A very long day... — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

On the second long day of driving, we needed to be on the road for nearly 12 hours (!) to reach our next resting point. Remember the type of roads I shared with you in the last post? Well, they didn’t get much better; the water crossings continued and we had many miles of bumpy dirt road to contend with. We passed through many traditional villages…

… with house construction varying from brick (rare) to walls of bamboo…

… topped with a thatch roof, that is replaced every 2-3 years.

Some houses were surrounded by bamboo fences -

Kids waved to us all day as we passed…

… and it was very interesting to see the young ladies with dried paste on their faces. This is made from aloe or tamarind and is used as a sunscreen (lighter skin color is desirable) as well as a skin treatment (for acne, etc.) -

The young woman on the left in the picture above has a young child wrapped up against her back, like this -

Most women wear a T-shirt and then a brightly colored cloth tied as a long skirt. I loved the chaos of color in this market scene -

An interesting sight was the braiding of tobacco leaves into ropes:

As I had noted at the end of the last post, we caught the baobabs at sunset, but before we got there, we passed through a village with some massive specimens -

We did have another deep water crossing as we headed south, but this ferry didn’t have a working motor, so the locals made do -

We were leaving the giant baobabs behind…

… and entering the (mostly) desert area of the SW of the country that had many termite mounds -

Then some of the bigger towns showed off the variety of transportation used -

The orange van above is an example of the local buses, where belongings and bags of goods bought at the weekly market are piled on top, and people are crammed inside. The zebu cart was a very common sight throughout our travels. Zebu are the only “beasts of burden” in Madagascar, but they also provide meat, and are sacrificed for village celebrations like funerals and marriages.

Before we stopped for the night, we visited a reserve of a Spiny Forest. No explanation needed -