Ilakaka - Sapphire Mines

We spent one more morning with Bosco, our Isalo guide. He offered to show us around the sapphire mines in Ilakaka, a city about a half hour away from Isalo.  We weren't sure exactly what to expect, but we definitely were not expecting what we saw.  Most of the "mines" are basically deep wells dug by local men, without any permits, straight down into the ground, sometimes 20 or 30 meters deep!  Obviously, accidents and deaths are very common. 
Other mines are made up of large groups of men with shovels excavating hillsides - safer, but more exhausting labor in the hot sun.  The worst part of it all is that the laborers receive only a few dollars a day for their work - an independent miner may be able to sell a rough sapphire, assuming he is lucky enough to find one, for maybe $20 to a foreign buyer (usually Chinese or Indian), who then quickly exports the jewels out of the country and makes a huge profit. 

Ilakaka had a strange vibe - men crowded the streets and hawkers eagerly tried to sell us jewels (or maybe just polished pieces of glass, we probably wouldn't have known the difference).  The city has grown from a small village into a boom town - walking around felt like being inside an old western movie.  All that was missing was some tumble weed and a distant whistle.

The last picture is actually of a photo hanging inside one of the many jewelry shops - but it's a good picture of one of the shovel mines.  We saw a smaller one closer to town, but we were asked not to take pictures.