With our stay on Nosy Be completed, we’ve traveled approx. 150km north-east to our next port of call - the Réserve Spéciale de l’Ankàrana. It’s the first mainland destination of our journey, and one that will involve a little bit of roughing it before we move on.

After leaving Vanila Hotel, we found ourselves back at Hell Ville port by means of the same driver from tour yesterday;  I have a sneaking suspicion that there are either a dearth of taxi drivers in Hell Ville, or (more likely) he’d overheard we’d be going back into town and took the initiative to wait for us outside just in case. Either way, it was a hassle free ride, and he even assisted us with chartering a boat to the mainland.

After the usual round of bartering, we managed to secure a ride via speedboat to Ankify, where we would pick up a 4x4 to take us the rest of the way. Heaving our luggage aboard, we set off on one of the hardest, fastest water crossings I’d ever been on; exciting, but very trying on the buttocks. Observing my shutterbug tendencies, the pilot was only too happy to slow down whenever we wanted to take photographs and generally enjoy the fantastic scenery.

On arrival at Ankify, we were mobbed by “porters”, each one trying to grab our cases and carry them to our waiting car. It was a melee, and before we knew it our bags had disappeared from our possession. We thankfully caught sight of them a few seconds later in the boot of the car, but had no idea who’d handled them for us, and about 10 or so of them were standing asking for money - in the end, we gave them 10,000 Ariary (about £3) and told them to figure it out amongst themselves. They took the money and ran with huge smiles on their faces, making me think that we might have “overpaid” them.

It took about three hours of continuous driving past lush countryside and small but colourful communities to get to the reserve, but the enjoyment of all this amazing scenery was spoilt by our thoroughly unpleasant driver, who in the three-four hour journey has yet to engage us in conversation or even acknowledge our existence. He’s made a number of extended unscheduled stops, disappearing off to do who-know’s-what without letting us know what’s going on, and takes perverse pleasure in deliberately squashing chameleons on the road.

Thankfully, we made it in one piece and looking forward to this afternoons activities.