Down but not out in Madagascar
After our 30 day Cargados trip I was looking forward to 8 badly needed days of rest in Reunion with no clients and no guests. I’d researched all the surf waves and paragliding sites over a year ago and couldn’t wait to taste the goods. I should have known better. Maintenace alone took the better part of a week. Continued engine worries, a number of canvas and sail projects, burned out battery charger- the list kept growing. And then 48 hours before our planned departure things went from bad to awful. We’d flown our wonder chef Bobby back to Jakarta for the week so he could meet his new daughter, who was born in February. I’d received a number of emails all week about how good everything was going with his family and how excited he was to return. I drove to the airport to pick him up, but he didn’t show. I assumed he’d just missed a connection, but learned shortly thereafter from his first wife (Bobby has two wives) that he been very badly injured in a car crash en route to the airport in Jakarta on his way back to Discovery. We were told he had a broken back, badly damaged face, hands and one knee; and of course would not be returning to the boat.
This trip goes down as one, if not the finest expedition of my life. To qualify as an “expedition” it should have the following attributes: remote, rarely or never attempted, difficult, and requiring great planning and usually heroic effort. Having two amazing chefs and a luxury yacht probably removes ‘difficult’ from our list, but we topped the scales on remote and never attempted on this one, and if you add what our chefs went through to get food on this boat we definitely have heroic. Although swimming with dozens of sharks cannot be described as easy…