Toamasina. It's already a few days removed from my feet, but not from my heart. A great town. The name is either a reference to St. Thomas, or a comment by the king on tasting the water of the Indian Ocean - "Salty..." The city was a resort on the East coast for the colonial French at the turn of the century, and survived for a while like that until the French were kicked out and people realized that the area gets cyclones on a regular basis. Once the last stop on the Madarail train line, the station (which has seen no action since the late 90s) is now filled with sandbags. Still, the city persists, and still people come to stroll the wide but destroyed streets and view the lavish but crumbling architecture. It's a magical place, one of my favorites so far, and, though since my last post I've camped out with lemurs and swam between islands, I wanted to put the pictures of it online, especially in view of the comment complimenting the cityscape of Antananarivo. Someone needs to set a movie here.
5 comments:
what is the light like there? what time is it in the bottom ones?
great to see more photos! is the Ritz a theatre or an upscale hotel for those French colonials?? xx
it does have an Orson Welles feel to it
a movie... or a novel?
Glad to see positive feedback on the Toamasina/Tomatave front. The pictures by night are from my first arrival in town, which was around 6 or 7 PM. It's a hard quality of light to capture on the camera, and these might not be fully representational, but I still like the look of them a lot. And the Ritz is, unfortunately, just an empty structure right now, as are many of the more majestic buildings in town. There are more ghosts than people at times. Lastly, in regards a film versus a novel, I feel the texture of the town would be hard to grasp without images, it being somewhat removed from the typical Western metropolis. But maybe that's my own failing.
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