Wednesday 12th October 2022. Belo-sur-mer to Morondava

We enjoyed our last breakfast at Entremer of toast and yoghurt and honey,  Laurence asked if we had been for our morning swim which made us feel bad that we hadn't so we ended up having a final swim after our breakfast - the water was back to being a perfect temperature so we were pleased we had made the effort.  Paying the bill turned out to be fun as it transpired the deposit had never gone through even though we had confirmation from our bank that the transfer had been paid.  Rather than worry about it we just paid it again but as a result of this and our seeming inability to correctly estimate costs we yet again had too few Ariary but Laurence was quite happy for us to pay with a combination of Ariary and Euros keeping enough Ariary back in case of emergencies on the route back to Morondava.  

The route back was so much easier because we knew where we were going and we now understood that there were dams over the salt pans.  We were able able to much better appreciate the beauty of the inlets as well as the salt pans and the spiny forests 

I even got to drive for a couple of stints as for once we weren't worried about time.  We had just come through the village with the toll and were crossing the dry river bed when my lack of experience of driving on sand became very evident as the wheels decided to go a different way to the one I wanted them to go and we ended up going off road and got buried up to our axels in sand.  In reality we were quite lucky that it hadn't been worse but it was still pretty bad as we were totally stuck.  The entire village then descended to help dig us out which took over an hour and was pretty stressful as they all had different views on what the best solution was.  We had clearly had sixth sense earlier when keeping cash back for emergencies but we weren't sure that the villagers were happy with the amount we gave them but we did supplement it with a couple of bottles of water which seemed to help.  As I told Ian afterwards we are supposed to be on an adventure holiday and I had just added a bit of adventure.  Ian was less convinced of this and took over the driving again!

We arrived back at Chez Maggie mid afternoon and had a lovely walk along the beach watching the sun go down.

We finished the day with a sundowner in a bar on the beachfront before returning to the hotel for dinner (shrimps in coconut sauce).