The green vanilla beans were already mature - ripe & bursting with vanilla caviar. A long wait of 9 months, a great deal of patience & even higher risk was about to get paid off. It was time for harvest. But I was only scheduled to arrive in Andapa from Accra a week later. This meant that the Randriamihaja family had to guard their fields from vanilla thieves for one more week.

Dylan is a 4th generation farmer and processor of vanilla beans. He grew up along with his 10 siblings and spent his childhood at his ancestral farm, running between the rice fields and climbing up mountains that surrounds the Andapa basin. At age 15, he was ready to help his father. He tended to vanilla vines, pruned the shade trees, trained the growing vines by folding them downwards and then upwards and back, just so the vines reached no higher than his height. This would allow young Dylan to reach for the vanilla beans at the time of harvest.

THE VANILLA ROADS

The weather was not in our favour and a distance of merely 18 kilometers to the farm took us over 2 hours and 30 minutes.

"The road can truly be paved in gold" Dylan quipped. "SAVA region is the world capital of Vanilla, with millions of US dollars flowing in. But who is taking away our money? Why are we forced to be left behind?" he questioned. He was equally frustrated with the possibility of export licences being limited to a handful of big and influential players under the current government's recent regulations. The export of cured vanilla beans are prohibited before September 15th. Until then, he waits in anticipation.