Domaine Du Lac

After living in Tana for 5 months we felt it was time to explore another local tourist site. Only 9km from our house by road, at the end of the airport runway, sits Domaine Du Lac (site botanical et zoologic), but the road is terrible so it took over an hour to get there! Our journey there was further impeded by the local Citroen owner's club putting their poor vehicles to the test and making an outing of driving along the road!

The Citroen flag made us think it might be an organised event not just a traffic jam!

More Citroen 2CV's than you would expect to see on a dirt road 

The lead Citroen!

After passing the Citroen parade, which many people were eagerly awaiting with video cameras, the road got progressively worse. Every now and then there were brief sections of tarmac just to give you hope that it might improve. On the plus side Bethan fell asleep so was nicely refreshed when we arrived at the small zoological gardens. The 'zoo' bit was much better than Soavinandrimanitra Nature Parc because the wildlife was free roaming inside a tropical house rather than individually caged (although Bethan liked Soavinandrimanitra because the lemurs cuddled her). We were impressed with Domaine du Lac. Here are some photo's from the day:

Hundreds of tortoises

It wouldn't be Madagascar without some free roaming Lemurs

Enjoying the sunshine

Mini Baobab

Bethan liked these flowers so the owner picked them for her 

Biggest Green Gecko we've seen so far

Men fishing on the lake

Just eating my lunch with some Chameleons

Parson's Chameleon

Tomato Frog

Mantella Frog

So cool when they are jumping

Grounded

On the 18th December I did a flight from Antananarivo to Besalmpy with a team from US AID. I sat by my plane making felt food for Bethan's Christmas present (the glamorous life of a pilot!!) and met a lovely young lady called Sandra. She only spoke Malagasy but was quite happy to chat to me for half an hour and managed to make me understand that she liked my plane, introduce me to her father and leave me with a mango as a gift.
After a few hours, the USAID team returned to continue their journey to Maintirano, where I would leave them and planned to collect them from, a few days later. After completing the fun task of refuelling the plane (sat on the wing with jerry cans) I flew back to Antananarivo. Unfortunately half way home, whilst completing a routine check of the instruments, I noticed a drop in oil pressure. Normally it reads just above the green arc but now it was reading at the bottom of the green. Fortunately, I made it back to our hanger without any further problems.

After landing and talking to Rob, the chief engineer, the aircraft was temporarily grounded pending a test flight. The next morning Rob and the training captain taxied out to check the aircraft. When they taxied back a few minutes later we knew it was bad news - the plane was permanently grounded until the problem could be resolved. As the oil temperature and everything else appeared normal, the obvious conclusion was that there was a problem with the pressure relief valve in the oil filter so a new one was ordered just before Christmas. The new part made it through customs and into the MAF hanger in record time and was fitted before the new year. Unfortunately this did not resolve the problem so the aircraft is still grounded and the engine will now make it's way to France to be overhauled, which could take 2 months.

In the meantime, I have been re-writing the airstrip directory, which is a book of charts showing us important information about the places we land and what the runway and surrounding area looks like. Some of our charts had nothing on them and others were hard to decipher. Here is a before and after photo:

Bethan is also trying to help fix the plane! She has sent in drawings, tea and chocolate to make it feel better and finally resorted to building me a new one!

Christmas in Madagascar

Our first Christmas in Madagascar almost snook up on us without us noticing. Without the shops and radio playing cheesy Christmas songs from November but with warm weather and nesting birds, it didn't feel like the run up to Christmas at all. On the 17th December, we had the MAF staff Christmas party. Previously a work do has involved an evening out with colleagues, having dinner in a nice restaurant but this year it involved games, devotions, speeches and lunch, starting at 9am and over by 3pm!

Staff Christmas Party games

We had fun eating ice creams while doing our Christmas shopping at the 'mall' and stopped off at the souvenir market for some small toys to put in our home-made crackers (that didn't bang but did have hats and jokes) and a new dress for Bethan to wear on the 25th.

I'd really like all these teddies!

Thanks to a visit from Jo at MAF UK in November, we had some imported brown sugar, so Christmas cake and mince pies were on the menu!

Making mince pies

Christmas day arrived and thanks to the enormous fireplace, Father Christmas had no problems getting down the chimney! Bethan, however, was a bit unsure about what to do with her stocking of presents.

 

After a while she got the hang of opening them and enjoyed playing with the contents.

Opening presents

Christmas lunch was a lovely red onion tart (Delia) with the usual roast trimmings - roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, stuffing and carrots. Couldn't find any sprouts in Antananarivo but we didn't really mind about that! All enjoyed outside in the sunshine:

Not our traditional setting for Christmas lunch!

Christmas lunch in Mascar

The afternoon was spent opening presents, talking to family on FaceTime and enjoying the paddling pool. Then in the evening the power went off so a few presents were opened by candle light. Thankfully the power cut was only an hour or two, unlike last years Christmas in the UK when the power was out for 2 days!

Filling up her new paddling pool