Saturday 1st October 2022.  Cheshire, UK to Antananarivo, Madagascar

Arrived at Antananarivo airport at 10:45pm having set-off from home at two in the morning - a very long day of travel from Manchester via Paris.  The first task was to fill in a booklet in order to get our visa and provide our COVID vaccination status.  Having been on a flight for the last 12 hours it seemed odd to be expected to fill this in whilst standing in a queue at nearly midnight when we could have done it with the luxury of time on the flight.   Having read on the plane that we needed two passport photos each for our visa we were extremely relieved when this proved to be wrong and the process turned out to be relatively painless if a little convoluted: pay for visas at one booth, move to next booth for passport control, go to another booth for a police check, then finally hand over the form about COVID vaccination status.  On the plus side by the time we had navigated all this our bags were on the carousel and we were able to walk straight through and go to get the shuttle bus to the hotel arriving at FlyInn Hotel totally shattered at midnight.

We had planned the route for the next 2 weeks to give us a glimpse of Madagascar focused on the West side of the island as the island is too big to cover in a couple of weeks.  We would start by flying to Morondava and then pick-up a 4x4 vehicle and ultimately drive back to Antananarivo.