1/9/16
(Short entry. I just came back from halong bay tour, and will be trying to catch the night train to Hue on an hour!)
I know we love to say “no pain no gain”, and it is mostly true: effort is always needed to achieve something (unless you are super lucky, then would you mind buying a lottery ticket for me?). However, I am never sure if putting yourself through severe pain just to attain a goal is always a wise idea. For example, extreme running across Sahara desert or kayaking through the Amazon sounds amazingly fun, but also scarily dangerous. If risk should equal reward, how much should pain equate to gain?
I woke up in the junk boat feeling quite alright, especially since I was waking up every 2 hours for no reason (maybe I am not going to be a good seaman..haha. Say that out loud). The first activity of the day: kayaking in the bay. With fog blanketing the sea and the rock formations, it was a little eerie and surreal. The scenery was breathtaking, and I was happily paddling along in a 2 person kayak all by myself – they do not have single kayak. Being constantly reminded of how alone I am by the empty seat in front of me, I rowed and rowed my boat (kayak) gently down the bay. Everything was quiet and peaceful, and I was extremely happy until I got closer to the shore. The amount of trash is also quite amazing, and soon I noticed empty plastic water bottles, containers, cigarettes, and food packaging all floating along with me. I guess looking from afar is better than close up in this case.
Our next activity was a visit to the pearl farm: where they grow pearls. We were shown how the raised oysters and pearls: they showed us how a foreign object (the seed pearl) was inserted into a live oyster. To protect itself, the oyster produce substances (white milky in color) to coat this foreign object, which eventually turns into a pearl. To get the pearl, they simply kill the oyster, take out the pearl, and use the body for soup stock. Beautiful as it is, it was a little tragic: the oyster was killed just because it swallowed the wrong thing (or in this case, man forcefully made the oyster swallow a bad thing). I looked at quite a few beautiful pearls, but kept having the image of dead oysters in a chain in my mind.
The rest of the afternoon was spent on a bus back to Hanoi. As I was sitting on the bus, I wondered: do dead oysters haunt the owners of pearl necklaces? Then I wondered if they felt any pain when we pry them open to insert something into them, and then open them up again and kill them for it. Is the pain of oysters worth the pearl we are collecting? Also, why do we want to wear secretions of dead oysters around the neck? (I would find it weird if someone wants to wear my body fluid around their body.)
(Then again, I do love eating oysters….)
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