Traveling in the places less traveled occasionally means you have to rely on some modes of transportation that might not be acceptable to your standard Western traveler…aka my mother.  She is anti-prop plane, so much that she will take alternate routes to avoid such an option.  Unfortunately, when in Madagascar there are not alternate routes.  The roads washed away in cyclones and the dirt airstrips are not long enough to allow a jet to take off or land, so if we wanted to make it from the lemur filled rain forest of the northwest to the spiny desert of the southern coast where the funny baobab trees live, we had to trust our fate to this guy…

He looks okay…if you don’t compare the size with the golf cart towing it…or think about how you are boarding from the back as the “cargo hold” for checked luggage is surrounding the cockpit up front. [Ed. note: He was sturdy. Small overhead bins, but hey, it was bigger than both of our flights in Belize, and it looked newer-ish than our North Korean plane.]  But this little guy was our bus, taking us and ~40 companions on an adventure, with a layover even!  Yes, it was literally a bus, stopping in 3 cities and unloading and reboarding passengers at each stop along the way since there is not enough travel in Madagascar to have direct flights.   We were lucky to be stop number two on the route, so our gamble in the skies on an airline the EU only last year removed from their list of banned airlines (add this to the list of things I don’t tell my mother until this blog goes live…).  And, we even managed to snag an exit row for our journey…

                                                       Yes, this says “Cut Here In Emergency”…                                                               [Ed. note: we tried not to actually think about that implication.]