Thursday, August 9, 2013
A summary:
They have millions of "black lip" oysters dangling from lines (incased in net-cages) in their pearl farm whose sole purpose in life is to produce these pearls for them. They force them open and shove little white balls inside (taken from a different species of oyster found in America), which collect black oyster slime over time and eventually (after 2 years) become black pearls. These balls of hardened slime are set in various metals to be worn around the neck, wrist, or finger and can be bought for thousands of dollars in their jewelry shop.
This one farm produces 20,000 pearls a year and there are hundreds of farms in Polynesia. This leads me to wonder where their value comes from, because it certainly is not from scarcity. Oh, and they are not native to Polynesia, they were planted here by man.
After sitting in the jewelry shop for a bit and hearing about this whole process, they brought us down to this rickety old floating floor they call a boat that had unsecured lawn chairs on it for us to sit.
Hanging on for dear life, we motored out to their little floating workshop where the slaves workers scrape barnacles and crap off the oysters and then throw them back in the water.
That is not Macklemore in the picture, just some French guy who looks like him.
They can only keep the oysters out of the water for an hour at a time for scraping, so they have this little area where the oysters can have a breathing break.
Jan and I brought our snorkelling gear because the tour was supposed to include snorkelling around the farm and seeing the dangling oysters. Unfortunately, we were the only ones who brought gear and the other 15 people would have to sit around on the uncomfortable raft waiting for us to do our snorkelling, so we opted to just skip it.
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