Today we were the last up to breakfast at 0700. The boat took us to visit the pearl farm, where they farm baskets of pearl oysters. It was informative but sad to see how they do it. They sacrifice a couple of young oysters to embed bits of their shells into other oysters, along with small spheres of pearl dust. This irritates them and they form spherical pearls around the balls (natural pearls aren't spherical.) They showed us this process and how they dissect the mature oysters to extract the finished pearls.
From there we headed back to the harbor very slowly through the beautiful scenery. We "checked out" of our room (though they'd already turned off the air conditioning generator before we woke up) and we were the only people on the cruise who hadn't bought any of the overpriced drinks the whole trip. We managed to finish our 5 liters of water.
Back at shore we had lunch at a big restaurant (decent, but our new worst food in Vietnam) and waited for the bus to come take us back to Hanoi. It was full of garbage from the last group who rode in it. We made a longer stop at yet another ugly statues store, but at least this one was somewhat air conditioned. Our boatmates bought and shared some watermelon and lychees.
The bus eventually returned us to the hotel and we had some chicken Pho for an early dinner, and showered in their small bathroom. I also went to apologize to the travel agent for doubting him on the details of the cruise.
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