Copy and paste this to Nosy Be.html We spend the day clearing in. All goes well, money greases the wheels and we get home in the afternoon, suffering from a mild culture shock.

Yacht Nemir has arrived a day earlier and Bob gives us the run-down of the local experience. I have travelled before but I feel rusty. Us "western people" are so used to being left alone in our own countries that it takes a few days to get used to being public property. What I mean is the experience of you standing out as a millionaire compared to the locals and the constant knocking on the hull from canoes, the constant pulling of the sleeve of some street vendor etc.

A day or two later we relax into the Madagascan life and start enjoying ourselves. Hellville, the dusty little historic town in the island of Nosy Be, becomes a pleasant experience. Unlike Mayotte, every person in Madagascar is happy to be photographed and they all greet us with wide, genuine smiles.

Nosy Be has a rum distillery exploiting the left-overs from a wide spread sugar cane industry in the northern Madagascar. The rum is cheap and nasty. I sample the 89% rum and end up moving down to the 63% strenght. Dark or white, about 1 euro per litre. Great! With all our plastic containers available, we don't have to visit another liquour store until Caribbean.

After stocking up with vegetables, bread, cheese and some other basics, we sail out of Hellville and start exploring the area. Our first stop is Nosy Mamoko. (nosy = island) A canoe soon approaches us and we get ready to trade for some fresh garden produce. A half-drunken man paddles to Aliisa and wants to sell rum and marijuana. I've already got my rum and I'm not really into smoking dope. I wish I was though, as the home-grown drug is cheaper than local cigarettes!

Later we manage to trade a few empty glass jars for a couple of eggs. When we were in Chagos, we were advised to hold on to all our used glass jars for trading in Madagascar. Now, we had a whole suitcase full of them and they turned out to be valid currency in almost all villages. As in PNG during my visit in 2001, I buy local cigarrettes for trading and for giving away. The villages remind me of PNG. The dugout canoes arrive soon after anchoring, loaded with local produce.