Hike

We're back at the dock in Riatea and having just as much fun as before, everyday as part od school we have a physics lesson with Caminante dad and learn formula's and do experiments for 2 hours.  We always try to do our school as quickly as possible so we can get off the boat and go to town for ice-cream and ripsticking.  Yesterday after school we got on hiking clothes and grabbed bottles of water and sharpies (for drawing tattoos when we got bored), we walked along the street 'til we found the path up the mountain.  As we walked we talked and joked around with the boys off Moana Roa playing Truth or Dare, our new obsession, and drawing weird pictures and words on our arms, we walked real slow so we were soon way behind but we were having fun so we didn't care.

At the top we joked about throwing rocks down and hitting people (we didn't do it of course), and they told us about a time when they had caught a chicken on a hike, carried it all the way home and kept it in a chicken pen. There was a rooster on the mountain and I laughed as they asked their mom, "If we catch it can we keep it?"


We walked home and took showers before heading over to the boys boat for a movie night, we had fun and stayed up late into the night.

Pearl Farm

The Tuamotan islands are famous for their pearls so we decided to take a look at on of the pearl farms in Rangiroa.  The bus took us to a small gazebo like seating area outside of the giftshop and a tour guide told us about the difficult task of extracting a pearl from an oyster.

He explained how each oyster is specially raised for 5 years until it can produce a pearl sac.  Once   it has grown to a good size the technicians use the lip from a younger oyster (also called the graph) and insert it into the older oyster so that the pearl it will produce will have good color shinyness.



After the oysters have the graph they are placed back into the ocean with nets to keep away predators, they sit there for 2 more years until the pearl has developed enough to be extracted.  A separate technician then takes the finished pearl, determines if it is worth keeping, then places a bead, a small ball made from the shell of the oyster, into the pearl sac so that the oyster can continue producing pearls.

We watched the workers at work for a while then wandered into the shop so we could look at the finished pearl jewelry.  We mostly browsed but Nanna, my grandmother, let me pick out 2 pearls so that the lady could make them into earrings!  They are beautiful and unique, made from the black pearls of the Tuamotan atolls.

A Farm Day

We're leaving soon for the islands in French Polynesia, The Marcecies.  Before we leave though we need to stock up on fresh fruits and vegetables because we ran out of them coming from Panama to here in the Galapagos.  We do this every we time we leave for a passage, but this one is going to be at least three weeks long so we need to get a lot.  The store in the town is unreliable because it only gets small shipments every few days, so we are going to go up to the farms that supply the store with most things.

At first we did not have high hopes because the first farm was a run-down dump and did not have very good produce, but the second one was really good and we got everything we needed.  We drove into the drive way, scattering a bunch of ducklings who were feeding on a watermelon rind, and sat on the bench to wait for the owner.  The owner was a tanned man with a machete and knife case attached to an old leather belt and... He only spoke Spanish.   When we asked for bananas he took a long branch, looked for a while then poked just the right spot so that the clump of bananas slowly lowered itself down and he took his machete and chopped the whole bunch off and the tree sprang right back up!

When we got back we were excitingly telling everybody who didnt come (including my sisters and dad), how amazing it was.  We gotten everything we wanted and more, overflowing all of our bags in the process, watched him chop it all off the plants when we asked, and paid forty dollars, a very cheap price.