Financial Update: Going Broke in Southern Africa

Andy updated you on the obsessions of Southern Africa, so it's my turn to relate our financial status. Even though we didn't have to buy visas in most of these countries, the whole region was quite expensive, thanks to a combination of Western-priced supermarkets, developed-world hotel standards, and pricey national parks and safaris. But there were still a few good deals. Here are the details.

Madagascar: $184/day. Madagascar is actually really, really cheap once you get there, but flying there cost us each about $900 roundtrip from Johannesburg. (If you're coming from America or Europe, double that.) Since we were in Madagascar for 18 days, this added $100 a day to our average. The only other really expensive thing there was a last-minute internal flight that cost us about $170 pp (adding another $20/day). Road travel, street and restaurant food, hotels, and national parks are a fantastic deal, however, so if you can manage to swim to Madagascar, it's a very budget-friendly place to travel...

Zimbabwe: $144/day. Surprisingly expensive for a country whose economy collapsed just a short time ago, Zimbabwe doesn't have particularly cheap rooms, food, or national parks ($30 per person for Victoria Falls felt especially outrageous). It would be a good place to have a tent of your own, and/or a car that you could sleep in...

Botswana: $131/day. Another country where we could have really used a tent! Game drives and boat trips in Chobe National Park are good value, but you can't get a room outside of the park in Kasane for less than $50. We managed to find cheap food and decently-priced tours in most places, but there are just no budget hotels in Botswana.

Namibia: $100/day. Don't let that average fool you--Namibia may be the most expensive country in Africa. We only got it down to $100 by renting the cheapest car possible and a tent with a friend and camping our way around the country. Public transit is particularly outrageously expensive...when you can even find it. We had to hitch a lot to get to Windhoek from the north.

Lesotho: $108/day. We only spent two nights in Lesotho, so take this average with a grain of salt. We were driving our own rental car from South Africa at this point, so gas and rental costs jack things up, while sleeping in our car brought them back down for one of the two nights.

Swaziland: $260/day. This average is also skewed since we only spent two nights in Swaziland, one of which was at a fancy game reserve (other one, in the car). Gas is slightly cheaper in Swaziland and Lesotho than South Africa, in case you were curious.

South Africa: $114/day. We visited South Africa in two sections--first for three days in Johannesburg, where we didn't have a car, then for about two weeks driving in a rental car from Cape Town to Nelspruit (detouring into Lesotho and Swaziland). Things were definitely cheaper when we stayed put in one city, since once we got the car, we covered a lot of ground quickly (and paid for a lot of gas). We were paying around $50/day for the automatic car rental (sticks are cheaper) and $25/day for gas. We slept in the car about half the time in South Africa...the other half the time we were usually in double rooms at backpackers hostels, which cost around $30-$35 a night. We also cooked our own food a lot. Activities in South Africa, such as national park visits and shark diving, made up most of the rest of our expenditures.

Mozambique: $80/day. Finally, a country under the $100/day mark! Mozambique is great value. It's not as developed as South Africa, but it's not quite as poor or disorganized as many other countries in Africa. We traveled by bus, stayed in decent hotels and hostels, did snorkeling boat trips, and celebrated the return of street food for very reasonable prices.

Zambia: $200/day. We only spent three days in Zambia, visiting South Luangwa National Park. It's not exactly a budget destination, but by traveling there on our own by bus and cooking our own meals, we managed to save about 30% off the packaged tour we were considering out of Lilongwe. This would be another good place to have a tent--we paid $60 a night for a room at a camp outside the park, but camping would have only cost about $10.

Malawi: $65/day. Malawi is cheap. A two-day private kayaking trip on the lake, including meals, snorkeling, and camping equipment, cost us $40 per person per day. I feel like a similar trip in South Africa would have cost over $100 pp/day, at least. Hotels, food, and buses are also cheap. There isn't much to do in Blantyre or Lilongwe, so if you go, head straight for the lake if you can.

There you have it, Southern Africa by the numbers. As a general rule, the countries that start with "M" are pretty cheap to travel in (once you get there, at least)...and the ones that start with "S" or "Z," not so much!

Obsessed in Southern Africa

We thought it was finally time to catch up and write about what Southern Africans obsess about. As always, these are based on our short time in the countries, and may have little or no relationship to what you think.

Madagascar- A dead currency. The country got rid of the Malagasy franc in 2007 and replaced it with the ariary, which is worth 5 times more. However, nearly everyone still quotes prices in the old currency, as though you can still pay in it. It would be as though you went to Italy and everyone was still quoting prices in Italian lira, but you never really know. So, someone says 1,000 when asked a price. Is that 1,000 of the old currency or the new?

South Africa- Named Routes. Every road seems part of some touristic route. If we lived in South Africa, our driveway would probably be dubbed the "Andyandtara.com Driveway Route" by the government. It would come complete with nice signs. At one point we were driving down a tiny dirt road that no one uses and it had a huge sign saying something like "The Bob Robertson Mountain Route" and we just laughed.

Zimbabwe- Bartering. Because the Zim dollar is catastrophically worthless and people haven't fully adjusted to using dollars and rand, many people are still happy to trade. How much is that souvenir? "$10, but I'd rather trade it for your shoes." I was very tempted to trade the sunglasses that I bought for $1, but I really didn't need any of the junk they were selling...

Botswana- Urinal cakes. Tara has to take my word for this one. Every urinal has no fewer than 50 small urinal cakes, most often in a rainbow of colors and sometimes in a variety of shapes (cubes, round, thick, thin, etc.). All the bathrooms smell very nice.

Namibia- Germans. Sure, it was a German colony, but so were lots of places. Only Namibia has kept alive everything from German sausages to sauerkraut. Any German would feel right at home speaking German and many of the towns look like small German villages.

Lesotho- Walking in the road. The people of Lesotho don't really seem to understand cars. Because they see so few, they have the belief that the roads were built exclusively for them and their livestock to walk on. This proves problematic if you are going down the main road at 60 miles per hour at night, come around a turn, and discover a huge group of people right in front of you.

Swaziland- The King. Though most famous in most of the world for choosing a bride from a parade of topless, dancing teenagers each year (Google Reed Dance if you want to learn more), the king of Swaziland seems revered by all within the country. Let us know if you figure out what he does other than waste the country's money.

Mozambique- Male and female symbols. This sounds weird, but many places in Mozambique use the biological male and female symbols. You know, the little circles with an arrow coming off, like you might use in a biology class or the 1970s. We always had to do a double-take and figure out which was the right one to use.

Malawi- Teaching the language. In most places, people act as though we should know the local language, even when it is only spoken by about 100 people. In Malawi, they don't expect you to know it, but they always wanted to teach us. At least 20 people tried teaching us greetings for different times of day, but all failed.

Zambia- Coming to America. We had kids as young as 10 and adults well over 50 asking us how to get to America. At least we could tell the kids that they should study hard and maybe get a scholarship to an American school. The best we could come up with for the adults is that they should thinking about trying to get to an easier country like South Africa (even though South Africans mostly hate other Africans coming to their country).

And that ends another fine addition of obsessions. Hope that you enjoyed it!

No, we didn't eat any lemurs

The food of Madagascar is set apart from the rest of Africa along with its geography. Heavily influenced by Asia and by what can be grown locally since it is isolated, the food is a nice fusion. In addition, it is probably the cheapest food of any country we have visited. The standard price for street food is 5 cents per item, and the selection is often large. We also had some very good and cheap Chinese food, which is normally expensive in the rest of Africa. Let's see what we ate.

One food picture left from Gabon. Here is the family with whom we stayed eating the tasty chili that we made for them. Some Germans that were staying had spent a ton of time and money tried to make a German dish the night before and everyone hated it. We did much better and everyone really liked it (or at least everyone had seconds and thirds when the night before they took one bite and then went and found other food).
Jumping right in, the single best food in Madagascar, and possibly my favorite street food in the world so far, are deep fried bananas. Batter a banana, throw it in the deep fryer, and it comes out with the banana warm and soft in a crisp shell. Amazing. And at 5 cents each, I ate no less than five of these each day. I don't understand why these aren't sold on every street corner in the world. I think you could sell them for $2 each in the US.
We also found these fried manioc sticks. Sort of like a fried piece of bread. They would have been much better with sugar, but Tara really liked them. Oh, and they were sometimes on sale: two for five cents. I like this picture because Tara apparently has part of one in her mouth while posing with a second...

Samosas are very common in Madagascar. A bit more like the ones we have had in Ethiopian restaurants than Indian restaurants, they are often filled with green onion, meat, potato, and other vegetables and spices. Always served with a spicy sauce. Five cents each. In the US, you couldn't even buy the amount of oil in each of these for five cents.

This might be the weirdest, and one of the more costly, street foods of Madagascar. They take a mix of peanuts and rice, sometimes adding a bit of banana or sugar, and smoke it inside a banana leaf. It sounds amazing, but it turns out to be a bit bland. Very popular as a special treat, since this slice cost almost 50 cents. It really needs about ten times more sugar to be good.

We found little churros in the market! Tara is a churro fanatic, and though this wouldn't make the list of top 50 best churros found in our travels, she was very happy to find one. Cost: five cents each.

The other thing that made Tara really happy is that you can find fresh yogurt on nearly every street corner. It is expensive, at 10 to 20 cents per cup, but she splurged for it... Apparently, it was really good. Sometimes it comes in colorful cups, which is more exciting than this regular one.

I think we mentioned before that many people still quote things in the old currency. When asking about the price of these strawberries (a big bag of them), we understood the price to be $3. This seemed way too high, but the woman quickly understood and told us that was the old currency, so we bought a pint of strawberries that were very good for $0.50. We ate them so fast that we forgot to take a picture until they were almost gone.

Fresh fruit juices on the street are common in Antananarivo and some of the bigger cities. Five cents a glass and you essentially get whatever flavor or two they have that day, though all of them advertise that they have dozens of flavors. Sort of a mix of fruit juice and Kool-Aid, which is just how I like my fruit juice.

Ice cream was surprisingly cheap there, if not the tastiest. They do have a lot of cows, which makes dairy cheaper than many African countries. We bought these to celebrate the airline finding my lost bag.

For breakfast at one of our hotels, Tara had this fruit jam that she loved. Some kind of berries that started with a p. Pockberries come to mind, but I don't actually think they could be called that. So, Tara will have to correct this later and add the name of the berries. They were okay, but not as good as she claims.

These fruits are really good. I asked a few people that spoke English if they had an English name, and the consensus was that they only exist in Madagascar and don't really have an English name that anyone knew. They have big seeds inside, but the flesh taste like a mix of a plum and an apricot. Very sweet. We bought a few big bags of them. Extra fun because they come still attached to the branch.

This is a manioc cake with a stripe of peanut butter in it. Peanut butter (called pistache for unknown reasons in Madagascar) is not uncommon, but costly by Madagascar standards. So, for a five cent cake, you don't get enough peanut butter in the peanut butter to manioc ratio.

While walking through the very dry areas in the middle of the country, our guide showed us these edible berries on these thorny trees. He gave us some and they were very good. I then tried to pick my own, discovering that if you pick them before they are really ripe, they are not only disgusting, but leave a taste in your mouth that doesn't come out for about an hour.

For breakfast one morning while waiting on a bus in a small town, the options were very limited. I bought this cake thing that turned out to be rather terrible. Tasted like a plastic sponge. Tara pointed out that all one had to do is look at it to know that it would taste like that, but I still had to try.

Local restaurants in Madagascar have huge menus, which surprised us at first. Then we realized that they don't start to cook anything until you order, so it often takes well over an hour to get your food and you hear them making everything fresh in the back after you order. This was zebu beef, the local type of cow, which is very tasty.

For one of our nice meals, Tara was going to have lobster. However, they had something else on the menu called cigale, that they told us was a bit like lobster, but they had no idea what the English word was. Tara was adventurous and got it. It looked like a mutant lobster and we later learned that the word means cicada. We still have no idea what it is called in English, but Tara thought it wasn't quite as good as lobster. Let us know if you know what this thing is called.

We bought some fresh baobab honey from a woman on the street. It was in a recycled rum bottle. Hooray for recycling. The honey was very good, but we did get some intestinal critters in Madagascar that may have been from that. Or from the thousand other things that we ate and drank that they advised foreigners not to. Nothing a little cipro couldn't fix.

Noodles on the street and salad on the street are popular. Popular together. For about 15 cents, you could get a nice plate of curry noodles. A few places that we had them were amazing. Some were just mediocre. A great snack during the day, though.

Fried scallion pancakes were also popular. More fried than scallion, they would make for a popular drunk food in most places. However, since everywhere that serves food closes by about 7pm in Madagascar, that isn't the case there.

Here is a selection of five cent items in a rural village. Red bananas lightly fried, deep fried bananas, weird banana bread stuff in a leaf (made with manioc flour and no sugar, so not as good as it sounds).

Look at these mud crabs for sell at the market! Very nice, but I didn't ask how much. Probably five cents.

More five cent items. Some manioc chips (slices of fried manioc with salt), more red bananas, and fish. We never tried the five cent fish, but they are popular. We calculated that you could buy everything on this table for about $2.00.

These look like noodles at first, but are actually more like a curried sourkraut. Not bad, and filling, but not nearly as good as the noodles.

Here is some different banana bread, which is okay, but not really sugary and sometimes has sand in it, and huge chunks of manioc that has been boiled. You can guess the prices.

A plate of hot corn is good on a cold day. Especially for five cents. Actually, this was in a touristy town, so it might have been ten cents.

We went to this local French-owned smoothie place where we had disappointing smoothied (for a whopping dollar each), but had some tasty fries.

While walking around a local market, I bought a popsicle in a bag without knowing the flavor. I literally put my lips on it to rip off the corner and eat it, turned to Tara and told her that I was fairly sure it was beer flavored, which is gross. She then tried it and confirmed not just that it was beer flavored, but that it was actually frozen beer. Like I said, gross. Worst street food of Madagascar.

Tara then found pieces of cheese from a street vendor. She had thought about buying a huge wheel from other vendors, but this one sold her just a bite. She really like it.

Here are the duck fat fries that we got from the French-owned cafe. They were very good and very reasonably priced at 30 cents per bag.

Everywhere had this stuff called Bonbon Anglais Lemonade. For one of our final dinners, we got a bottle with dinner. It turned out to taste like bubble gum. Not good at all, and neither English nor lemonade. Boo to Coke for making such a bad product, though it seemed very popular there.

This is some weird local sausage dish that Tara had. Very good, plus it was at the entrance to a national park with lots of lemurs. They told us it was pork, not lemur, but who really knows. We saw lots of lemurs, but no pigs.

One of the several Chinese meals that we had. Fairly typical Chinese fare, but also typical for Madagascar.

Tara also had to try one of the drinkable yogurts from the store. Yao seemed to be the main brand. She gives it a thumbs down, especially since it was way more expensive than the yogurt for sale everywhere on the street.

Well, that looks like everything for foods of Madagascar. Overall, the food was really good just like the animals, and I tell Tara a month later how much I miss deep fried bananas about every other day.

Mad about Madagascar Wildlife

Madagascar broke away from the African continent about 130 million years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs. This is enough time and isolation for evolution to create an assortment of animals far different than anywhere else. Most famous are the lemurs and chameleons, and we saw tons of both. The low quality of many of these pictures, even when we were feet from the animals, makes me appreciate how difficult it is to be a professional wildlife photographer, but we did our best.

Even in Tana, the capital, butterflies abound. No lemurs in the city, though. Here was the best butterfly that we saw.
Our first nature destination in Madagascar was Ranomafana National Park. The National Park system of Madagascar is excellent, with well-trained, English-speaking guides. Typically, you go through the parks during the day and take a walk on the fringes of the park at night (no one is allowed in the parks at night). At Ranomafana, our guide was Roody, who was maybe not so incredible at spotting things during the day (though we saw several lemur species thanks to other guides telling him where they were), but he was really terrific at spotting animals in the dark when Tara and I could barely see anything.

One species of spider in Madagascar builds massive webs, often by bridges. The webs commonly span 100 feet or more with no supports other than the edges, which is really impressive when you think about how the spiders get the webs started. Here is a picture of one to scare Tara when she reads my post.
Ranomafana became a national park mostly because it is home to the Golden Bamboo Lemur, which wasn't discovered until 1986 and only lives in this area. We were fortunate enough to see a troop of them, though it was fairly dark in the forest to take their pictures.
The Golden Bamboo Lemurs on the the smallish side for lemurs. As the name implies, they eat mostly bamboo. Madagascar has 5 species of native bamboo, and now lots of others that have come from Asia.
Tara was tired after our lemur hike, but I went on a walk for a couple of hours in search of wildlife by myself. Unfortunately, without a guide, this was the most exciting animal that I could find. Now, it was a really nice looking insect, but it may not have been worth the energy expended to find it.
At night, the chameleons find resting places lower in the trees, which makes them easier to find. Madagascar has about 50 chameleon species, ranging from about an inch long to a couple of feet. This one is a juvenile of an already tiny species (I think it is just called the green chameleon), so it is particularly small. Small ones often hang onto little leaves like this.
This is a full-grown short-horned chameleon catching a little shut-eye. I resisted my desire to grab him and pet him.
This is a juvenile short-horn, which you can see isn't as dark as the adult above.
This is a full-size green chameleon with me in the background for size comparison.
This is the same one as above, but without me to ruin the picture. So tiny and so green.
This one is an even smaller species. A brown something or other. Maybe the size of a pinky finger if you include the tail.
This one is another species, but was quite high in the tree and harder to see.
I'm sure that you are sick of chameleons by now, but I am not, so we'll go on after a short intermission of frogs. This tree frog has a nearly blue underbelly.
Like the frog above, this species only lives in Madagascar, but frogs don't evolve all that quickly, so they look very much like tree frogs everywhere.
This is one of the best-looking chameleons that we saw. Two-toned, horns in the front, looks like he is ready to ride into battle.
This is the juvenile of the ugliest chameleon that we saw. He looks really great and really ugly up-close.
This is a juvenile of the two-tone one above. Again, a bit brighter as a juvenile.
Back at our hotel, a huge beetle was walking around. Maybe an inch or so. About 60 seconds after this picture, Tara accidentally smashed it.
An adult of the ugly chameleon. Not much prettier, but bigger.
I didn't really get any good bird pictures in Madagascar, but we'll try to put a few unexciting ones in for the hardcore birders that I'm sure frequent our blog. This is the female of the paradise flycatcher, a bird that is very common in Madagascar.
Don't know what this one is, but the picture was better than the last one.
Green geckos (this one is Gordon) are common in many parts of the island.
Red-backed lemurs are one or the larger and more common lemurs in Madagascar. Here is the female in a tree.
The male is a gray color, despite the name red-backed. Here is a blurry picture of him. He lives with a group of females, which isn't always the case with lemurs, as some are monogamous.
At Isalo National Park, we partnered with Chloe, a very nice French girl we met on the bus, to take a day hike to canyons nearby. Beautiful dragonflies in red and orange were common near the many streams.
Our guide, John (I'm sure that John was his name as much as John is the real name of the Indian guy who picks up your customer service call from Mumbai), found us a nice group of ring-tailed lemurs, probably the lemur most identified with Madagascar. Here is one pole dancing for us.
Here are two more posing for a picture. These are used to humans and weren't afraid at all, but because lemurs only have one rare natural predator (the fossa), they generally aren't too afraid of people.
Many people in Madagascar, and particularly in the area around Isalo National Park, measure their wealth by the number of Zebu cattle that they own. The cattle are valued at about $300 each, which is a lot. Typically, a man needs to give the family of a girl two of them to marry a woman, but men often can't afford two. So, they will sometimes steal cattle from nearby villages (because they are the only thing of value that anyone has) and sell them at a discount to one of the really big cattle families around. They then use the money to buy zebu for the brides family. So, it is essentially cattle laundering.
One more ring-tailed lemur picture. Too cute not to post.
From Isalo National Park, we continued to Ifaty, where we did some scuba diving of which we have no pictures. However, that is also the area where the "Spiny Forest" begins. It is more a desert with cactus like plants and baobab trees. Some lemurs can live on the cacti, but we did not see any. The best we did was this lizard.
The area is also known for tortoises. We got a ride with some locals who saw this one by the road. The woman was going to try to take it home to her kids, but they have very sharp claws and she put it back out of the car as soon as it came out of its shell.
Our next stop was Tsingy National Park, which we knew nothing about except that I had seen a picture and decided we were going there no matter what. The park turned out to be really great and had some wildlife, too. Here is a tiny frog living in our hotel room.
Tons of small caves exist in the Tsingys where geckos like this one live. They stick even to the rock.
This lizard living in the cracks blends in well.
Another green gecko hanging out at our hotel.
In the Petite Tsingy, we saw this falcon. Maybe the best bird picture we have from Madagascar.
We also saw these Madagascar black parrots. Two species of parrots exist in Madagascar, but black, and nearly identical except that one is slightly larger. We saw both and couldn't tell them apart.
A red-backed lemur looking down at us.
This is a sportive lemur, which I thought was called a sporty lemur about the first 10 times the guide said it. Mostly nocturnal, this one was sitting around resting during the day. Looks more like a squirrel, and about the same size, but definitely a primate.
Madagascar has more than one type of butterfly that Tara refers to as a monarch butterfly. This is one of them.
Near the Way of the Baobabs, we saw these zebu grazing by the lake filled with water hyacinth.
Our last park stop was Andasibe, home to the Indri, which is the largest and one of the rarest lemurs. It cannot live in captivity, and now lives in only a small portion of Madagascar (it used to be common over much of the island). It is sometimes called a giant teddy bear. The indri is mostly famous because it makes a loud wailing noise when it wakes up in the morning that can be heard for a couple of miles.
This giant grasshopper was several inches long. Our guide says that they can also bite and that they hurt, so we kept our distance. It reminded me of a comment from one of our earlier guides, though, when he was talking about how the locals eat giant spiders. I asked him what it tasted like and he replied, "It tastes a lot like a giant grasshopper." Right, of course it does.
Here's another indri picture. They have almost no tail, unlike other lemurs, and mostly jump horizontally from one tree to another.
This green spider is maybe only an inch across, but his coloration was amazing.
Red-fronted lemurs are not so rare, but are apparently rare in the park where we were. The guide was really excited to see them and said he hadn't seen them in months. We saw some in Ranomafana as well, but this is a better picture.
In Andasibe, we also saw the rare Diademed Sifaka. They are large and have a lot of personality in addition to their beautiful markings. This one is trying to reach some fruit.
Here is another one holding onto a tree.
Tara found this tiny red beetle that looked as though it had been painted with fingernail polish. After about 50 attempts, we got this okay picture of it.
I was walking aroung the grounds of our hotel unsucessfully looking for chameleons when one of the gardners saw me and told me to come over to a bush where he showed me this guy. When he thought the chameleon wasn't cooperating for pictures, he grabbed him and moved him to a lower branch despite my objections, which is why he looks angry in this picture.
When asked if he could get a mouse lemur to stop long enough for a picture, our guide at Andasibe for the night walk told us that he knew how to hypnotize them and it shouldn't be a problem. We thought this was a joke because we had seen another mouse lemur that moved at remarkable speed without ever stopping. As it turned out, the guide wasn't joking. If you can hit them just right with a low intensity flashlight, they freeze a bit like a deer in headlights and then you can photograph them. So, here is our brown mouse lemur picture. They are the same size as a hamster and are the smallest of all primates. They weight 1-2 ounces, depending on the species.
The other animal that I told the guide I wanted to see was the leaf-tailed gecko, which has a tail sort of like a beaver that is supposed to look like a leaf for camoflauge. They are rare, but he said we would try. Towards the end of our walk, he spotted something about 20 feet away and happily announced that he thought it was a leaf-tail. We get up to it and I said, "Where's its tail?" He looks and replies, "Hmmm...looks like this one had its tail bit off." The irony of finding this rare animal without its namesake appendage was too much not to laugh about.
This short-nosed chameleon (not to be confused with short-horned) is very small and has a nice big nose.
This is a short-horned like in earlier pictures, but at a different park. They look like a triceratops.
A short-nosed from a different angle.
If by some miracle you are still reading, that wraps up our wildlife post for Madagascar. Despite costing a fortune to get there, the wildlife of Madagascar really was remarkable. We would happily go back and try to find some of the species that we weren't able to spot this time.