Day fifteen - people start to arrive

Today was my eldest daughter’s birthday so as soon as I was dressed I went to the fruit plantation, where there is a spot with some phone signal. I didn’t manage to speak to her but was able to send a greeting by text. I felt rather sad not to be with her on her special day but promised we would go out and celebrate once I was home.

From the fruit plantation I went up into the forest to try to get some macro photos. On the path I came across another dead tenrec. I’ve now seen three in total, none of them alive. I hope I manage to see a living one before I leave!
I photographed some invertebrates and a cooperative plated lizard. On my way back through the zoo I saw a beautiful kingfisher. Although it was some distance away I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures.

I wanted to take some little presents back for my colleagues at the IOW Zoo so I browsed the shelves of the Ivoloina zoo shop. I bought some fridge magnets of geckos and chameleons cleverly made from recycled tin cans. I also bought some tiny hand-carved wooden lemurs.

Lunch was fried plantain, which looks like banana but is not very sweet. It was delicious.

The afternoon was extremely hot and humid so I decided to sit in the shade and read for a while. Tomorrow was to be the first day of the MFG annual meeting and people from member zoos were due to arrive at Tamatave today. Most would be staying at hotels in town, but the head keeper from Duke Lemur Centre was going to be staying in the dormitory at the training centre so I was looking forward to meeting her.
In the early evening Christof and I drove into Tamatave to meet the other delegates at one of Tamtave’s swishest hotels, the Neptune. As we turned into the main street a car started hooting furiously behind us. We pulled over and saw Karen frantically waving out of the window. Her insurance company, after almost two weeks of prevarication, had suddenly decided to evacuate her to South Africa for medical treatment and were sending a plane to collect her and her family that evening. They were on their way to the airport now so it was lucky that we had seen them before they left.
The Neptune hotel was very smart and a fancy buffet was laid out ready for us. It was great to meet up again with people that I had met at previous meetings including Charlie and Andrea, the MFG’s first programme managers 25 years ago and MFG chairman Eric, from St. Louis Zoo. Old friends and new acquaintances were soon chatting over a beer. People had travelled from all over the world, including the US, South Africa and Taiwan.
The keeper from Duke was called Britt and she travelled back to Ivoloina in the truck with us. She told us that Duke were aiming to start a keeper exchange professional development programme with Ivoloina Zoo and she was here to start planning the programme and to see what the zoo and the accommodation are like. I hoped that there were not as many rats in the dormitory building as in the bungalow!