Local tourism- malagasy discovering Madagascar: how achievable is it?

This year, I move toward a radical change in my professional career after June 2010, moreover I am celebrating 10 years of dating my wife (oh gosh, that’s been a long and lovely ride) we’ve decided to spend our vacation in Madagascar (as if we could afford spending a holiday outside of Madagascar , in a place where we’ve never been together.

This will surely be an interesting experience as:
- this will be a clear milestone, a kind of “let’s turn the page”.  Turn the page as I’ll begin my journey as a online entrepreneur- at some point of time, you just don’t find a fit being an employee. So I like considering it as having a fresh air before boarding onto this
different experience

- but for madafan, I also want to associate this experience to a case study for Madagascar tourism. In fact, since the 2009 crisis, professional tourism stakeholders in Madagascar has decided to finally promote local tourism as a way to sustain this industry. I personally think that so far it’s just a “filan-tsy mahita” (a “forced alternative” while waiting for a better one) since tourists have almost canceled all their booking last year… Now that a lot of international promotion has been done by participating to a lot of well-known tourism trade fair (“Le monde  à Paris, ITB Berlin”,…), it seems that feed-back are positive on tourists willing to go back to Madagascar again- which actually means that this “local tourism” thing will probably soon become a piece of  history that no one cares about… I may be wrong but let’s wait and see…

So let’s put a bit of background so that Madafan readers can have a  clearer idea on what’s going on (and may be some Madagascar tourism pro can tailor an offer for us Hey, I’ll be writing about this  experience since inception to the “coming back home”- which can be a good (or bad) thing for both of us
The plan is to take a vacation with my lovely wife and two small kids (3 and 4 y.o) on august 2010. My daughter doesn’t support car-rides, nonetheless we want to go to different places than the usual local-vacation-destination in the east-coast (Foulpointe, Mahambo, Toamasina, Manambato, ambila-lemaintso), or in the north-west coast (Mahajanga)- though we are willing to consider going by flight (oh gosh, that’s already a big expense in our budget even though Air Madagascar has tha avana family pack with 50% rebate  on local flight) but dammit, my family deserves it, and I want to spend a good time with them before getting back to being a workaholic 
Will we make it? Wait and see- I’ll try to report here the challenges (and the nice findings) that we face along the way as we move forward preparing this vacation (and hey, if you have any suggestion I’m more than willing to consider it- and eventually report  it on Madafan)