Ok folks, this is a rant. Be prepared. I'm sure Madagascar has it's good points, but I haven't found them yet.
(Here goes - this is what's on my mind after 4 days in Madagascar, roughly divided between a dreadful hotel and a work assignment, with no tourism activity or redeeming personal or social interaction of any kind...)
So... here I am in Antananarivo, Madagascar. A fascinating place, right? WRONG! IT's an incredibly BORING place. It would be hard to imagine a more boring place on Planet Earth. I am staying in the Hotel Sunny Garden. Now, you say to yourself, that must be a nice hotel which is both sunny and has a garden. Right? WRONG again! It has been raining non-stop since I arrived, and the garden, if you want to call it that, consists of a few remaining patches of soil which have not been paved or cemented over, in which a few trees/bushes grow.
The more accurate name for the hotel would be "World's Most Boring Hotel Based at a (get ready for this one) Toyota Dealership in a Remote Third World Island Nation's Capital." Yes, "Tana" as the locals call it, is the capital of Mada (another short-hand version of the full name). An enterprising Malgach (the name of a ciitzen of Mada) came up with the novel (but not noteworthy) idea of building a hotel next to a Toyota dealership. Even more novel is the idea of having the guests drive THROUGH the Toyota dealership on their way into the hotel parking area. As we all know, many world travelers who stop in third world capitals for a short hotel stay often decide to buy a Toyota to take home with them. What an idea!!!
Not content to have hotel visitors drive through the dealership, the owner of the hotel had other brilliant ideas, such as hiring hotel staff who excel at having the most bored and disinterested expression possible. You want a room? I don't care. You want to order dinner? Not my problem. You want your room cleaned? What does that have to do with me? To be fair to the employees, this is most likely another of the owner's bright ideas. Make people work at least 12 hours a day, provide no training or motivation of any kind, pay them almost nothing, then see how they treat people. For some reason, although the employees are still here when I leave dinner, and arrive before I get up for breakfast, they lack excitement.
Add to this the attraction of the most bored and unfriendly guests found anywhere on the planet, and you have a really explosive mix. The standard is to seat you for dinner opposite an old, bored, drunken reprobate (I'm not sure they are really drunk or reprobates, but I'm on a roll, so work with me here folks) who will stare at you unflinchingly during your entire dinner without any sign of recognition that you are: 1) a human being; 2) you are equally as bored as the person staring at you; 3) if you spoke to each other, there is a small, very small, chance that it would relieve the boredom. So I sit down at my assigned table, nod politely in the direction of the old, bored fellow opposite me, who then ignores me entirely.
Note that the ability of old, drunken reprobates to ignore others in a run-down third world hotel cuts across language barriers. Tonight I was seated opposite an old French guy, who repeatedly stared in my direction, but who just as persistently refused to acknowledge my existence, peering through his deeply hooded French eyes in a typical, guarded French way. At one point I burst out laughing at something funny on a website. He stared at me in a most disgusted manner, as if to say, "Vraiment, monsieur, to laugh, it eez so ...not French!"
Add to this delightful mix, which I have been enjoying since my arrival on Saturday, the presence of hordes of voracious mosquitoes who roam the restaurant and feed on the clients at will. The hotel is located in the industrial area of town, which gives you an idea of the beauty of our surroundings, and is close enough to drainage ditches and large bodies of standing water to provide highly productive breeding grounds for multiple species of mosquitoes, who have learned that the hotel guests are corpulent, red-blooded, juicy morsels.
So the main entertainment in the evening, at dinner, other than staring fixedly and implacably at other bored guests without acknowledging them, is swatting mosquitoes. When one has finished dinner, grown tired of staring at others and being stared at by them, and has killed one's nightly quota of mosquitoes, it is then finally time to retire to one's hotel room.
There, in the privacy of one's badly designed hotel room, one has one's own personal supply of ravenous mosquitoes, which one is not obliged to share with anyone else, as well as the choice of watching a pitifully small number of TV channels while sitting under a mosquito net, which is intended to repel mosquitoes, but in reality closes you in with them instead.
Yes, the clever owner, who never seems to tire of trying out ways to drive away customers, ensuring that they never, ever return, has provided mosquito nets that are not treated with any sort of insecticide, becuase let's face it, that would just make it too easy for guests to relax, and what would be the fun in that? No, these are just netting material, with no mosquito repelling or killing properties whatsoever. Now, it takes your average mosquito, whose brain weighs about 0.0000000001 grams, about 2 seconds to figure out that if it gets inside the net with you, you become its prisoner. You have conveniently volunteered to close yourself in to a small airspace from which there is no chance of escaping its bloody bite.
Yes, folks, this is life here at the Sunny Garden Hotel here in the industrial area of Tana, on the island of Mada. Won't you please come and join me? I have a table ready for you, and want nothing more than the chance to stare impassively at you, hoping that you might choke on a fish bone, or otherwise encounter some form of misfortune so as to entertain me.
Do pop 'round, won't you? Cheerio!
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