What I did on my summer vacation.

[Rain Man]

So for those of you who don't ever look at me, I wandered away for a while. A sample of vacation photos will follow.

[Rain Man]

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.)

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

[Rain Man]

This was the view looking left from our hut.

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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.

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

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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.

[Rain Man]

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

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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.

[Rain Man]

Walking along the bridge.

[cardken]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

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.

Much like Branson.

[cardken]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Random view of rural South Africa as we drove by.

Looks like Belton, Mo.

[cardken]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

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

Looting? Looks like Katrina- New Orleans, LA