NOT QUITE A PERFECT PARADISE!
As the days passed by, I couldn’t be happier to be on Tuamotus, this place blew my mind and was without doubt one of the most amazing places that I ever been. But that same landscape that for us makes the place so perfect, is the same one which makes a tough life for the locals to make an economic profit. These islands are flat and very vulnerable to tsunamis and storms. The soil is also poor in nutrient as is formed only by dead coral, being rich only in calcario, which makes it hard for any agriculture. Besides that, the freshwater on offer is limited, depending mainly on the rainwater that they capture through the roofs of their houses.
For this reason, local people have to adapt to what the land has to offer. The one thing you`ll find the most in Tuamotus is coconut trees. There are an incredible amount of things you can make out of a coconut, as you can eat its meat, drinks its water and use its dry skin as wood for making fire. It also produces copra, a final product of the sun dried coconut which will be squeezed for producing coconut oil. The Tuamotus are also one of the few places in the world where the black pearl oyster ‘Pinctada margaritifera’ , can be found and this species is the one responsible for producing the rare and valuable black pearl. So nowadays one of the most important economic activities in these islands consists in farming these oysters and inducing them to produce the pearls, offering jobs for much of the population.