Team 1
This is our fourth day in the country, we have been to 3 towns so far, Antananarivo, Anbositra and Fianarantsoa. We have spent many hours on the bush taxi driving through little villages watching people stop and stare at us white people in the pink taxi. "are they only staring at us because we are in a pink taxi" quote Georgina. We have also witnessed the extreme poverty here in Madagascar, children rummaging through rubbish on the street and more shockingly many carrying machete's. We have seen many amazing sites including picturesque landscapes and women carrying chickens on their heads. So far we have met many people all of whom are very friendly and welcoming such as Enda, Johnny, Fegghi and the nice guy in the italian top whos name we never came across. Even though only 43 percent go to school many know a number of languages including English, Malagasy, French and Italian. More importantly Joe was able to have a deep conversation about football players and teams. One thing we were suprised about, despite the fact they have next to nothing the people all have a massive smile on their face and waved at us as we drove past or got off the pink minibus. From Joe and Alicia.

The group have been brilliant and are beginning to show their true personalities. Joe and Lewis try to show as much flesh as possible, as often as possible regardless of the audience. Alicia is getting known for her blonde moments: biting through her headphone cables and constantly tripping over her laces. Despite having no make-up, Kendal and Meg S still manage to spend hours in the bathroom. Megan who claims not to be a leader could be heard across the valley shouting at them to come out as we were all so hungry. Michael spends most of his time asleep and when awake, constantly shares his nuts with Georgia!  Emma has not stopped talking since we got here, except when asleep, or being sick on the plane. Joe and Megan also succombed to the turbulance and Lewis became the official puke monitor, carrying the bags to the toilet.

Lizzie made the mistake of telling us she can speak French and now gets dragged everywhere to translate everything from 'How to get to the National Park' to 'The toilet is blocked'. Georgina has become a mini-mum, stressing in the airport when she thought she had lost Alicia and giving her a right telling off. Vicky and Becky are trying very hard to destroy their tent, breaking the elastic in the tent poles and splitting the poles themselves. Should Georgia be in Madagascar? Spiders I can understand, but she runs away from anything that flies - she'll have no chance in the rainforest.

Weird! We have come into an internet cafe and found that the screensaver is Birmingham Selfridges!

We are going to sign off now and try to upload some photos. These can take some time so not sure how many we will get on before the rest of the team get back from the supermarket. After that we head to the national park for some short treks and then it really begins - main trek followed by project. It is highly unlikely we will be able to blog again for some time.

Neil