Once we'd said our farewells to Birgit and Christian we headed over a nearby island to visit Rikitea, the only town in the Gambiers. So many islands! The were lots more boats over by the shops and we managed to anchor next to the cheerful yellow boat belonging to Juan, our BBQ buddy from the other night.
We only stayed there for one night, which gave us 1 1/2 days to prepare for our six week passage. That really doesn't seem like much...
It was a cute little town. Birgit and Christian had already told us what time to go and get baguettes, which is the most crucial piece of information for all the small towns in French Polynesia. They usualy only bake bread once a day and it disappears very quickly. So the bakery was our first stop, where we loaded up with the first baguettes we'd had in almost two weeks. Then we spent the rest of the day running around town stocking up for our trip. There were actually lots of stores, but most of them were just little counters that you walked up to and asked for what you wanted. Then they went and fetched it from out the back. This only works if you speak French... I did run round to all of them repeating the phrase 'Avi vouz chocolàt noir?' over and over again. By doing this I ended up with seven blocks of dark chocolate, which will hopefully last me the whole trip. Except that the first one didn't last me the day. Whoops.
We did find two stores that you could walk into though, and we managed to get meat, flour, butter and baked beans. There wasn't really much else to provision with. Our fresh produce consisted of 6 moldy onions, a small bag of wrinkly old potatoes, three carrots and a handful of manderins. I got the sense that the manderins were a special treat, as the shopkeeper was really excited about them and kept trying to make me take some. I assumed they were really expensive (the last bag of oranges I bought ended up costing $2 an orange). But they were surprisingly cheap, so I grabbed a few. And that is all we have to cover us for the next six weeks, aside from a leftover papaya and three more plantains from our garden raid. I also have some breadfruit in the fridge that I've boiled up, ready to bulk out our passage stew.
One thing I noticed about this town is that the people are much friendlier than everywhere else we've been. Everybody in French Polynesia has been nice, but here they were trying really hard to be as helpful as possible. Somebody tried to give me a lift back to the boat when they saw me walking past, but I was nearly there so I politely declined. We could never get a ride anywhere else when we actually tried to get picked up, The shopkeepers corrected my French and kept repeating it until I could say whatever I was trying to say properly. When it comes to French, either you say it perfectly and people understand or you mispronounce something and they stare at you blankly. Mostly they stare at you blankly, even when you're saying it properly. I even managed to have my first conversation in French with a nice man on the street. He asked me how my day was going, and I told him it was very well and I was sorry but my French wasn't very good. Then he said that it was fine and asked if I was on a boat. I said yes, and he told me to have a nice day. Longest conversation ever without throwing in any English! I was pretty happy about that. And slightly annoyed that I'm starting to get better at speaking the language just as we're leaving. Though most of the time I've just been trying to ask for things in shops or ask directions from people, which ends up being just short sentences or questions instead of actual conversation. Nobody else has wanted to stop and talk to me in broken French before. If I can't talk to them properly they mostly don't want to try, even the really friendly people. They just use hand motions to try and show me what they mean.
So the Gambiers are lovely. I'd really like to stay here for a bit longer, but we have to get going. I went to fill up all our water jugs today just before we left, only to discover that the last of the cheap jerry cans I bought in Vanuatu for our passage has now got a hole in it. That was disappointing seeing as I bought them specifically for this passage, but we actually got a lot of use out of them so at least they didn't go to waste. We were slightly worried about water knowing that we had 50L less than we had intended, but Juan came to the rescue by loading us up with water bottles. He must have given us at least 30L more in loose bottles, which was a big relief.
I was the lucky one who got to ferry all the bottles and jerry cans to shore and fill them up from the tap across the road. This took several trips and was a bit of a mission. I had tried to find a pamplemousse for our passage while I was in town, but nobody sold them seeing as everybody had their own tree. One of the times I went over to the tap to fill up with water there were two guys there already, one sitting in the shade and the other filling up mass amounts of water bottles in the back of his truck. I swapped pleasantries with them in French, but one of the men spoke English so we were able to chat for a while. I asked if they knew where I could find a pamplemousse, and the guy in the truck was all like 'oh, here's one,' and retrieved one from the back. Yay! Then he said he had lots of fruit back at his house and offered to go get some for me. Water gathering was the last thing I had to do before we took off, so I had to decline his offer. He didn't understand and insisted he come back later with some fruit. I said we had to leave soon, so he asked which boat was ours. I told him and then he said he'd come by the boat later with the fruit. It took me a while to get them to understand that I was actually about to leave the country and couldn't meet them later to receive their free food. I really can't believe how friendly and generous these people are. Even to offer me anything at all was really sweet, but they were going to go to all the effort of loading it in a boat and then delivering it to me via the water, which is ridiculous. Birgit was right about how nice everybody is and how easy it is to get pamplemousse here! If only we could stay a bit longer.
But we really had to go. I was refusing to leave French Polynesia without some of the black pearls that the country is famous for. Everybody seems to have some and you see all of the cruisers sporting at least one pretty pearl necklace. We hadn't been able to visit any pearl farms yet and I had made an effort not to buy any from Tahiti where they were overpriced and not as nice. We were going to get some from the source. So before we left the country we were going to make a quick stop at the pearl farm on the other side of the Gambiers.
Our plan was slightly ambitious, considering how far away the pearl farm was and that it was close to midday by the time we managed to get away. But I was either going to go back in time to all the opportunities I'd had to buy pearls that I passed up because they were too expensive, or we were going to visit a pearl farm before leaving. It took us a few hours to get across the lagoon. This travelling time was partly due to the mass amounts of pearl buoys we had to avoid on the way. They were scattered absolutely everywhere! Garth went downstairs and left me in charge for about 10 minutes, during which time I nearly had a heart attack. I was standing up in the cockpit in order to see all the little buoys scattered through the water. Then one would creep up on me and appear right in front of us, so I'd run back to change the direction the autopilot was taking us in. Then I'd stand up again and there would be another one right in front of us. So the boat weaved in a jerky, panicky, zigzag pattern as I made my way in between the buoys. Finally I was relieved from the stress when Garth came back and took over again. I don't know how he stays so calm.
Then when we got closer to our destination we had to cross a very shallow patch of water. So we had to slow right down and carefully watch the depth, which was only just deeper than the boat. After we spent ages dodging coral heads and shallow bits, we eventually dropped the anchor into crystal clear water and headed to shore. Phew!
When we got to the beach I was seriously sad about forgetting to bring the camera with me. It was one of the most beautiful anchorages I've ever seen, and without pictures to reflect upon I can't' decide if it was nicer than the pristine water we stayed in overnight in the middle of Fakarava or not. We walked to the pearl farm along the beach but our walk took a lot longer than expected bcause I kept turning to look back at the boat, almost stopped in my tracks by how pretty it was. Garth almost had to drag me.
When we arrived we met Eric, who was the man in charge of the whole operation. He showed us around the farm, encouraging us to stand behind the workers so we could get a proper look at what was going on. Unfortunately they had just harvested all the pearls the day before so we missed seeing them get taken out of the shells. But today they had to put them all back in the water. They were inserting tiny little balls into the shells for the pearls to grow around and grafting a tiny bit of shell on with it, which determines what colour the pearl will end up being.
This was all done by a handful of people, mostly girls with tiny hands. The shells were opened by less than an inch and then held in place by a little clamp. Then the balls and the graft were put in with long pointy tweezers, the clamp was taken away and the oyster was ready to grow another pearl. The pearls in French Polynesia are typically a gorgeous shade of black, but they actually come in lots of colours. In the Gambier especially they manage to produce pearls with a slight golden, red or green tinge to them. Eric had a big sack of shells from the recent harvesting, and he insisted 2 take some as souveniers. You can see the ring of colours around the edge of the shell, like a dark metallic rainbow that changes colour depending on how you look at it.
There was also a room closer to the water where people were tying the oysters up. They put a small hole through the shell which is used to zip tie it onto a kind of plastic mesh that goes back in the water laden with oysters. I'm not sure why, but the oysters have to be pulled up and cleaned regularly or the pearls won't end up quite so pretty. It all seems like a big mission for a tiny little pearl!
After we'd looked around and I'd sufficiently mourned my absent camera, we headed back along to the beach. Eric's house was at the end of the Motu in front of where we'd anchored and that's where he was going to meet us so we could browse through his pearls.
There was another boatload of people hanging out on the beach already. The were from Wigwam, who we met briefly the other day. We chatted for a while as the family got a BBQ going for their dinner. There were kids everywhere, which was lovely to see. They had the most gorgeous accents and the young ones were doing all the translating for us. I really wish I'd bothered to learn French when I was young and impressionable - kids seem to soak up other languages so easily.
Eric eventually arrived and we headed onto his verandah. He had two bags - one was chock full of very pretty, perfect round pearls. The other was what he called an 'unsorted' bag and it was filled with lots of random ones. He laid out a big cloth and upended them all onto it, then invited us to pick through. It was hard to figure out what I wanted. I was hoping for a few nice round ones in different colours and a small bag of cheap reject pearls. He priced the nicer ones of these for us at $2 each, and I got a whole heap of them. They all had defects of some kind, so nobody really wants them. I was really interested in these ones though.
They have perfect lines around them. It looks like they'd been engraved into the pearl, but the oyster does it on its own. Birgit had a necklace made out of them and I love how different they are. I also got quite a few round ones as well as two really pretty pearls shaped kind of like teardrops. My final pearl was a really big guy I'm hoping to turn into a choker, which cost more than double all the little ones at $50. It's huge though, and nice and round. We spent the rest of our French Polynesian money, which was around $200. I also traded two pretty pearls for a small bottle of alcohol, but I left Eric the rest of my Vodka as well. We weren't going to drink it before we got to Panama and alcohol is so cheap there anyway.
The oysters produce a few lots of pearls before being retired, because each time they get re-grafted the pearl will be a slightly lighter shade the next time around. So eventually they lose the gorgeous shade of black and become a much lighter colour which makes them much less valuable. Garth fell in love with the silver one, which has lost all the dark pigment from the oyster being reused too many times. So that one is for him.
We had to go back to the boat to fetch the alcohol, which gave me an opportunity to grab the camera. Unfortunately the sun had moved and was now shining right on the water, so it had lost the pretty turquoise colour. The sun is determined to drive me crazy. It always shines on the water in the afternoon so you can't see where the reefs are from the dinghy and the water loses its colour because of the reflections.
Anyway, now we're off. We've said goodbye to French Polynesia, which has been our home for the last five months. We're heading south towards Pitcairn Island, dodging more pearl buoys and hoping we get clear of them all before the sun goes down. And so begins the longest passage we'll ever have to do.
Xxx Monique
We only stayed there for one night, which gave us 1 1/2 days to prepare for our six week passage. That really doesn't seem like much...
It was a cute little town. Birgit and Christian had already told us what time to go and get baguettes, which is the most crucial piece of information for all the small towns in French Polynesia. They usualy only bake bread once a day and it disappears very quickly. So the bakery was our first stop, where we loaded up with the first baguettes we'd had in almost two weeks. Then we spent the rest of the day running around town stocking up for our trip. There were actually lots of stores, but most of them were just little counters that you walked up to and asked for what you wanted. Then they went and fetched it from out the back. This only works if you speak French... I did run round to all of them repeating the phrase 'Avi vouz chocolàt noir?' over and over again. By doing this I ended up with seven blocks of dark chocolate, which will hopefully last me the whole trip. Except that the first one didn't last me the day. Whoops.
We did find two stores that you could walk into though, and we managed to get meat, flour, butter and baked beans. There wasn't really much else to provision with. Our fresh produce consisted of 6 moldy onions, a small bag of wrinkly old potatoes, three carrots and a handful of manderins. I got the sense that the manderins were a special treat, as the shopkeeper was really excited about them and kept trying to make me take some. I assumed they were really expensive (the last bag of oranges I bought ended up costing $2 an orange). But they were surprisingly cheap, so I grabbed a few. And that is all we have to cover us for the next six weeks, aside from a leftover papaya and three more plantains from our garden raid. I also have some breadfruit in the fridge that I've boiled up, ready to bulk out our passage stew.
One thing I noticed about this town is that the people are much friendlier than everywhere else we've been. Everybody in French Polynesia has been nice, but here they were trying really hard to be as helpful as possible. Somebody tried to give me a lift back to the boat when they saw me walking past, but I was nearly there so I politely declined. We could never get a ride anywhere else when we actually tried to get picked up, The shopkeepers corrected my French and kept repeating it until I could say whatever I was trying to say properly. When it comes to French, either you say it perfectly and people understand or you mispronounce something and they stare at you blankly. Mostly they stare at you blankly, even when you're saying it properly. I even managed to have my first conversation in French with a nice man on the street. He asked me how my day was going, and I told him it was very well and I was sorry but my French wasn't very good. Then he said that it was fine and asked if I was on a boat. I said yes, and he told me to have a nice day. Longest conversation ever without throwing in any English! I was pretty happy about that. And slightly annoyed that I'm starting to get better at speaking the language just as we're leaving. Though most of the time I've just been trying to ask for things in shops or ask directions from people, which ends up being just short sentences or questions instead of actual conversation. Nobody else has wanted to stop and talk to me in broken French before. If I can't talk to them properly they mostly don't want to try, even the really friendly people. They just use hand motions to try and show me what they mean.
So the Gambiers are lovely. I'd really like to stay here for a bit longer, but we have to get going. I went to fill up all our water jugs today just before we left, only to discover that the last of the cheap jerry cans I bought in Vanuatu for our passage has now got a hole in it. That was disappointing seeing as I bought them specifically for this passage, but we actually got a lot of use out of them so at least they didn't go to waste. We were slightly worried about water knowing that we had 50L less than we had intended, but Juan came to the rescue by loading us up with water bottles. He must have given us at least 30L more in loose bottles, which was a big relief.
I was the lucky one who got to ferry all the bottles and jerry cans to shore and fill them up from the tap across the road. This took several trips and was a bit of a mission. I had tried to find a pamplemousse for our passage while I was in town, but nobody sold them seeing as everybody had their own tree. One of the times I went over to the tap to fill up with water there were two guys there already, one sitting in the shade and the other filling up mass amounts of water bottles in the back of his truck. I swapped pleasantries with them in French, but one of the men spoke English so we were able to chat for a while. I asked if they knew where I could find a pamplemousse, and the guy in the truck was all like 'oh, here's one,' and retrieved one from the back. Yay! Then he said he had lots of fruit back at his house and offered to go get some for me. Water gathering was the last thing I had to do before we took off, so I had to decline his offer. He didn't understand and insisted he come back later with some fruit. I said we had to leave soon, so he asked which boat was ours. I told him and then he said he'd come by the boat later with the fruit. It took me a while to get them to understand that I was actually about to leave the country and couldn't meet them later to receive their free food. I really can't believe how friendly and generous these people are. Even to offer me anything at all was really sweet, but they were going to go to all the effort of loading it in a boat and then delivering it to me via the water, which is ridiculous. Birgit was right about how nice everybody is and how easy it is to get pamplemousse here! If only we could stay a bit longer.
But we really had to go. I was refusing to leave French Polynesia without some of the black pearls that the country is famous for. Everybody seems to have some and you see all of the cruisers sporting at least one pretty pearl necklace. We hadn't been able to visit any pearl farms yet and I had made an effort not to buy any from Tahiti where they were overpriced and not as nice. We were going to get some from the source. So before we left the country we were going to make a quick stop at the pearl farm on the other side of the Gambiers.
Our plan was slightly ambitious, considering how far away the pearl farm was and that it was close to midday by the time we managed to get away. But I was either going to go back in time to all the opportunities I'd had to buy pearls that I passed up because they were too expensive, or we were going to visit a pearl farm before leaving. It took us a few hours to get across the lagoon. This travelling time was partly due to the mass amounts of pearl buoys we had to avoid on the way. They were scattered absolutely everywhere! Garth went downstairs and left me in charge for about 10 minutes, during which time I nearly had a heart attack. I was standing up in the cockpit in order to see all the little buoys scattered through the water. Then one would creep up on me and appear right in front of us, so I'd run back to change the direction the autopilot was taking us in. Then I'd stand up again and there would be another one right in front of us. So the boat weaved in a jerky, panicky, zigzag pattern as I made my way in between the buoys. Finally I was relieved from the stress when Garth came back and took over again. I don't know how he stays so calm.
Then when we got closer to our destination we had to cross a very shallow patch of water. So we had to slow right down and carefully watch the depth, which was only just deeper than the boat. After we spent ages dodging coral heads and shallow bits, we eventually dropped the anchor into crystal clear water and headed to shore. Phew!
When we got to the beach I was seriously sad about forgetting to bring the camera with me. It was one of the most beautiful anchorages I've ever seen, and without pictures to reflect upon I can't' decide if it was nicer than the pristine water we stayed in overnight in the middle of Fakarava or not. We walked to the pearl farm along the beach but our walk took a lot longer than expected bcause I kept turning to look back at the boat, almost stopped in my tracks by how pretty it was. Garth almost had to drag me.
When we arrived we met Eric, who was the man in charge of the whole operation. He showed us around the farm, encouraging us to stand behind the workers so we could get a proper look at what was going on. Unfortunately they had just harvested all the pearls the day before so we missed seeing them get taken out of the shells. But today they had to put them all back in the water. They were inserting tiny little balls into the shells for the pearls to grow around and grafting a tiny bit of shell on with it, which determines what colour the pearl will end up being.
This was all done by a handful of people, mostly girls with tiny hands. The shells were opened by less than an inch and then held in place by a little clamp. Then the balls and the graft were put in with long pointy tweezers, the clamp was taken away and the oyster was ready to grow another pearl. The pearls in French Polynesia are typically a gorgeous shade of black, but they actually come in lots of colours. In the Gambier especially they manage to produce pearls with a slight golden, red or green tinge to them. Eric had a big sack of shells from the recent harvesting, and he insisted 2 take some as souveniers. You can see the ring of colours around the edge of the shell, like a dark metallic rainbow that changes colour depending on how you look at it.
There was also a room closer to the water where people were tying the oysters up. They put a small hole through the shell which is used to zip tie it onto a kind of plastic mesh that goes back in the water laden with oysters. I'm not sure why, but the oysters have to be pulled up and cleaned regularly or the pearls won't end up quite so pretty. It all seems like a big mission for a tiny little pearl!
After we'd looked around and I'd sufficiently mourned my absent camera, we headed back along to the beach. Eric's house was at the end of the Motu in front of where we'd anchored and that's where he was going to meet us so we could browse through his pearls.
There was another boatload of people hanging out on the beach already. The were from Wigwam, who we met briefly the other day. We chatted for a while as the family got a BBQ going for their dinner. There were kids everywhere, which was lovely to see. They had the most gorgeous accents and the young ones were doing all the translating for us. I really wish I'd bothered to learn French when I was young and impressionable - kids seem to soak up other languages so easily.
Eric eventually arrived and we headed onto his verandah. He had two bags - one was chock full of very pretty, perfect round pearls. The other was what he called an 'unsorted' bag and it was filled with lots of random ones. He laid out a big cloth and upended them all onto it, then invited us to pick through. It was hard to figure out what I wanted. I was hoping for a few nice round ones in different colours and a small bag of cheap reject pearls. He priced the nicer ones of these for us at $2 each, and I got a whole heap of them. They all had defects of some kind, so nobody really wants them. I was really interested in these ones though.
They have perfect lines around them. It looks like they'd been engraved into the pearl, but the oyster does it on its own. Birgit had a necklace made out of them and I love how different they are. I also got quite a few round ones as well as two really pretty pearls shaped kind of like teardrops. My final pearl was a really big guy I'm hoping to turn into a choker, which cost more than double all the little ones at $50. It's huge though, and nice and round. We spent the rest of our French Polynesian money, which was around $200. I also traded two pretty pearls for a small bottle of alcohol, but I left Eric the rest of my Vodka as well. We weren't going to drink it before we got to Panama and alcohol is so cheap there anyway.
The oysters produce a few lots of pearls before being retired, because each time they get re-grafted the pearl will be a slightly lighter shade the next time around. So eventually they lose the gorgeous shade of black and become a much lighter colour which makes them much less valuable. Garth fell in love with the silver one, which has lost all the dark pigment from the oyster being reused too many times. So that one is for him.
We had to go back to the boat to fetch the alcohol, which gave me an opportunity to grab the camera. Unfortunately the sun had moved and was now shining right on the water, so it had lost the pretty turquoise colour. The sun is determined to drive me crazy. It always shines on the water in the afternoon so you can't see where the reefs are from the dinghy and the water loses its colour because of the reflections.
Anyway, now we're off. We've said goodbye to French Polynesia, which has been our home for the last five months. We're heading south towards Pitcairn Island, dodging more pearl buoys and hoping we get clear of them all before the sun goes down. And so begins the longest passage we'll ever have to do.
Xxx Monique
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