Reniala Reserve — Attraction in Atsimo-Andrefana

The tour of the Reniala Reserve is GROSSLY overpriced. The costs do not scale with the cost of living and with the economics of the area. (Abject poverty is throughout the region, yet there is no shortage of foreigner-owned pizza shops, resorts, and whatnot.) One hour for one person can cost you the equivalent of the average weekly salary of a worker in Madagascar. You can quickly rack up over a month's Malagasy salary to the cost once you add more paths to the tour. No local citizen can afford entry into this place. This reeks of colonialism and exploitation. The owner makes out like a fat rat while the locals suffer in poverty. The Frenchman who owns the place is married to a Malagasy, which is an old colonialist trick to gain permanent access to land. Sorry, but not sorry...I'm not a fan of...

Really nice park that's definitely worth a visit but beware all the fake and scam parks along the way. Ignore all the guys sitting in rickety stands on the main road who will yell out to you how you need a ticket first and tell you they are with the official reserve and have official tickets and so on. They are not. It is a scam. Just ignore those scumbags, turn right off the main road and walk to the very end where there's a (green, as I recall) gate with a sign on it. Once you get there it'll be clear you're there and that the others were pure scams and it suddenly looks proper and legitimate and they give you a receipt and so on. A pleasant maybe 10 minutes' walk from the main road, past a school, past some weird Vampires of Jehovah or whatever, past some...

We tried to visit but we couldn't reach the reserve. We were followed by touts so aggressively that we felt suitably threatened and left. We tried changing direction, and raising our voices, but this guy was demanding we pay the entrance before even reaching the park. One of his friends joined in as well. The people in the neighborhood did not help, rather they also started calling to us trying to sell fabric skirts for 25,000 which are easily found for 5000 in the city. Harassment in Mangily is next level. We had planned to spend a night or two, but instead walked back to the road and took the first bus back to Toliara. People spend more money when they're happy and comfortable, not when they're...