Log> The value of intuition

There must be a certain amount of karma that gets credited in your account when you just strap yourself to a backpack and go humbly out into the world, waiting expectantly for whatever it offers or throws your way. Landing in Madagascar, following my intuition I again managed to get myself a small change of itinerary - going after a bird, sure, but an extinct one: I was recommended to go and seek out the site where only recently Rahona Ostromi, the missing link between birds and dinosaurs, was discovered. That will mean trekking into the limestone 'tsingy' of Northern Mad where the national park infrastructure is quite underdeveloped according to legend. An hour before hearing about this I had extended my stay in the North of Madagascar to span as much of my time in the country as possible, 8 days in total.

A couple of words on this saying 'yes' thing that got me in trouble in Mauritius already - of course this doesn't mean saying yes to every taxi tout, salesman and beggar, but to proposals of genuine interest and potential, anything that tickles my fancy, so to say. Ahem. This will likely get me in trouble, but so be it, the better the stories. And on the topic of stories, I'm still writing trivial things having changed my initial storyline and, well, even topic. I have a gallery of characters running around in my head and they will need to find their places - I'll go mad otherwise. The pieces have slowly been falling into place before this so I'm keeping my fingers crossed (while not on the keyboard).

And Antananarivo is a mess. Cities in third-world countries are rarely a positive experience, and whereas I've only met nice people here, had good food and slept in a reasonable (compared to the previous palace) accommodation, the city itself is a place of poverty and filth. I'm flying to Nosy Be for the advanced diving course now, and I'm partly afraid that it will be a nice, built-up resort-styled island. It would just be so unfair.