An interesting article....

This article from The Guardian is worth reading:

Madagascar's capital is like a glimpse of medieval London, with a layer of grime
In parts of a city that is a wild architectural hybrid, it would not be surprising to see Falstaff emptying a bucket out of a window

From the sky I could see man's harvest of destruction. Flying into Madagascar, I looked down on vast tracts of naked planet that were once thick with trees. Nine-tenths of the original forest cover on this island, one of the world's most precious Edens, has been lost to human rapaciousness.

My bus bumped along the road from a modest airport towards the capital, Antananarivo, which means "city of the thousand", supposedly because a thousand warriors once protected it. We wound through streets that long ago became inadequate for the teeming traffic that ebbs and flows, on wheels and feet, through a narrow corridor of shopfronts and market stalls – everyone has something to sell.

We crawled behind motorcyclists and minibuses, pedestrians balancing giant bags or cardboard boxes on their heads, and ancient taxis whose drivers are known to carry petrol inside plastic water bottles and to glide downhill with the engine off to save every drop. We were on a hillside and occasionally we could look down into the basin and see farmers wading through lush paddy fields.

On the horizon loomed a gigantic and unattractive hotel. It was built by the Chinese, we were told, to be ready for an African Union summit, but when Madagascar experienced a bloody coup earlier this year, the summit was cancelled and the hotel became a monstrous white elephant.
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