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We left London yesterday, Friday 19th October, on the 1025 BA flight to Nairobi. On Thursday evening I attended an exceptionally good Police Bravery awards which PMAS sponsored and got back to the hotel at 0100am; so after barely 4 hours sleep I was up again at 5.15 to catch one of the first tubes to terminal five. (John was well rested as he had stayed at the hotel rather than brave the awards!) Luckily we stayed at the Pullman hotel very close to Kings Cross and a stones throw from the tube entrance. Particularly important as we had in addition to our rucksacks and holiday bags two bags of goodies for the schools we support in Kenya - we left these at the Hilton, our overnight hotel in Nairobi for collection. As we had no time for breakfast the hotel packed us off with two very good breakfast boxes.....which were some of the best I have seen - fruit salad, breakfast yogurt,croissant etc not the normal items consumed on the Piccadilly line in the morning but we sat there amidst the early commuters chomping away!
After the early rush everything else went to plan - save for the 45minute queue at Nairobi to get through immigration - we booked a taxi in the customs hall for a fixed price and got into a really clean nice airport taxi. We arrived at the hotel around 1030pm. The driver, Peter, said he would collect us again in the morning and bring us back for our 6am check in for our flight to Antananarivo..... I
I said ok knowing we could easily get another taxi from the Hilton if necessary! After a very short sleep up again and this time we set off with Peter, who was waiting for us, and a Hilton breakfast box - not bad - as we are now breakfast box experts - and great banana bread!
Our flight to Madagascar left on time,we were one of the first in the queue for our visas and the luggage was off pretty quickly......into the arrivals hall but there was no sign with our name ......we waited ......I went to the money changer to get local currency and also used the ATM. I then asked a lad in the tourist office to ring our local agent .....which he did after I bought him some phone credit ( 1000 malagasy ariary -30p). He found they were enroute and would be another 30 minutes........a while later a bright faced young man appeared very apologetic as they had been trapped by a VIP road closure. We were then whisked off to our hotel.....the Lantana
Albeit we were on the wane we put our things down freshened up and headed to the zoo for our first taste of Madagascan wildlife. Apart from the two lemur islands with brown and ring tailed lemurs the rest of the lemurs were in smallish cages. It was an old zoo - some cages had been destroyed by February's cyclone but if it helped the Malagassy people understand their wildlife it had to be good. We also got to see the fossa, some birds and the aye aye - with it's long middle finger for extracting insects, its black fur and big eyes it looked like the Cruella Deville of the animal kingdom! The zoo also had five camels - a present from an Arabian king!
Back to the hotel, it was now 4pm and we decided to combine lunch and dinner - to celebrate John's birthday and enable an early night as we were 'knackered'- to coin a phrase. After a very nice meal we were in bed and asleep by 7pm!! A hectic 3 days ended now hopefully a relaxing holiday.
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