Yesterday we were in Nosy Be, Madagascar.  Nosy Be means "Big Island" in the Malagasy language. The weather is very warm and humid, around 90 degrees, luckily there was a nice sea breeze.  There was another cruise ship here (a very old one) and there was only one spot on the pier so the tendering operation was very slow as we had to alternate with the tenders from the other ship to load and unload passengers.  We took the provided van to the market in the center of town and walked through the stalls where they sell everything from fruits and vegetables to live chickens, and mud crabs.  There were flies on everything, including the meat, not very appetizing.  The taxies are the three wheeled kind that zoom up and down the main street honking their horns for no apparent reason.  The local people mostly seem to just hang around and do nothing so we assume that the unemployment rate is pretty high.  They were not unfriendly, just sort of ignored us, but the children smiled and waved at us.  We only stayed about 30 minutes and caught the van  back to the pier so we could get back to the ship.  Back aboard we immediately took showers and had cold drinks and spent the rest of the afternoon just relaxing and watching a movie.  The video system on board is very nice with about 200 available programs and you can watch for a while, then save your movie to finish later.

The other cruise ship, we think was a German ship

The veggies look pretty good in the picture, but you can't see the flies that are on everything!

The traffic on the main street is mostly the three wheeled taxis and small old French made cars, .

Our ship looks pretty nice compared to the other one!

The tenders had to dodge all sorts of other vessels to get to the dock