Coast to Coast.

Since I last checked in,
I retook the pleasure train back to my jumping off city of Fianarantsoa, this time it ran only 11 hours and was far less crowded. Although I did get to watch a poor fifteen year old girl, burdened with what seemed all of her family's possessions (Which they had clandestinely snuck onto our first class car and hid amongst our belongings while the police were in the wind) all chucked out of the moving train. It was a matter of the police completing a filthy task in front of a slew of Nikon and Canon-sporting tourists, but regardless, first went her bags of food and supplies off bridges and into gulleys, and then when the train herky-jerked to a halt for mechanical failures, she too went overboard.

But for that unfortunate incident, I arrived swimmingly in Fianarantsoa and spent the night at a weird mammoth of a hotel, made and meant for the Chinese: but it had a pool and I got a barbeque chicken pizza.

I have since met my driver, Pascal. He is a toad-faced, soft-spoken single dude in his fifties. Our conversations have been as diverse as discussing the weather and what is his favorite rock. But he serves his purpose and I have made my way coast to coast, to the smoldering Toliara, filled with old, fat French men and their pretty young prostitutes, mangrove lined beaches with trash replacing what I would expect to be white sand. It is a pleasant, and slow-paced place.

I have been meeting with people in the Sapphire industry, a staple of the region, and the prices for raw stones are pretty rock bottom if you go to the source. I have also been meeting with more solar companies in the region and ooahing and aahing their small, inefficient and somewhat corrupt projects.

There is a wheelchair acrobatics show at the beach tonight,
Steven