Today is the end of our excursion to Ile Sainte Marie, and before heading back to the airport, we thought it would be nice to have lobster for lunch.  This island is known for its seafood, so we decided we couldn’t leave without a nice lobster lunch.  Tsiry called the resort reception desk to make the request, and they indicated they would see if they could find some, and would let us know.  You see, this island is very much a hunting and gathering society.  People don’t farm or store food to eat.  Instead, they eat what they can kill, catch or find on any given day.  Anyway, by 11 AM, the resort indicated that a local fisherman had indeed brought in a few lobsters, so we would get our lunchtime wish.

Here is my lobster lunch (with fries)!
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Lunch was good.  They basically cut the lobster down the middle and grilled it.  It wasn’t as large as a rock lobster that you might have in Canada, but the meat was very good and easy to eat.

Here’s one final picture of the area before we have to head back to Tana.

After lunch, the resort shuttled us back to the airport, where we would catch our return flight to Tana.

I didn’t take any more photos today, but once back in Tana, we returned to the Palissandre hotel to relax.  We headed down to the hotel bar with the laptop to check e-mail and upload a few days of photos to the website.  This would be the final upload while in Madagascar.  Today’s entry, along with any entries to follow, would be written and uploaded once back in Canada.

Today we had hoped to rent a nice covered boat to cruise around the island of Sainte Marie.  Unfortunately, this didn’t happen.  First, nobody would cruise up the eastern side of the island in the open Indian Ocean, saying it was too dangerous, but that we could tour the other side.  This would have been fine, but they didn’t have any boats with a top, which meant we would not have any protection from either sun or rain, and we would have to share with 6 other people who had also asked to do the same thing.  Who would have thought that boats would be so hard to find on an island populated around tourism, and we’re not even in the high tourist season–I think there are more vacant cabins here than occupied ones at the moment?

In the end, we decided to stay around the resort for the day and relax.  This turned out to be a very good decision, as we found out some interesting news later in the day during dinner.  It would seem that the boat they had offered us, ran into some misfortune!  Nothing tragic, but the boat did break down way out in the channel and they had to call in a tow boat to get everyone safely back into shore and end the tour early.  So not only are boats difficult to find here, but apparently the boats they do have are not in the best condition.

Our day around the hotel was relaxing.  We spent a lot of time swimming, enjoyed a nice lunch, spent some more time swimming, enjoyed a nice dinner, had another game of pool, and then it was time for bed.

The food here at the Soanambo has been fabulous.  I had a wonderful seafood pasta plate for lunch today.  My dinner was an incredible peppercorn zebu steak that was cooked to perfection.

I didn’t take many pictures today, but here are a few…

Dave’s lunch.  Dinner was even better, but I didn’t get a photo…

This might be tomorrow’s lunch wandering around the guest cabins?

I spotted this crab on the pathway at night on the way back to our cabin…