From Tana to Tamatave to the Ship!

So what about that epic journey I hinted at the previous post? As I said previously, when we arrived in Antananarivo, we soon found out we would wait there for 3 days and take a bus for the 8 hour ride to Tamatave where the ship will be docked for the next 10 months of field service. Little did we know that our journey would begin bright and early at 4:30 on Monday morning! I was not awake enough to think about getting a picture, but let’s just say it was very early and still dark out. 

Our group loaded our bags onto a smaller van and drove a few minutes away to meet the other 40 or so people traveling with us in our caravan. Just to comment on the speed of life in Africa, we were ready to go by about 5am…we didn’t end up leaving until 6:30. Conveniently, that was actually when we needed to leave, but it took planning almost two hours in advance to leave on time, haha!

This picture was taken near the end of the journey, but if you look closely you can see the two vans in front of us loaded with luggage that made up our caravan.

Off we went driving about an hour through the city of Tana then we hit countryside and mountains for most of the rest of the trip. We were warned that there would be many winding roads and a lot of people get motion sick so most of the people in my group took Dramamine to prevent any problems, which meant a lot of sleeping going on for much of the trip. I was just enjoying the views as we drove. This is a spectacularly beautiful country with such a huge variety of nature and there was always something new to look at.

The area near Tana is filled with city streets mixed with rice fields. It's a beautiful and intriguing sight to see.

Between Tana and Tamatave, there is a large mountain range we had to pass over. Here we are in about the highest section before we started our descent. Breathtaking!

We stopped once for a bathroom break and later on to eat the lunch we had packed (baguette, Laughing Cow cheese, apples and cookies). Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a rest stop in Madagascar, so each of our stops with our group of 60 people took no less than an hour for each of us to take turns using the 1 or maybe 2 bathrooms available. By about 1pm when we stopped for lunch, we were all getting anxious to arrive in Tamatave. There are kilometer marker signs scattered occasionally along the road so we were trying to estimate how far we’d gone and how long we had left. 

As we got closer to the coast of the country, there was green, tropical plants everywhere! That white post is one of the mile marker signs we were watching for.

I knew to expect a longer than 8 hour trip, but in the end our journey took about 11 hours and we were all more than happy to get off those buses! This is my first view of the ship from the bus as we drove through the port:

It was surreal to finally be seeing the ship in real life. Most of us in my bus have been waiting to do this for many years and the atmosphere in the bus as we got closer was giddy! We were like children on Christmas morning, so excited to see what was waiting for us and to step foot on this ship that will allow us to fulfill our dreams. We were joking about passing around the tissues because some were tearing up at the sight. It touched my heart to see this first sign of the passion Africa Mercy crew members have to be volunteering for this organization and fulfilling our goal to bring hope and healing to the forgotten poor!