Waking up at 6:00am on day 5 we both felt like hitting the snooze button, sleeping in and calling room service. It's been a whirlwind of pearls, bright lights and extravagant dinners, but we had one final day, so we presssed on.
Chi Huyhn the founder of Galatea is not one to sit back and rest on his laurels, so it's always fun to see what he's been up to since we've seen him last. While he continues to work with Tahitian pearls, he's now branched off into large freshwater pearls, with stunning results.
While settling our bill with a supplier for the previous day purchases, we saw a box of pre-matched earring pairs in various shades of peach, champagne and golden tones. Cherry picking a few pairs from each card we pulled enough for a small collection of golden earring pairs. These pairs have a lovely champagne to dark golden tone, reminiscent of baby golden South Sea pearls, but with sharp metallic luster. If you love golden South Sea pearls, but not the price tag that comes with them, these are for you.
Alana has always asked me why I don't do any rings with some of the special pearls we've collected. Without a good reason, we decided to pull a handful of slight button shaped pearls for rings. We found a nice purple, some goldens and a fancy colored pearl to play with.
With sore eyes and tired feet we called it a show and headed back to the hotel to make arrangements for the next leg of our trip. If you read our day 4 report you know we were invited by Jewelmer to attend their 35th anniversary Gala in Manila and then fly to their private Flower Island resort/pearl farm to photograph their operation.
I'll admit with reports of Typhoon "Mario" dropping 3 feet of water in 24hrs the day before we were to land in Manila, I wasn't sure what to expect. Now that we're in Manila I can see that the people of the Philippines are extremely resilient and most we've talked to have shrugged it off and are back to business as usual.
We want to thank everybody for following along on another pearl buying adventure and hope you follow us as we make our way through the Philippines. Internet connection allowing, we plan to publish a full report on the Jewelmer gala and of course their Flower Island pearl farm.
