Nature’s shower
As I was saying in my previous post, spending three days on a pirogue floating down the Tsiribihina River is an awesome experience that shouldn’t be missed if you ever find yourself in Madagascar.
However, the one thing I didn’t speak about was the fact that things get a little bit sweaty while you’re sitting the whole day in an open boat in the sun and the river is probably not the best place to take a dip in – it’s not the cleanest river in the world and unless you’ve spent your whole life next to that river, your body is probably not used to the microbial fauna present in the water. So at the end of each day you have to make do with splashing some water over you from a bottle before you retreat to your tent.
By the third day this gets a bit old and unfortunately you know that at the end of the boat trip you have at least one more night in a fairly basic guesthouse with no running water or electricity so it will be more of the same. At this stage, enter the waterfall… Just a couple of hours before finishing the boat trip we stopped for lunch at this unassuming place at which point the guide tells us to take a walk with him. After about ten minutes of walking a beautiful waterfall opened up in front of us, with refreshing water set at just the perfect temperature. I can tell you, we were there for a while!