Return to Rangiroa

/ Cruise Boy

OK, I won’t do these “Return to” titles anymore…

However, Rangiroa was the first stop during my 2019 cruise where I took a shore excursion. There isn’t much to do on this atoll, so I repeated my visit to Gauguin’s pearl farm. Rangiroa is very much an atoll, with just a single main entrance into the lagoon. The ring of land barely extends to the side of the road.

Rangiroa (from Wikipedia)

It took me a while to think about how to explain the color of the water here, but it came to me…

It’s “Sports Drink Blue”. I’m not kidding.

Silver Dawn in Rangiroa Lagoon
Rangiroa Beach

But to match it all up, there was the amazing sky. Here’s a vertical panorama.

Silver Dawn Pano

It was a 15-minute drive to the Gauguin Pearl Farm. They are the only pearl farm in Rangiroa, but there are 400 other farms in French Polynesia. I recognized the instructor/guide from six years ago. Here are many tidbits of pearl knowledge

  • There are three types of cultured (human managed) pearls
    • Tahitian pearls, also know as “black pearls”, mainly produced in the South Pacific
    • South Sea pearls are typically white to golden
    • Akoya pearls are white to blue and smaller than South Sea – they were the first to be “cultured”
    • Each pearl type is grown within a different oyster species
  • Cultured pearls start by a technician adding a “bead” within the living oyster
    • Oddly, the beads come from mussels found in Mississippi
    • The technician also adds nacre-producing part of a donor oyster, which slowly coats the bead
  • The pearls made here are called “marine cultured”, to separate them from “fresh water” pearls
Technician Adding Bead
Black Pearl Oyster
  • The oysters are placed 8 meters underwater
  • Even managed by people:
    • 10-30 percent do not produce pearls
    • 10-20 percent are lost to sea animals
    • About 40 percent produce sell-able pearls, with 15 percent of those being top-grade

Here is some information on how pearls are graded.

It was fun to visit Rangiroa again and see thing thru more-experienced eyes. Six years ago I didn’t even realize they spoke French in French Polynesia. I was such a wide-eyed newbie then, lol.

Tidbits:

  • A “keshi pearl” happens when the nacre does not coat the bead but still collects. They come in fun shapes and sizes
  • The local islands have grade and middle schools, but the only high school is on Tahiti island. The kids stay in a dorm.

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