Blaire is back, but just barely! Jeremy is like the energizer bunny -- zero jetlag and boundless energy. I tried to catch up on the postings in the wee sleepless hours of last night, but no such luck. You guys are prolific!
Jeremy brought a laptop, so he was able to email from his hotel room while on the tour. The hotels had community computers that had the world's slowest dial-up connections and were very expensive. I could have called home every day for the cost of a couple of emails. But, hopefully I will make it up with story and photos.
Jeremy has seen a lot of this stuff before, so it probably got a bit tedious at times. Not for me! We had hardly got off the plane from Los Angeles, when we had to board the private Wan Air flight to Marutea, 1000 miles away from Tahiti.
And here we are on the atoll...
Just inches from hungry sharks -- supposedly benign hungry sharks, which were being fed by the people doing the cooking.
Later that night we were treated to a sunset walk on the beach...
And my friend Leslie saw whales and she yelled to all the people on the beach so we would look. Well, whenever the whales arched out of the water, we all cheered. That made them curious, so they came closer and started to frolic on our behalf.
We finally made our way down the beach to have a glass of champagne (sounds really good until you factor in the man-eating mosquitos) and the whales followed us. One of them stood straight out of the water and gave us the eye. Then they all gave us several waves of their fins -- high fin, low fin -- you know
It was mystical.
There was nothing to interrupt the sea and the sky. It was magnificent.
The next day we observed the grafting process for the Tahitian pearls. I got a great close-up video of nucleation, but I'm not allowed to post it. I will post a shark video when I get a chance.
On the night I wore Jeremy's pearls, he was off having dinner with Josh. No invite -- totally unfair
But I hear they did some great business.
After spending way too much money in Tahiti, we spent a day in Moorea due to the delay of our flight to New Zealand. It was supposed to leave at 8:00 a.m. and didn't leave until midnight.
We were supposed to have two days in New Zealand to see the Eyris Blue Pearl operations. For anyone who knows me, I have been obsessed with Eyris Blue Pearls for forever, so I was upset that we would miss something. We took a vote and agreed that we would clean up and go out right away without sleeping, so we did eventually get to see everrything.
It was beyond my wildest dreams. Roger Beattie, who runs and owns the business showed us every step in processing the shells right down to the finished gems, ready to set. The next day, we drove to Akaroa Bay and Roger took us out to their operations at sea and showed us the Paua Abalones and their pearls in progress.
Here is a photo of how beautiful they can be...
Off to Darwin Australia to visit Paspaley Pearls. Here we flew by sea plane to the water operations on the Paspaley III ship. I got to midwife a pearl birth by squeezing out a pearl. Too cool. They are lovely right out of the shell. More photos later & a video, but here I am on the boat to Kuri Bay where we had a fabulous lunch. Worn out, but happy.
Gee, I am getting a reputation for being happy and smiling a lot, but it's hard not to smile when you're in pearl heaven. Okay, I also was the comedian on the trip. Everyone was so serious, so somebody had to do it!
The next day we went to Paspaley's office to the pearl grading room. Wow! Pearls EVERYWHERE! Here is a photo of us handling them...
That's it for now. I'll report more later.
Blaire, the pearl reporter
