Pearls! I LOVE pearls!To my surprise Fiji is in the south sea pearls business! Justin Hunter, an American marine biologist, set up Fiji's only pearl farm just off of SuvaSuva in 2000. We toured it on our last day at Koro Sun. The farm looked pretty big to me. We boated out and saw workers cleaning the oysters. It takes months to clean the barnacles off of all the oysters. Once the workers are done they start all over and by then the oysters need cleaning again.
Twice a year Japanese technicians comes in and inseminate the oysters. Two technicians can do about 1,000 a day! Workers collect the oysters and start to pry them open. Then the techs open them a little more and check that they are healthy and then put in an "irritant". They can also put in a little piece of a sacrificed oyster's skin to color the pearl. Afterwards I had mixed feeling about my love of pearls but not enough to skip the show room before we left. We watched the technicians working but weren't allowed to take pictures.
The whole process is pretty interesting. They have about a million oysters. We snorkeled over the farm and got to see the oysters lined up. Sorry, no pictures of that either! About 18 months later they check the oyster and take the pearl. If the oyster is still healthy it can grow another pearl and since the oyster is bigger the pearl gets bigger. Turns out due to their process and the local environment these pearls grow bigger and thicker than in other South Sea countries, such as Tahiti or the Cooks. They come in a wider range of colors too.
Afterwards we got to go to the showroom (of course we do!). In a side room Mrs Justin Hunter was sorting pearls. We took a look and she had about 4,000 pearls out. I wanted to buy a pendant or a loose pearl. Turns out these folks have a pretty strong opinion of their pearls. I suppose ultimately the market must supports their prices but they were a lot more expensive than I'm used to paying and the loose pearls were just plain gray. BORING! Not that all the pearls were boring. Quite the contrary, but those pearls were already made into jewelry. They were in a rainbow of natural colors and they were huge! Like Barbara Bush Pearls or Betty and Wilma Pearls, only black pearls not white. Amazing they were!!
I asked to buy some that she was sorting and the answer at first the answer was no. Then I explained I didn't want gray loose pearls and then she said that I could look through the "export reject" pile. These are pearls that are so deformed that they won't even export them. They put them in giant tubs and they are sold thousands at a time at auction in Japan. People use them in art or art jewelry. That's easy to understand because even though they are 'rejects' they are very cool! We picked out 3 and she priced them. I bought two really cool odd shaped pearls. I have a design for one and still thinking on the other. My jeweler said he's on it as soon as he's done with a few other projects. Yeeehaw!
SNORKELING!
After lunch we went on a group snorkel trip. It was fun and there were some fish and a little bit of coral but this isn't the snorkeling part of Fiji so it was exactly spectacular. It was certainly fun and it's always great to be in the water.
HAPPY HOUR!
By this time we had really made friends with the Koro Sun staff and the other guests. We learned we were the oldest people there since it was all newly weds. Aaron made some interesting observations. First he said, "Hey, have you noticed how all the guys here are totally built?" Well, I hadn't. In fact I said, "No way they are little tiny twiggy men". He told me to look at the pool and standing there was a sculpted Army Ranger type. He was just huge! I said, "What? The guy with the giant guns over there? He's nothing!" So then I add, "Notice how all the women are little tiny waifs with perky breasts and heart-shapped tooshies?" Aaron says, "No way!" He too was directed to the pool. Observation confirmed thank you very much!!! Leave it to us to be the standard deviation.
That night Hiram hosted happy hour out by the ocean instead of in the resort. Everyone came out for it. It was a little like Honeymooners Summer Camp about then. We all knew each other because we did activities everyday together and there are only 18 people so of course you get to know folks. The other guests were great fun. We had a couple of drinks and the resort brought over complimentary goodies from the kitchen even though we weren't in the main part of the resort. See what I mean? They just look after you no matter what.
Now for how we found out how much older we were... On the walk from happy hour to dinner one couple said something like, "We have a combined age of 43" or something like that. I said, "Jeeze, we have a combined age of 74" and just like that the parade of couples practically stopped cold. Suddenly 8 perky-sculpted-20-something couples were staring at us. "What?" Someone got brave and piped up, "Ah, well, um we're 60." There. Someone else in their 30's. Whew.
Aaron and I had a great time and the kids just referred to as a unit. I don't know why. Everyone else got names but we were known simply as "Seattle". Could it be because that we were very outnumbered by Aussies? (They loved our accent, by the way.) Regardless we learned to look up when our hometown was mentioned. We tried to represent the City as well as we know how.
That night we ask the staff if we could eat at one big table instead of 9 tables of 2. Of course they said yes. They made a big table in the middle of the room. We had a great time having dinner and laughing. It was a fabulous last night to our Koro Sun honeymoon. In the morning we would leave before dawn to take the 2 hour drive back to Labasa to head to our next destination.
The whole thing totally exceeded our every expectation.
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