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What road

The reason for my massive detour to the west and the crews backtrack of 1000 km was road conditions due to the rains. The vehicle turned back at Breiville and on I went. For the first 30 km I was a bit peeved, as the road was fair, then rounding a bend I hit the first and basically last real village, as I walked out of it, so did the road, there was nothing, just a track consisting of two deep scars in the red earth. According to the map, there was a secondary good road here, or one did exist. The further I went the worse it became, in some areas it became even difficult through the dongas and over the rocks on foot, let alone even find where the road was, how did anyone manage to travel this.

Then came the rivers, up to 10 every day that had to be crossed, not a single bridge existed, or even a low water crossing, there were signs that there was once something, but these had been slowly eroded after years of neglect. There were also signs of a once well constructed secondary road with drain age and bridges. Later I was to find out that it was not months since the last vehicle had passes but that the last vehicle had passed some 6 years ago.

The further that I travelled, the more apparent it was that there was no sigh of any maintenance or intention , desire or consideration to ever fix any piece of the road linking east to west, actually the opposite, the road was actually turned into rice paddies and big water channels cut all over it. As an area it has became so bad that the oxen could not get through in certain areas, but all that happens is a new track is cut. So often I saw a simple thing that could be done to save a future massive erosion problem, but it is basically by passed and looked at as if the mindset is I am through, its now no longer my problem. I feel that this mindset it one of the fundamental problems that is fuelling the rapid demise of the Malagasy infrastructure, the country is crumbling at an alarming rate everywhere. Looking at developing third world countries economies, I feel that it can be quite simply categorised There are 2 main types.

The constructive economy, one where there is planning and thought put into growth with regard to infrastructure maintenance and expansion in order to sustain this and then there is the destructive economy, one where its basically every man for himself and we only have to get through today, nothing is maintained and expansion of infrastructure is only done for some ulterior motive, like a big mining deal.

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