(cc) Jen SFO-BCN

Weird question from a blog that aims to attract tourists to come to Madagascar, huh?
But as a fellow blogger/twitterer pointed out, although crisis is still in the air, strange enough,a whole bunch of foreign people are in Madagascar now, for different reasons..and those people aren’t coming for lemurs, nor for national parks  (well, they don’t primarily come here for those wonderful things)…

First of all, all of a sudden (well that’s not really the exact word) almost 50 entities representing the international community ended up around a table at Carlton Madagascar for finding a way out of this crisis. Well, they don’t really fit into the kind of tourists we want to have in Madagascar, I mean- they come to Madagascar, not because of its beautifulness but because of weird thing happening here that we can’t be proud of. Anyway, if we want to be positive, we can say that since their country of origin allowed them to come here, then travelling here ain’t that risky despite some protests against their venue

Then comes the AfroBasket event: the feminine african basket cup that is hosted by Madagascar. Ok, this deserves a big round of applause as  it’s a beautiful way to showcase once again the “fair play” spirit that sport brings in although on the political scene, Madagascar is almost banned from the african union.

While international community and local politicians try to play the same symphony while avoiding improvization, the 20th edition of Madajazzcar [fr] gives the floor to well-known jazz artists who masters the art of improvization while playing good to your ears.This is the kind of meeting where you’ll cry, not because of tear gas, where you’ll applause not because of any well-written (or should I say “aimed at pleasing people”) speech, and where you simply enjoy the time being-13 days (from october 5th to october 17th) of pure art.

Finally, the VIP list of persons that are in Madagascar include a blue-eye canadian and francophone singer named Garou who played in front of a full Mahamasina Palais des sports stadium last night in Antananarivo. As Matt Parson pointed out in one of his post “can Madagascar benefit from the celebrity factor?”. Well, Matt, this time again, it seems we missed the train as he came, he saw and he went- I am not aware of any buzz around it anywhere else than in Madagascar.

To summarize, it’s too bad that oktoberfest happened last saturday, because it would have been nice to have all those people raise their drinking THB glass to Madagascar.

So now you’ve got the answers to the question “What the heck are all those uncommon tourists doing in Madagascar?”, now the question is “why the heck don’t you plan your next trip to Madagascar”?