I’ve been lucky enough to spend 2 months in Madagascar so here’s a post about the amazing time I had there, before the normal service is resumed about all things London.
The first 6 weeks were spent on a charity school building project in a remote area of south east Madagascar.  We were camping with no running water and no electricity but it was all worth it to complete a secondary school for the area, their first but hopefully not their last.
We stayed in a beautiful area and took on the challenge of construction work by hand with good humour, even surviving a passing cyclone, luckily we were only the edge of it! We saw poverty and hard lives and really admired the approach of Malagasy people who always try to make the best of whatever is thrown at them. The charity who organise the volunteering projects is Azafady which is doing really good work in this under developed part of the world.

Here are some photos of our work and the surrounding beauty:

Our challenge!

Making the floor by hand

The local market

Beautiful countryside near our village



Lake in Fort Dauphin

A beach just for us!

Fort Dauphin

A beautiful country

After 6 weeks hard work building the school, I was off on my travels to see some more of the island, particularly the unique wildlife – the fabulous lemurs and chameleons. I also got to see the golden web of the spiders whose silk is used to make the extraordinary golden cape currently in the Victoria and Albert Museum London.

How to chose a few photos to show you this wonderful island and its wildlife? Well, here goes, my favourite lemurs and chameleons:

Ring tail leumurs

Sifaka lemur

Indri lemur

Baby brown lemur

Curly tail chameleon