Today we again left early to beat the heat of the day. This time we headed west towards Toliara, our final stop on the southern part of the trip before heading back to Antananarivo and our final night in Madagascar.
Not long after leaving Isalo we went through several boom towns - they have grown up in the last 15 -20 years as a result of finds of sapphires and gold. Indeed we saw lots of people working in the river bed and more again queuing to sell what they had found to dealers of which there seemed to be many. These towns showed more signs of wealth than the sapphire towns in the north - more concrete buildings - but behind them were the same wooden huts that the majority of people lived in - further analysis showed the concrete buildings belonged to the dealers - so you can see where the money was being made......it smacked of an unfair distribution of reward for the labour put into the finds and removal of stones! The dealers funded one of the public schools - l'ecole de saphir - as a sign of largesse!
We had two wildlife focussed stops - firstly at a very dry forest area - a small national park where we went looking for Verreaux's sifaka - and found them. We had a great 30-45 minutes with a couple of families - springing from tree to tree and eating a breakfast of leaves ....there were babies amongst the group which made the sightings even more interesting watching their antics; albeit most of these sifikas are predominantly white with black markings there was one young male - on the edge of the group- who was predominantly black with white markings.....it would be interesting to know if the colours change if he becomes a successful dad or whether this is an often observed phenomena with little effect on the population colour overall.
We also saw the largest chameleons we have seen, the great coua and the eye of a sportive lemur who was in a trunk with her baby and not in the mood to come out, there were more flatid leaf bugs - this time green so we have seen them at every colour in their life cycle now - white, pink and green.
Having had an good 90 minute walk - the sun was already getting very hot and it was only 1000am. As we drove further along the road towards Toliara. the temperature gauge in the car hit 34 albeit as we got closer to the coast and felt the sea breezes it dropped to 29.
As we journeyed I took several pictures of baobabs - worldwide there are 8 species and Madagascar has 6 of them.
Our final stop was an arboretum - started many years ago by a Swiss botanist - a great collection of all the plants endemic to the south ifaty arid conditions - besides the plants we also saw a Madagascan nightjar and a grey mouse lemur sleeping, a warty chameleon, several lizards and a male paradise flycatcher sitting on his nest. Our final stop was their museum where I took a picture of an enormous fossilised egg of the now extinct elephant bird......it must have been big, or very flexible, to lay that sized egg! Prior to our walk we had lunch in the light airy outside restaurant - to be recommended - really tasty and they offered a vegetarian option - couscous and vegetables in a tasty tomato sauce - excellent.
After the tour we made our way to the Victory Hotel - thought of as mid to luxury - my reckoning would be 2 star. There was however a pool which I used - not as good as the Sunny hotel's - it could do with a refurb ---but it was quite big. As we went into our room we were aware of loads of mosquitos - I tried mosquito repellent on them but of course that doesn't kill them it just frightens them! So I went to reception and asked for some real killer. We agreed that I would go to the pool while John ran the gauntlet of dispatching said mosquitos, prior to reading on the patio outside the room - albeit the spray can advised you to stay out of the room for 15 minutes it was still smelling strongly of insect killer when I returned 40 minutes later. Because they didn't die instantly I think he sprayed liberally and could well have killed us if we had been much smaller- indeed after very good showers and using the repellant properly we retired to the bar area to let the smell and potency subside; but the smell was still strong when we returned 3 hours later after dinner!
On the dinner front the restaurant manger was excellent and ensured I had a vegetarian meal which appealed so much to John he had it as well - it was well cooked and really tasty. What the hotel missed out on in luxury it made up for in staff friendliness. When we returned to the room it was a final pack, as it is an 0630 check in tomorrow for hopefully an 0835 flight, and off to sleep hoping the still present toxicity of the insect killer doesn't have any long lasting effects!