. There were no villages or anything that we could see, just jungle and giant carniverous lemurs.

This was the view looking left from our hut.

This was the view looking right from our hut. There had originally been six over-water huts, but they got blown to the giant carniverous lemurs during the typhoon. They had two of them almost rebuilt and two more in process when we visited.

That's our hut, with the blue and yellow lounge chairs.

A problem quickly arose. We were expecting "dirt cheap" on the island, but the prices ranged from Denver-level to expensive.

We didn't have enough cash in Ariary to last the week, and we were seriously worried because the typhoon had taken out some lines, so our hotel told us that they could no longer run credit cards. If the bank also had the problem, we were totally hosed and were going to be living on power bars for part of the week. So we had to go to the bank.

On foot.

Six miles.

Each way.

In the rain.

(It actually stopped raining the second day, but we didn't know that, so we walked in the rain.)

The hotel guy told us it was six kilometers, but we think he was a really bad judge of distance. My wife and I are both tall and walk at a reasonable pace, and on our various trips into town it took us a minimum of 1 hour, 27 minutes on a nice day and about 1 hour, 45 minutes in the rain. The road was a bit rugged in spots. The picture shows one of the worse areas, which occurred maybe every quarter mile or half mile.

The funny thing is that we took a taxi back from town one day after we got our money and were feeling good. The taxi took 40 minutes since the road was so bad. At one point we were passed by an old guy riding leisurely on a bicycle.

The wife pondering which way to go at an intersection. Okay, the only intersection.

Once you got close to town, you had to walk along a pair of bridges that served both vehicle and pedestrian traffic. If you were a pedestrian, you yielded to a vehicle. I was curious what would happen if two vehicles met on a bridge, but never saw it happen.

Walking along the bridge.

Much like Branson.

Looks like Belton, Mo.

Looting? Looks like Katrina- New Orleans, LA

(in Computer Voice)Would you like to play a game..?

MORE MORE MORE !!!

Okay, at some point I'll run out of photos. I'm getting close.

At low tide, the natives would all come out and hunt mussels.

We had a lot of excitement one day, because a native brought his cattle down the beach.

Relatively speaking, it was excitement. It was a pretty quiet place.

A nice sunset. We had about seven of them over the course of the week.

Here are the various denominations of money. The westerners used the 10,000 Ariary bills more (roughly $6), which tended to be brand new. The natives tended to use the 100 and 200 Ariary bills (roughly 6 cents and 12 cents), and most of them looked like they'd gone through an industrial blender.

The wilds of Madagascar across the strait.

(Seriously, they really were wilds. It was just jungle over there.)

We walked to town four times over the course of the trip. "Town" was pretty small, kind of like Dodge City but with Indochinese/African people. This is me on the main street.

By my count you still owe us around 700 more photos.

Another main street view.

There were some restaurants, and we were almost always the only customers. When we would order, we think they would actually go out and buy the food and kill the chicken. Seriously. When we would order, it would take about 45 minutes to get our food, and it was really fresh. It wouldn't have been that fresh if they didn't go out and get it.

I don't think my wife will let me post, um, all of them.

We would pass lots of native huts on our way back and forth to town. These are some of them. An entire family would live in each hut, which were typically maybe 10 x 10 feet with no electricity or plumbing.

This one takes a little imagination.

At night, there were a zillion stars in the sky, and you could see the whole range of the Milky Way. It was gorgeous. Then, on the water in the dark, you could see torches up and down the coastline as the natives hunted shrimp. They would walk knee-deep in the water, slowly swinging their torches back and forth as they hunted. It was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.

Then it was off to the water! We rode out in a small boat with an Italian dude, his two Malagasy assistants, and three Italian tourists.

But what is that disturbance in the water?

Big splash from the mysterious disturbance.

Whale!

We were there at the beginning of the annual migration of the humpback whales, which congregate in the little strait between our island and the mainland.

Since they're there to mate, the humpbacks do a lot of stuff. We didn't see any of them leap out of the water, but we saw some of them flip their tails out of the water. It was really hard to get good photos, because you only had a second when they would flip up.

Closer shot of a tail flipper.

Here's a pair of them running side by side. They would surface, blow a lot of water out their blowhole, flip their tails up and dive, and then they'd resurface a couple of minutes later.

On a side note, our boat was smaller than the whales and didn't have life jackets. I was kind of hoping that the whales could see well enough to not surface under the boat.

This guy was doing barrel rolls. It's a little blurry, but that's his front fin and his back fin as he starts to roll onto his back.

An interesting bit of trivia: whales leave tracks.

When they surface and then dive, their tails somehow takes the waves out of the water, leaving a big flat area of water that has no movement. As they dive and surface, they leave a trail of circles of this amazingly flat water, big circles standing out against the waves at relatively regular distances. This is one of them up close.

On our fifth day, we discovered a footprint, meaning that there were other people on the island. I named the native Friday.

Our hotel had lots of organic bug zappers.

Closeup of bug zapper.

The wifey relaxes in the hut before dinner. At night, mosquito netting was de rigueur, so we had to climb in and seal it every night.

90 percent of everything in Madagascar exists only in Madagascar. They have eight times more species of palm trees in Madagascar than there are on the entire continent of Africa.

The rest of these animal pictures are from a zoo-type place that we went to. It was a bit different than an American zoo, because you got a guide, and they let you in the enclosures with the animals.

Here's a gecko that's unique to Madagascar.

How many geckoes do you see in this picture?

Check out the camouflage on this guy. It was absolutely amazing. This picture shows it pretty well, but in real life, it took us several minutes to notice it.

The zoo guy dude is all like, "Hey, come on into this enclosure", and I was all like, "I don't think I want to." I did, though, and the nine-foot boa constrictors didn't mess with me.

Sergeant, you're to ride back to Natal. When you see the Bishop tell him, that is, tell his daughter, that I was obliged to remain here with my infantry. Now go. God go with you.