Time to leave the Comoros Islands

Trip Start May 20, 2007

Trip End Jul 16, 2007

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Flag of Comoros Moroni, Comoros
Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Tomorrow, we set off for Madagascar, by PLANE. We've had quite the little adventure in this odd destination, but I'm pretty thrilled to move on to my dream destination. Overall, we've had a good time, but of course there was what Marta and I refer to as a "seagull moment" (see last entry). We spent the last 2 days in Chomoni, a village on the east side of the island. We went there mostly because we knew they had accomodation, and we had camped on the beach in a different village the night before (incredible) and were in need of fresh water.

We found our hotel - a room on the beach in a little building. Just a bed, table, a giant poster of Wesley Snipes from "Blade" covering the wall, no electricity, buckets of water upon request, and an outside stone squat toilet that I'm positive folks up the hill looked into as we used it (I hope it was exciting!). All for only $15 a night! Seriously, this country is ludacrisly expensive.

Marta and I opted to stay for two nights, as Sunday was the island's presidential election, and few cars were given clearance to be on the road that day. The politics of this country are a bit wild - all week, leading up to the election, vans and trucks packed full of people would careen down the island's narrow roads, blaring music and yelling in support of one of the 18 presdiential candidates. Note that there's at most 350,000 people on this island, but 18 presidential candidates. So, we spent our time going on long walks, swimming in the ocean (still hasn't gotten old), reading (I'm currently caught up in a secondhand copy of "The Devil Wears Prada" in French. Nothing like reading something kinda junky in a foreign language), and searching for food. As it was a village, the only restaurant of any kind was our hotel, which would fry up some delicious but overpriced bananas and manioc for us. We saw people eating, and the townsfolk looked well-fed, but all we could find to eat on the first night was some biscuits, and after more searching, bananas and oranges, and we bought out the town. Apparently everyone just goes to Moroni to do their shopping.

On Sunday; as we wondered where we would find our next meal, a UN car pulled up to our hotel. Out came a middle-aged Frenchman who was doing a tourism assessment of the islands for the UN. If anyone could embody France, it was him. When we offered him some of our filtered water (thanks for the filter waterbottle, Dad!), he laughed and said, "No, I have water from France." Anyways, he took pity on us and gave us their snack supply of some bakery rolls and bananas that they had brought from Moroni.

So, our Seagull Moment. On the first day, we were alerted to the presence of a critter in our room - it got into one of our bananas. Sunday, Marta discovered that it had taken some nibbles from her discarded dirty underwear. What? That night, having wrapped up our food items, we went to sleep, only to be awoken by our hungry creature. This time, it was bold enough to try to eat Marta's hair while she slept. What an audacious critter! We were thouroughly disgusted and annoyed and kept up all the rest of the night as it scurried loudly about our room. And that was the seagull moment.

Two things I love about this place:

1. You can buy a wheelbarrow full of womens underwear.
2. French rap. Ridiculous.

Moroni hotels

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