AN EVENING STROLL IN MADAGASCAR

ANTANARIVO, MADAGASCAR

A little virtual vacation: these photos were taken on an evening stroll in Madagascar’s capital city, Antananarivo (known affectionally short as “Tana”), the dusk after a first full day on the island. That night, I felt both the pleasure of traveling to a city hardly visited by tourists, as well as the unease of finding myself in a setting so foreign - a country that, for me, throbbed between eerie and beautiful, chaotic and liberating. As a throng of students trailing our way down Madagascar’s southeast coast to a remote research compound, we often found ourselves the only patrons of a restaurant, the only visitors of a terraced hotel, as if we were perpetually the stragglers in a max-exodus, relics of a tourist golden age that perhaps never happened at all. ⁣
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In an effort to describe Tana in my journal, I wrote: “imagine a gritty, sun-stripped Amalfi Coast but without the ocean. A rocky shoreline, but no water to appease it - a city that makes you thirsty.” A somewhat strained observation - and Euro-centric, sure - but one that continues to ring true for my memories there. Further down the page, I comment on Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” blaring in the distance as a young man poses for me in his sunglasses. A reminder that, for however far one wanders, America follows us everywhere. ⁣

7.22.2020