Travel with Dale & Margaret

Today we are in Raiatea, a beautiful island in the Society Island chain.  We signed up for a Pearl Farm/Snorkeling excursion, so we met our group and boarded a mini van for the short drive to a beach.  Waiting for us at the beach was a boat with a small outboard engine.  We climbed aboard and made our way out to a shack structure perched over a reef.

I love pearls, always have, so learning how they are “made” was interesting.  It turns out that most pearls these days are “cultured” which means they insert a starter substance – in this case a round manufactured product made from shells found in the Mississippi River, into an oyster.  They pry open the oyster – just a little so they don’t tear the muscle, and look to find one with good colors/opulence in the mother-of-pearl area on the inside of the shell.   When they find a good one, they tear it open and slice off some of the outer meat and cut that into tiny pieces.  They do this so that they can take this “DNA” and add it to other oysters so they can try and get prettier colors on the resulting pearls.  This is sort of cheating, but it works!

Once they have some good DNA, they then open up other oysters, make a small incision and place both the DNA specimen and the starter into the oyster’s belly!  The oyster will then begin the process of coating the starter substance with, you guessed it, mother-of-pearl!  The interesting part of this process is that 18 months later, they take out the first pearl and re-insert another larger starter.  This means that the oyster again, will coat the starter but that the resulting pearl will be larger!  They can typically get 8 years of work out of an oyster – that’s about 5 pearls per oyster over their life span.

They suspend the oysters by drilling a hole through the oysters hinge (this doesn’t hurt them) and hang them on ropes at 20 feet or so below the surface.  They use big buoys that are anchored to the ocean floor to keep the oysters at the proper level.

Natural pearls do exist, but they are rare and typically not round.  Mikimoto developed this technique back in the 1890’s.

After the demonstration we were able to snorkel around the “farm” and see the operation from another perspective!  We also saw some beautiful coral, multiple colorful fish and even some blue-lipped clams.

Back on the ship we had a nice lunch and returned to our room for a nap.  But alas, a nap was not to be had…upon checking our email, we learned that our neighborhood back home was being evacuated due to a fast moving fire with 40 foot flames and 80 mile per hour winds!

We got our messages from the home phone and indeed did hear the automated message that said we needed to evacuate our home  due to a fast moving brush fire.  This fire has now taken off and is VERY serious.  Our neighbors had to evacuate their homes and stay in hotels until the fire passes.  We started making plans to fly home in case our home was involved in the fire…go home and clean up the mess and then fly back to meet the ship.  What else could we do?  The video on Fox about this fire didn’t help calm or fears!

It made for a very stressful evening as we waited to hear if our home would be OK.  Finally, at around 9:00 pm, we learned that the evacuation was lifted and it seems as though our home is safe.  There have been 25 or so homes that did burn and thousands of acres scorched.  Very sad.  Here’s the news we saw on our TV back in our room.

Today we are back in Moorea.  The ship anchored in Cook’s Bay and they started off -loading passengers around 9:00 am.  Dale is still trying to get our Circle South America blog books uploaded so we can get it printed but the internet connection on the ship is VERY slow (we knew it would be slow, but it is really slow!).

So Dale had two objectives for our day in Moorea.  First, he wanted to find an internet connection so he could upload the book files, and then he wanted to go back to a Pearl store we had visited on our first trip to Moorea three years ago.  This is where he got a black pearl necklace that he loves and wears often, so often in fact that he wanted to get another one!

Luckily, we found the store’s shuttle driver in the parking lot by the port and we were off to the Pai Moana Pearl store.  The store has a great history, it is owned by a family who runs the store and who also owns a pearl farm.  The father, Peter Sr., arrived in Moorea in 1978 on his 70’ sail boat.  He fell in love with the island, and in turn, fell in love with an island girl and decided to settle down here (this is a pretty common story in these parts – sailors visiting the islands are captivated by the  beautiful scenery, easy life style and exotic women!).  It’s fun to see a family business doing well – his oldest son Peter, Jr., and his daughter Vaea, work behind the counter and another son, Chris, helps bring customers into the store.

Dale immediately got his computer plugged into the store’s internet as I browsed the pearl collection.  We picked out a nice pearl and decided to go to lunch while the computer was uploading the files.  Just down the street was a great Japanese restaurant where we had some sushi.  Next to the Poi Moana store was a car rental place and we decided to rent a small open-air off road vehicle and drive up to a spot toward the center of this dramatic mountainous island to get a better view.

Moorea was formed by a volcano and over the years, as the elements have worn away parts of the landscape, it is left looking very rugged.  James Michener’s book “Tales of the South Pacific” which was later turned into a movie filmed here and made famous the mountain “Bali Ha!i” (that’s actually not the name of the mountain, but that is what they called it in the book so that is how it is referred to by tourists!).  The ride was fun…although a bit too windy for me.  With no windshield and no doors, it was a good thing we got back before the deluge came – which it did on our ride back to the port with Peter Sr.!   Unfortunately, the internet connection had bombed a few times and Dale was not able to get his files uploaded…but at least he got his new pearl necklaces!

Back on the ship we quickly showered and went down to meet the Captain at his welcome aboard party.  They had brought 6 freshly-caught yellow fin tunas onto the ship and we went up to the Terrace Café to try it out!  It was delicious and we went to bed with full stomachs and island dreams.

Here is the Top Photo Gallery for Moorea:

Click here for the detailed Photo Gallery for Moorea.

Today will be a busy day as we depart Moorea and head back to Tahiti to board the Regatta for the next phase of our adventure.

I was up at 5:45 am this morning and took my computer down to the restaurant to get some work done.  After breakfast, Margaret did her normal excellent job of packing while I played around with the GoPro camera clamped to the end of a snorkel.  I put the rest of the fish food out so I could practice filming in the shallow water (just in case the clamp didn’t work!).  I also took a walk over to the dive shop that is on-property to film the owners.  Below is a video showing Leno (who took me on my dive yesterday) explaining his dive operation.  Actually, I am not sure what he is saying…does anyone speak French out there!?!

When I got back Margaret had us packed and ready to go.  We checked out and took a cab to the ferry terminal.  A half hour later we were on the fast catamaran headed back to the “mainland”.  We had a nice conversation with Linda and Darryl, who we’d met at the Moorea Pearl resort, about some highlights of their visit to Tahiti and Moorea.  They have cruised on Oceania before so they gave us some insights into what we could expect.

Once the ferry docked at Papeete, we walked about 500 feet to the Oceania Regatta (talk about convenient!), went through the check-in process, had a quick lunch while waiting for our room to be ready, dropped off my carry on bags and I was off again!  I had to go back to the airport to pick up three large bags we had stored when we flew in from LAX.

I was back on the ship a few hours later and discovered that Margaret had already unpacked all the bags and was in the process of misting them with water from a spray bottle.  It’s a pretty interesting trick…she sprays each piece of clothing with a light mist, shakes them out and hangs them up.  Any wrinkles they had “fall out” in a few hours.  It saves me a lot of time as I tend to do the laundry and ironing when we are on the ship – not sure how I got that job assignment!

Since we still had a couple hours before we departed I decided to go back out and explore the town and, if I was lucky, find a good wine store to stock up on wine and vodka.  Unlike Regent, where all the liquor is free on Oceania you have to buy all your drinks.  No free bottles of wine and big bottle of vodka sitting in your room when you arrive.  It was hot outside but the walk was quite interesting and I got some interesting pictures.  There are a number of large street art pictures on the metal security doors, walls, bridges, etc. around town and they are quite colorful.  Street photography is also fun although, since I wasn’t familiar with the people, I tried to be discrete and selective.  I even went into a large indoor farmer’s market and bought Margaret some flowers!  Eventually, after asking a few people, I found a very nice wine store and stocked up on as much wine and vodka as I thought I could carry back the 6 blocks to the ship.  I underestimated the difficulty of that project but still managed, with a couple rests, to lug a full case back to the ship.

Bojan, our very tall butler, stopped by to introduce himself and make sure we knew our way around our suite, opened a bottle of champagne, and toasted our safe journey.  After the mandatory life boat & safety drill and quick showers, we were off to explore the ship.

There is a fun bar called “Martinis” were we stopped to have, you guessed it, a martini!  We got some inside information from Leo, the bartender on duty and afterward went to dinner at Toscana, which is one of the ship’s reservation-required restaurants.  We had a great dinner and a fantastic wine, thanks to the recommendation of our Sommelier, Ivan and we were back in our suite by 10:30 pm.  A very nice and fun first day on the Regatta!

Here is the Top Photo Gallery for today:

Click here for the detailed Embarkation Day Photo Gallery.