Having a gas in Madagascar

At long last, we are somewhere (Johannesburg, South Africa) with fast enough Internet that we can catch you up on our recent adventures in Madagscar!

OK, if you ever go to Madagascar (and I think you should!), you may want to do a little more advance planning than Andy and I did. For instance, you might want to:

1) Get a guidebook just on Madagascar, instead of relying on the 15 crappy pages Lonely Planet Africa devotes to the country...

2) Actually read about Madagascar in advance, so that you know you need at least 3 weeks in the country, or that you'll need to take internal flights (or both!) if you want to go anywhere remote...

3) Fly in on Air Madagascar, which then entitles you to 50% off all internal flights, instead of flying in on, say, South African Airways, which likes to force you to check your carry-on legal bags and then loses them...

But luckily, with a bit of improvising, we managed to overcome all these issues en route and had an amazing time in the land of the lemur. We saw plenty of wildlife at every national park we visited. The national park guides were terrific and spoke good English. The landscapes are breathtaking, and the sunsets the most amazing I've seen anywhere. People (other than taxi and taxi-brousse drivers!) are very kind, and food is delicious and extraordinarily cheap. In fact, most things are quite cheap once you get there. It was definitely one of my favorite countries so far, and if you can cobble together the money to actually get yourself there, I highly recommend that you go!

We've decided to separate our blog posts about Madagascar into general, wildlife, and food. I'll start off our pictorial odyssey with the general pics.

Before we get to Madagascar, though, one last picture from Gabon. Our last day there was the one-year anniversary of the country's long-time president Bongo's (yes, that's his real name) death. There were billboards over Libreville commemorating this, but our favorites were the ones that teenage girls were wearing around like backpacks. We asked one girl if we could take her picture, and she rounded up her nearby friends, too! I especially like the dove perched casually on Bongo's shoulder in this shot...
OK, on to Madagascar! We flew from Libreville, via Johannesburg, to the capital of Antananarivo, commonly shortened to Tana. S South African Airways lost Andy's checked bag (and, seemingly, the bags of about half the passengers on our flight!). Luckily, it arrived the next day and all was well.

This forced us to spend one extra night in Tana, but that wasn't really such a hardship, since Tana is pretty awesome! It is set in the country's central plateau region on a series of hills, and is very pedestrian-friendly and picturesque, with little cobblestone streets and staircases everywhere. Here is a view down one of the biggest staircases, which leads to the main market and serves as a stepwise market of its own.
The hills of Tana are apparently ready for their close-up.
There is a lake right in the middle of the city, with this war memorial out in the middle of it. It cost some crazy amount to go out and see the monument, so we just looked from the shore.
Taxis in Tana are old Citroens and Renaults that look like they're out of an old black-and-white movie. We rode in several (after heated price negotiations in French...).
After we got Andy's bag back, we headed south by bush taxi, or taxi-brousse (basically a crappy, smelly old minivan crammed four adults and a few kids to a row) for eight hours to Fianarantsoa, where a Frenchwoman we met in the car kindly put us up in her house there for the night. Merci, Annie! (We also made friends with another Frenchwoman named Sophie who let us steal her Lonely Planet Madagascar for a while, leading us to discover whole new regions of Madagascar that we wanted to visit that weren't even mentioned in our book. Merci, Sophie!)

The next morning, we were off to the nearby national park at Ranomafana, and an hour after arrival we were off on our first rainforest hike. Andy will cover the lemurs and other cool wildlife we saw there, so I am stuck showing you this giant tree fern. (Or maybe it's just an epiphyte?)
It wasn't so sunny in Ranomafana, but that just makes the forest look more dramatic, doesn't it?
Nice rainforestscapes.
And fungi, of course!
Wow, this fungus is crazy!
Goodness, Andy likes to take mushroom pictures.
OK, on to Isalo National Park, which took another painful eight hours or so in an even more crowded taxi-brousse. But luckily, in that TB we made another French friend, Chloe, with whom we ended up exploring the park (and who let us take photos of her guidebook pages to supplement our own info--very helpful!). Chloe also led us to my favorite hotel in Madagascar, Chez Alice, where we got a terrific bungalow with bathroom and great views of the surrounding landscape for $13. Here is sunrise from the grounds of Chez Alice:
Isalo is known for its cool rock formations rising from the savannah. Here are the three of us on our hike the following day.

We visited two canyons. The first is called Monkey Canyon and we did see some cool ring-tailed lemurs there, which Andy will blog about. But the canyon on its own was pretty cool as well.
It had some lush and crazy vegetation.
This shot may be from Monkey Canyon or from Rat Canyon, which we visited later. Sadly, we saw no Madagascar jumping rats there (apparently they used to be quite common there, hence the name).
Fungus in the canyon!
This pic is from Ranohira, the town right next to Isalo. In case you can't tell, that's half a dead cow on the cart.
One of the coolest things about Madagascar is its clouds. There are so many different types, and they often look like caricatures of clouds, like you'd see in a cartoon or a video game or something.
After Isalo, we went to Ifaty, a beach town on Madagascars southwest coast. We went there for the scuba diving, but have no pictures from that. (And thank goodness--turns out that someone had a wee panic attack and had to make an emergency ascent just minutes after going down. Oops! I managed to get my act together and do the second dive with no problems, but apparently that was the less-good one--Andy said he saw a lot more cool fish on the first. But did he get to have a private chat with the Malagasy boatman, Sammy, trying to explain to him in French the American concept of Uncle Sam? I think not...)

Anyway, sunsets in Ifaty are nice.
And with every drink you buy, you get one free cat!
The other cool thing to see in Ifaty is the spiny forest. These huge plants are covered with, well, spines! Madagascar has some crazily awesome plant life.
Mixed in with the spiny plants are big baobab trees. Here are a fat one and a skinny one together.
Baobabs + spiny plants = happy Andy.
So, our original plan (well, ever since borrowing a few people's guidebooks!) was to take a taxi-brousse from Toliara (the city near Ifaty) up the west coast to Morondava, the city near the Tsingys national park, which we'd decided we had to visit. The road here is apparently so bad that it would take 2 days to go 250 kilometers. But we were steeled and ready to do it.

Unfortunately, after the louses had gleefully taken our money and "made a reservation" for us, the taxi-brousse company decided not to run the route on the day we needed to go because they didn't have enough passengers. And, of course, no one seemed to be able to find enough money to give us a refund. A lot of shouting in French ensued. Finally, after about 30 minutes of BS, we got our money back and jumped in a cab to the airport, where we knew there was a flight that day to Morondava (there are only a couple a week).

Unfortunately, that flight was full. BUT, the friendly folks at Air Madagascar put us on standby, and we ended up with seats on the plane! It was way more expensive than the taxi-brousse would have been, but it was really nice to arrive in Morondava in two hours instead of after two days.

Here is my old-school, handwritten air ticket and boarding pass.
In southern Madagascar, we noticed a lot of women whose faces were painted yellow. We figured this had some sort of religious significance, but Sammy the boatman informed me that it's just a form of sunblock, made from the paste of a local tree!

Morondava is a nice little town that also has a beach and spectacular sunsets. Om...
In Morondava, we hired a 4x4 with driver to take us to see the tsingys, some crazy rock formations that were just eight hours away by terrible roads (notice a pattern here?). The trip took three days (one day there, one day at the park, one day back). We ran around Morondava like maniacs the day before we left, looking for other tourists who might want to share our car (and the cost of it), but we never found any. Apparently, high season doesn't hit until July.

Luckily, we were able to negotiate a decent deal with a local, instead of booking through an expensive hotel, and ended up with an awesome driver, John, who even hiked with us at the tsingys. En route somewhere, we saw this huge yucca-like plant.
What's a tsingy? It's a crazy limestone rock formation formed by eons of erosion. The national park has two sections, the grand tsingys and the petite ones. We started our hike in this "canyon" in the grand section.
Rather than try to find something interesting to say about each of these pictures, I'll just let the magnificence of the tsingys wash over you silently as you scroll down.




(I think this is where we make the transition to the petite tsingys. I know, they look the same, but when you're there, trust me, they are a lot smaller.)

Fun cactus-like plants common in the tsingys.
Zebu-carts are a very popular way to get around, or at least move your stuff around, in rural Madagascar. Zebu are the type of cow ubiquitous on the island.
These girls in Bekopaka, the village we stayed in near the tsingys, were initially scared to have their picture taken, but Andy charmed them, and they were psyched in the end to see themselves on the little screen.
Here's a typical Malagasy house, made of mud with a roof made of strong leaves.

On the way back from the tsingys, we visited some well-known baobab trees. Here is the giagantic, sacred baobab...

And here is Andy (lower right) getting amorous with the "amorous baobab."
Finally, we spent sunset at the "way of the baobabs," a famous avenue lined with impressive baobab trees.
Zebu cart, profiled in the sunset...
Ooh.
A great shot Andy got of ladies carrying loads on their heads home as the sun set.

This was Andy's favorite tourist at the way of the baobabs because he looked kinda like a comical French cartoon character.

Our next stop was Antsirabe, another plateau town on the way back to the capital. Just 12 hours on a dirt road by taxi-brousse, arriving at 3AM! Sigh.

Antsirabe is the pousse-pousse capital of Madagascar, with about five of these rickshaws available for any one person. Many pousse-pousse drivers(?) don't even wear shoes--in fact, many Malagasy don't wear shoes, even in the chilly highlands.
There is a big lake in the middle of Antsirabe, too. People like to do their laundry there and then spread it out to dry in the sun.
Taking a pousse-pousse halfway across town costs about 75 cents. Well, that's the best price we could get as tourists, at least. We're pretty sure the locals pay about 5 cents for the same ride.
Andy's favorite sign in Antsirabe. We haven't visited this website yet, but we assume they sell bat poop!
My favorite sign came later, outside of Andasibe National Park, our last stop in Madagascar. It's a creative translation of a French sign further up the road. At first I thought "acheminement" was a poor spelling of "achievement," but then I realized it's the same word on the French sign and means "putting into the road." Apparently, Google translator didn't know that word, and just left it in French for this sign...
Our hotel at Andasibe came with two extra beds--a single bed and this. Hotel, are you trying to tell us something? We were also amused that it came with its own mosquito net.
On our final night back in the capital, we got a hotel room with a balcony overlooking the city. Sweet!
And extra-sweet when the fireworks started! This was the third 50th anniversary of independence celebration we have been to in Africa (apparently France let all of her colonies go the same year).

It seems strange to write about Madagascar and not mention its animals or its food, but I've done my best. Hopefully I have whet your appetite for even more fun posts to come.

Financing West Africa

Our journeys in Africa until now have been pleasantly affordable, if not always pleasantly comfortable. We wanted to do the entire region at once, so here is what we can tell you about finances in West Africa. As a reminder, these prices generally include our visas (and visa prices may vary depending on where they are issued) and all expenses for the two of us. They are obviously a rough guide, but should be helpful to other traveling in the area.

Morocco- $47 per day over 15 days. Thanks to Morocco not requiring visas, cheap lodging and transport, and easy do-it-yourself tour options, this is one of the cheapest countries we have visited. We stayed in a few terrible hotels, but also a few rather nice ones, but you could easily stay in nice ones the whole time and not add more than $10/night.

Mauritania- $68 per day over 8 days. This reflects the $45 visa, but is lessened by us staying with a family for a few days. Hotels are a bit pricey in Mauritania for the quality, and most of the food is imported, so it can also be pricey if you want Western-standards. However, transport is cheap, with the iron ore train being almost free.

Senegal- $61 per day over 7 days. Senegal is the other country in this part of the world that does not require visas for Americans (or most Europeans), which reduces the cost. Hotels are reasonable except in Dakar, where you should definitely stay in the very nice Catholic Guesthouse or couchsurf if you are on a budget.

The Gambia- $106 per day over 4 days. This is skewed by the $50 visas and only being there for four days, but in The Gambia, you have to take tours (often costly boat tours) to see much. Guides can be hired very cheaply if you can find them, but boats cannot. We do have some good suggestions for bird and wildlife guides if you decide to go.

Mali- $76 per day over 8.5 days. Visas are $25 each. Mali has more tourists, so everything is a bit more expensive, especially tours of Dogon Country, which are costly, but interesting. If you are really on a budget, you can often get a mattress on someone's roof for very little money, which is actually your only chance to be cool enough to sleep if you are there in hot season unless you pay the outrageous additional amounts (normally $20/night) for air conditioning.

Burkina Faso- $66 per day over 7.5 days. Visas were $20 each at the border, but only good for 7 days. Transport is fairly cheap and often nicer than surrounding countries (even sometimes air conditioned on the main east-west road). Without your own car, you do have to hire a guide and car to see some of the interesting spots in the west of the country, which was not crazy expensive, but raised the average.

Ghana- $46 per day over 14 days. Visas were $30 each. Ghana feels more expensive than it is because at a few touristy places, you feel like you are being overcharged. Food on the street is good (if you can find it without fish sauce) and really cheap. Hotel rooms are very reasonable, though you may want to look at a few in Accra to find the right cleanliness/cost balance.

Togo- $49 per day over 4.5 days. Visas were $30 each. This is completely skewed by us staying entirely with Peace Corps volunteers while in the country. The average would have been about $30 per day more without that. Take the Post Bus, which is nice and reliable (and air conditioned) when traveling.

Benin- $65 per day over 5.5 days. Visas were $20 each. Good value since we had to pay $50 each for the car/tour to Pendjari tour and paid for hotels throughout the country. Take InterCity bus when possible--it was cheaper than most and air conditioned.

Nigeria- $80 per day over 11 days. Visas were $130 each. The visas make it expensive, but our couchsurfing in Lagos offsets that since hotel prices there are very high. Transport costs vary a lot from place to place in the country, sometimes with little reason. Street food availability also varies a lot, and restaurants are expensive. Make sure your hotel has a generator (almost all do) since the country is without power most of the time.

Cameroon- $59 per day over 15 days. Visas were $100 each. Hotels aren't that expensive, though the water and electricity in Cameroon is spotty, so you could find yourself without one or both even at decent hotels (good hotels have generators for power, but the backup for water is to give you a couple of buckets). Travel prices also vary a lot here in different parts, so just bargain hard and hope for the best.

Gabon- $78 per day over 7.5 days. Visas were $100 each. Gabon is expensive. Transport is two or three times more expensive than any other country in the region. Hotels are not cheap, though of a high standard (couchsurfing in Libreville greatly helps our expenses). If you venture to the national parks rather than Lope, they start at $300 per night per person. Yet, we have had a decent time here.

That wraps up expenses. As always, ask if you have any questions.

Obsessions of West and Central Africa!

This post is a long time coming, but we figured we'd wait til the end of this segment of the trip and do one big post covering all 15 countries we've visited so far! Either that, or we've just been lazy. You decide...


I guess we'll start with the three European nations we hit en route to West Africa.


Belgium - Chocolate. That one's easy. Brussels's streets are line with chocolate shops, each one fancier than the next. Luckily, if you hang around long enough and look serious enough about possibly buying something, most of them will give you a free sample!


Gibraltar - "Apes." They're actually baboons, which are monkeys, but all the tour guides call them apes. They were brought over from Africa by army soldiers in the 1800s (I think) for...um, company? Now they run "wild" over the Rock of Gibraltar, except they seem to know exactly where the tourists with the food congregate. Saying Gibraltar's obsessed with them may be a stretch, but hey, we only spent a few hours there and don't really have any other candidates.


Spain - Ham. Or jamon, in the local parlance. Brussels's chocolate shops are replaced in Spanish cities with shops with huge haunches of pig hanging in the window, selling all manner of pork products! In Madrid there is even one emporium called the Museo del Jamon. (It made for a strange gateway to the Muslim world, where pork products are impossible to find...)


On to West Africa!


Morocco - "Berber artisan cooperatives." A.k.a....carpet shops. A guy starts guiding you through the medina (old town) and you think you're just gonna see the sights. Then he steers you to the amazing "artisan cooperative" where you are in luck the Berbers are in town, selling their amazing crafts, just for one day only! (Except that miraculously, they're still there when you walk by the next day, and the next.) Suddenly you find yourself trapped in a carpet showroom, with carpet after carpet being unfolded for your "viewing pleasure" and a slick salesman countering your every objection to purchasing ("Can't carry a carpet around the world? We ship to America!"). And then you start thinking, to your horror, "Hm, that carpet does look nice, and shipping it wouldn't cost so much..." You barely escape. Luckily, this only has to happen to you in one city (OK, maybe two...) before you catch wise and just refuse to even enter such places!


Mauritania - Tea. We thought Morocco was obsessed with tea until we got to Mauritania! A super-strong blend of green tea, fresh mint, and loads of sugar, decanted over and over until your tiny glass is just basically filled with tea foam, and drunk in three rounds over the course of an hour with your new friends, tea is an unavoidable but excellent Mauritanian experience.


Senegal - Pretending to have Internet access. In no other country have we entered so many buildings that had the word "cyber" or "internet" over the door, only to find that the place didn't even have electricity, much less computers or a connection! Senegal's sign-painters are apparently afflicted with an optimism that they will one day have Internet access, and are painting for the future, not the present...


The Gambia - "Happy couples!" For some reason, Gambians like to shout the phrase "Happy couples!" at pairs like me and Andy (i.e. whities)as we walk down the street. This is then often followed by some sort of fairly innocuous attempt to sell you something. We surmise that there was some sort of tourism-promoting PR campaign at some point that proclaimed The Gambia the place for happy couples.


Most of the time it didn't bother us, but one time we had just lost a bunch of money to a malfunctioning ATM (since recovered) and Andy was really mad. Upon emerging into the street, we heard someone call to us "Happy couples!" and begin their approach. Andy barked, "We're not happy right now, leave us alone!" And you'd better bet he did.


Mali - Mud. A lot of West African countries have houses made out of mud, but Mali takes mud art and architecture to a whole 'nother level. It has the largest mud-brick mosque in the world at Djenne, a town filled with other intricate mud-brick buildings. It also sells beautiful bogolan, or mud-cloth, dyed with different pigments derived from, you guessed it, mud. If you don't like mud, you might not enjoy Mali.


Burkina Faso - Mobylettes. The Burkinabe are crazy about their motorbikes, or mobylettes. The nicest store in Ouagadougou is a fancy mobylette emporium. Mobylettes swarm through the cities, and you see pairs that have crashed sprawled across intersections. But if, like me, you are reluctant to take one (without a helmet, down a bumpy dirt road!), people just don't understand.


Ghana - Fish. All of West Africa likes fish, but Ghana is especially obsessed and puts fish in everything. This was a real bugbear to us as we tried to eat street food, because almost every sauce had at least a hint o'fish in it. Every market has a huge, stinky fish section...and it doesn't matter if a town is many miles from the ocean or river--that's what dried fish is for! There is one toll booth in the middle of nowhere outside of Tamale in the north where women with huge baskets on their heads swarm passing tro-tros to sell people dried fish. How this situation evolved, I will never know, but everyone knows the fish-lady toll booth.


Togo - Pate. This is more learned from our Peace Corps friends than directly experienced, but Togolese people are really obsessed with the starchy staple they call pate. It's made of pounded corn and is fairly tasteless (unless you get the fermented version...bleh) but if they have to have a meal without it, they'll go a little crazy. We had to try it, of course...not bad, but we (like most other yovos we met in-country) don't really get what the fuss is about.


Benin - Celine Dion. You know those immortal lyrics, "Near...far...wherever you are..."? Wherever you are apparently includes Benin! We heard Celine playing at the bus office, at the Internet cafe...well, maybe that's it, but it made an impression. Celine seems to be fairly popular in much of West Africa, singing in French, English, and even Spanish.


Nigeria - Locks. OK, we know that Nigeria has a poor reputation for security, but it seems to have an excessive number of indoor locks. In the apartment we stayed in in Lagos, every room had its own lock and key, and in two different hotel rooms we were given a refrigerator with a lock on it. You know, in case those dastardly thieves tried to steal your yogurt...


Central African obsessions:


Cameroon - Beans and beignets. Or maybe that's just what we were obsessed with when we were there. But in every town you can find at least one lady frying up beignets (balls of fried dough) and selling them for 5 cents US apiece. The same lady also always has a big pot of beans (a bowl costs 20 cents) and another big pot of a warm sweet porridge (a cup costs 10 cents). This magical trifecta was our dinner many, many times.


Gabon - Speeding. Good lord, those Gabonese drivers drive fast. Our guidebook features warnings about reckless drivers for several African countries, but only in Gabon do we feel like we're taking our lives in our hands every time we get in a vehicle. And it doesn't matter if it's a taxi or a bus. In most other countries, if a car is driving fast, it will at least slow down as it goes through a village, but not in Gabon--the driver just leans on his horn to warn all the children/goats/other cars to get out of his way. (Honorable mention Gabon obsession: mayonnaise.)

There you have'em, the obsessions from this first leg of our Africa travels! Take them with a grain of salt, of course, and feel free to let us know if you agree or disagree!

Gabbing about Gabon

We only know a few people who had been to Gabon, and they most often described it with less than kind words. The country is expensive, the drivers are crazy, and the local police roadblocks near the border where we entered were very corrupt (at one point a cop tried to say that we had to pay him for not having the required seven vaccinations rather than the actually required one, though he couldn't actually name single one--really, do some research if you want to shake down tourists), which combine to create a bad first impression. We spent our first night in Oyem, a village where we had originally planned to launch a pygmy-hunting trip, but which we decided against after our disappointing Cameroon pygmy adventure. We apparently didn't find anything in the entire town worthy of a picture. Here are our pictures after that, though.

The next day, we got up at 5am to catch a bus to Ndjole, which in our terrible Lonely Planet map looked the closed thing to a junction with the road that would take us to Lope National Park, the only affordable park in the country. We thought it would take 8 hours, but because the bus driver maintained a speed of 70 miles per hour no matter how sharp the curve or how crowded the street (sort of like the movie Speed, I suppose), we arrived in 5. The locals said we were unlikely to get a car and should take the train, which turned out to be a 12 hour wait for the next train. Here is the station where we caught the midnight train to Lope.

And the sun setting over the tracks.
This bug may not look scary here, but when it flies (which it can barely do with small wings and a huge body), the back part hangs down like a limp piece of plastic and it looks like a giant insect from a horror film. I have no idea what it was, but I avoided it.
Much of the cargo carried on the trains is wood that had been cut from the interior and goes to the coast for processing or export. Logging is everywhere in Gabon, though it seems that they are trying to manage it.
Lope National Park is an interesting mix of gallery forest (small patches of forest) and savannah. In this picture you can see both. Most animals live in the forest and come to the edges to feed.
Here is Tara tramping through the Savannah followed by one of our guides. Amusingly, instead of the machetes carried by all of our guides in other countries, these guides carried small pruning shears, with which they clipped grass and branches as we went. Tara says the shears are more civilized than a machete, but I laughed every time they cut something.
This is a lapwing, which has these terrific yellow things under its neck (waddles, I suppose). We also saw a mother and baby elephant and a couple types of monkeys, but couldn't get pictures of them.
The roads in Gabon often get very dusty, and if it hasn't rained for a few days, the plants become completely covered with dust. We saw much heavier coverings while traveling, but this was where we could take a picture.
In Libreville, the capital and ten times larger than any other city in Gabon, we were lucky enough to Couchsurf with Yvette, who has a beautiful house on the beach and who ran for president last year. She has been very interesting to talk to and an amazing host. This is the tortoise that lives in her yard.
For our anniversary, we went to La Dolce Vita, the local Italian restaurant in Libreville. This is us in our fanciest clothes... This picture was taken by Sarah, and American teacher that we met at the restaurant who was kind enough to let us come to the American School, meet the kids, and use their Internet connection for this post.
While at the American School, I was completely dominant in badminton against the seven year olds. Okay, so we were playing without a net or any rules, but in my mind, I won.
This is the equivalent of the White House, where the president lives and works. Hopefully, some other people live or work there, also. This was all I could get before an armed guard yelled at us for taking pictures.
Across the street from the Presidential Palace is the ocean. Here is a view of the city south of there taken by Tara, photographer (and French translator) extraordinaire.
To remember the time when slaves were shipped from the port, this statue has been erected. Probably not what I would have erected to remember slavery, but I don't really like most modern art. Tara thinks maybe they couldn't afford separate man and woman slave statues, so they combined them.
Something that I should have commented on long ago is tampons. Tampons, as it turns out, is the French word for a stamp, and Africans love tampons. Really love. In every town, many stand exist solely to repair broken stamps or to sell you new ones. Signs like this are everywhere. Every time we see one, I laugh inside.
It is the one year anniversary of not just our wedding, but of the death of Bongo, the last "president" of 40 years (if you define a president as simply being elected, he qualified, but if he must be fairly elected, he wasn't even close). All over Libreville are signs of him with everyone from the Pope to Nelson Mandela, but this was Tara's favorite.
Well, that wraps up Gabon. It has turned out to be a better stay in Gabon than expected. We have met some very nice people, and just wish that it was possible to visit some other national parks for less than $300 per person per day. Maybe when we are rich, we will come back to what are supposed to be beautiful parks.