Christmas Recap & swimming with turtles

Havn't been blogging for a few days so lets do a little recap from the christmas week at the new hotel.

Swimming with turtles

Before checking out from Coral noir we started our morning with a snorkle tour to see if we could find the bigtutles and yes we did! The water was unfortunatley not the clearest this morning but we could get really close to the turtles so it didnt really matter, it was amazing.

Back from the tutles we packed our things up and checked out from the hotel and both of us were really happy to leave the place. Very interesting thing was that our guide asked us about the hotel stay and why we are leaving. For us it was all according to plan as we had booked the other hotel already before we arrived to this one, but he said it's been a lot of guests changing hotel after a few days and checking out earlier than planned and he wants to know why. I love that he asked it and it was hard to tell him why that might be but we just feel a weird energy at that place and staff wasn't good at all. It has such an amazing location and incredible potential but it feels like it is stuck in time and about to close down any second.

On to the next...

Arriving to the new hotel gave us the impression of wow! The resort is bigger than I expected and it just looks absolutely amazing! The first thing the receptionist tells us is that as soon as the car/taxi/tuktuk is parked - we are in the hotels time zone. At first we didn't understand and thought she was joking but no... Haha this hotel has decided to have their own timezone so suddenly we were 1 hour behind more. After googling this we understood it is probably to let guests experience the sun longer and the activites at the hotel and it make sence but i have never heard that a resort can do that.

We had 5 nights in this hotel and it was the right place to be for christmas! They had organised a beautiful christmas gala dinner on the 24th followed by christmas beach brunch on the 25th with an amazing parade of dancers, singers and staff bringing the whole chrsitmas vibe up! It was beautiful!

Toughts about Madagascar & this hotel

In general I am so surprised how bad their english is here. At the hotel Shane asked for a beer and as they do in a lot of all inclusive hotels, they bring the beer and wine out in a jug. They brought that but not a glass so obvisoulye he asked for a glass, the waiter comes back with 1,5 litre bottle of water. Let's try again - waiter says okey and before we know it, he comes out with a bowl of ice cubes, haha I lost it there! We had to stand up a get an empty glass from the neighbour table to show him what we wanted so we could drink the beer that we just got. Well... at least he tried! I don't think i've ever been in a place where english is this hard and the service is so low - even if we are staying in nice hotels. It's very interesting to see and i'm so happy we decided to go to Madagascar as it has been a place I wanted to explore for so long, but i wan't expecting it to be so poor as it is and so undeveloped. I've been traveling in some really poor countries but it's just a different energy here, and we can't really tell if they will move forward or even more backwards in the development and structure here. Can't wait to come back in 10 years and see what has happened in this country because it has such an incredible potential and is so beautiful!

As far as the hotel goes, it was amazing to spend chrsitmas here. We havn't been 100% well this trip but finally in around christmas we were both okey again. Feels good to move on to another hotel for the last 2 days that we have left in Madagascar, 5 days on an all inclusive hotel with buffé food is enough for me and I believe Shane agrees. It has also been very interesting for me at every meal with my garlic allergy as they seem to use garlic in everything here but after 2 days I had my waiters that was waitning for me every meal and took me around and showed me what i could eat and not, some of these guys were amazing and took really good care of me and made sure I got some good food.

Tomorrow it's time for the next hotel and I can't believe we are already at the end of this trip. Luckily we are not going home yet - we have 1 week in south africa waiting where we will spend new years,