Now that I’m back home again, here are my 10 11 12 Best Things about New Caledonia.
- It only takes three hours to get there if you get a tail wind. (It takes four to come home).
- It was lovely to wake up in the morning and see the endless vista of the lagoon from the bedroom window. It’s a bit like being on a ship, where all you can see is the sea, except for the rock pools and the reef. Very restful for the eyes that read a lot, to effortlessly exercise long vision.
View from Chateau Royal Noumea, lovely even with a bit of evening cloud.
- Museum staff ask incredulously if you really are over 60 because you look too young, and say very flattering things when you produce the Seniors Card. (This is especially nice if you are in Noumea to celebrate the next birthday after that, the one with a five in it.) 40% of New Caledonians are under 20 so maybe they don’t get much practice at recognising baby boomers).
- The food is interesting. Sort of French, but with tropical flair. Unexpectedly, venison features quite often in entrees, but not in main courses. The Spangled Emperor is especially nice, and so is the Red Snapper (which is not the same fish as the Red Snapper that you might accidentally buy instead of real snapper in Australia). Seafood is expensive, but delicious. We avoided the yams.
Lunch at Le Roof.
- It’s multiracial. I don’t have a clue about the politics of independence, but on the streets and across all sorts of occupations (including positions of power on the telly and in their local newspaper which I read in French) you see New Caledonia’s history in the faces of people from China, Vietnam, Europe and the USA, and Polynesia, as well as the original Kanaks and many people of mixed race. As a Melburnian, I feel comfortable in multiracial societies, it’s how the world should be IMO.
- It’s colourful. The Kanak ladies wear beautiful long dresses in bright colours, and they often wear flowers in their hair; the Kanak men wear shirts with tropical flowers and don’t look silly in them like Europeans do. (Local people of European origin seem to go for pastels and blend in). Cars in Noumea are not boring white and silver (like ours increasingly are because to buy anything else you have to order it specially and wait for months). Buildings are painted in pristine white with bright aqua or blue trim, or they are painted in bright colours like orange and green. (If there were plain boring brick buildings I didn’t see any). There are three kinds of bougainvillea in different colours, and the vegetation is gorgeous. The sky was a beautiful blue, for us, every day. (Clouds which ventured across the sky at dusk vanished overnight).
- Their cocktails are colourful too! That one on the left was mine, and it started out yellow until they poured something blue into it. I wasn’t quick enough at photographing it to capture the effect.
- I did not once hear anybody hooting a car horn. We walked a fair way along the tourist strip and its side roads, and a good long way from the maritime museum to the war museum and then around the city centre, and we drove around a couple of times in taxis too, and not once did we see or hear the kind of road rage you can see any day on the roads in Australia. I got the impression from the size of the vehicles that The Male Sexual Identity in New Caledonia is not bound up in The Car.
- We loved their museums. The Maritime Museum is the best – we spent ages there, but the WW2 museum is good too, not too sombre, and very informative (with swing bands playing in the background). We liked the aquarium as well, and we probably should have gone to the cultural centre too, but idleness overcame us.
- You can practise your terrible French and they patiently help you learn the words you don’t know instead of scornfully answering you in English like they do in Paris. (Unless you get really stuck).
- Their airport has short, easy-to-read Pocket Editions of novels in French. I bought two.
- The best breakfast of the trip was at the airport where I had a proper French croissant. No sticky things added to it, not heated up, just buttery pull apart with your fingers deliciousness. At the airport! (We came back down to earth, figuratively as well as literally, at *sigh* Melbourne Airport. Is it just post-holiday blues that makes it seem so embarrassingly awful??)
It was interesting to learn that when France capitulated, New Caledonia came under Vichy law but – not keen on that at all – they had a coup toute suite and joined the Free French under De Gaulle. And say what you like about De Gaulle, he knew how to do a rousing call to arms and heaps of New Caledonians including tribal Kanak chiefs enlisted and fought bravely against fascism.
Travels with Tim and Lisa 