raiatea

img src="images/raia/raia5.jpg" />

We were at seas for two days before we reached Raiatea, the first of the six French Polynesian islands we would visit.

Raiatea is noted for vanilla, in fact you can smell vanilla almost as soon as you get off the ship. So off we went to a vanilla farm. The first thing we found out is that the Polynesian vanilla is much different and far more expensive than the vanilla we get at home which comes from Mexico.

that are perfectly shaped and colored The production of vanilla is an extremely long and labor-intensive process. It takes at least three years from flower to marketing — if the weather cooperates. The beans are all picked by hand, sorted by hand and dried in the sun on big trays. During drying, the beans are ‘massaged’ also by hand to bring out the flavor. After the process is complete after a number of weeks, as in most citithe beans are sorted and sold.

Along with vanilla, Raiatea is particularly noted for black pearls so we next visited a pearl farm. There oysters are seeded with bits of abalone shell which comes from, of all places, the Mississippi river. After three years the oysters are checked and about half of them have developed pearls of various shapes. Most of the pearls are harvested then, but those that are perfectly shaped and colored are left in the oyster for up to three more years to grow larger.

We were told that natural pearls are found in about one of every 15,000 oysters.

After learning about pearls we had a Polynesian lunch featuring a huge baked mahi-mahi, salad, rice and Hinano beer (made in Tahiti). After lunch we were taken to an island beach and then back to our ship.