20th June Antsiranana - Vohemar

That teal sapphire and the photo doesn't do it justice.


Left early to see the sapphire, the tour group was also leaving and heading south, a fact i was to regret shortly.
Arrived at the designated place at about 8am and started to look at stone. As per usual they show smaller pieces first to check out what your paying and of course there had to be one that showed me some glass. 3-4cts of material just like Australian material, green, yellow, blue and party only the blue is lighter. Also dogs teeth were plentiful.
They were just getting out the bigger pieces, I'd just bought a spectacular 15ct blue/yellow and a very unusual but beatiful teal coloured stone, when who should turn up. I have never seen 11 people, the miners, move so quickly. They disappeared from around me and reappeared around the french tour group so quickly.
I could only watch the frenzy from the outside. One gentleman I watched parted with a 1000 euro's for about a 10ct blue piece of rough. The miners were having a field day and I realized I'd be lucky to see any quality stones left. Had to laugh as the guy who tried to sell me glass disappeared after managing to sell it.
One of the smart tourist ask me to check a 10ct orange sapphire he was being offered. A quick check confirmed it wasn't a sapphire, but dichroic (orange and orange/brown), natural and with what looked like part of a manganese spectrum, crystal sytem was all wrong as well. I was hoping he wouldn't buy it as I would like to have a play with it but he did. It was the only one the miners had of that colour, Bugger!
There wasn't much left after they departed, I took one more piece and then started seeing all the ones I'd already rejected again so I moved on. 50 - 60 grams of quality rough so I was reasonably happy. Again I was told all the miners had moved onto gold panning.
Arrived at Ambilobe at about 9.30 where we would turn east across the island to Vohemar. Picked up some food as there is nowhere to stop to eat on the trip across. 164km that the driver was telling me we'de be lucky to do in the daylight.
Right from the start I realized that the road was really that bad. Also every creek and river we crossed had so many people panning for gold. I wanted to stop and take some photo's but as soon as we started to slow groups of armed young men would appear so we moved on.
OH what a road, at one stage we covered 2.7km in an hour, with me walking out front and guiding him. 12 hours later with me twice having my head slammed into the roof of the 4x4 and with an aching neck we reached a hotel at Vohemar, the Sol Y Mar. The worst thing was I realized we would have to go back that way to get back to Tana. Thankfully the owners were still up watching the world cup and got one of the staff to whip us up some dinner. The room was basic, I could hear the water lapping on the beach, and it had a mossie net and the beer was cold the perfect end to the day.