Tulear, Madagascar

July 2015

The road from Mangily to Tulear awkwardly sways next to the coastline for 25 kilometers. Once or twice it reaches out and brushes its hand across the soft beauty of the Mozambique Channel.

The red dusty road terminates in a tangle of brilliant colors, smoke and chattering diesel engines. Old Indian buses painted and vibrant mix with even older Mercedes that are retrofitted to carry both cargo and people.

Trucks make a pell-mell border that fence in a jumbled mess of smaller mini-buses, rickshaws, porters, sellers and a considerable number of people who just don’t seem to have anywhere else to be. Each bus is slowly filled by a line of workers, spun out like tentacles, groping after loosely held luggage, livestock or anyone who looks easily moved.

Sellers sit calmly on the ground. They paint their faces with a beautiful yellow paste made with dabs of water and the ground up bark of a tamarind tree. They sit behind roughly hewn boxes filled with cheap Chinese goods and always within touch of their friends. They sell pastel hair clips and bad flashlights, pens, notebooks, hairbrushes and small pieces of candy. The only thing that distinguishes these collections are the broken pieces of wood that contain them.

Stacks of bright yellow plastic containers stamped with the three-headed logo of Madagascar’s famous beer sit waiting to be hauled to smaller communities down the road. Cumbersome 200 lb. bags of rice sit plumped on the ground waiting to be heaved onto the back of men who act as human forklifts that raise the bags from the dust to the tops of the buses.

Trucks lumbering into town are two story affairs. Poorly welded benches are packed with people like an old western revival tent. The roofs, fitted with rebar cages, have impossibly large numbers of bags stacked on top. Bag after bag of charcoal made from the last precious hardwoods are unloaded with bundles of rafia and bags of coarse thick grass used for the simplest of roofs.