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Travel Notes |
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Tue Mar 19 02:08:55 2002 (nmcfarl) Book: Australia Rough Guide Location: "New Caladonia, The People|" So New Caledonia was a little different from most places, 'cause it was so french in the cities and the plains, so native (Kanak) in the north. Noumea had all the french conviences , the fashion and the food, also the topless beaches. Very french, very 'Metro', with many local civel servant from paris. As you drove north you ended up in the plains where they grow cows and ranch. This is a much more concervitive french style, basically these people are decendents of the orignal french colonist, both farmer and convict. Basically french cowboy style. Then as you get to the north and to the mountains you get into Kanak country, These areas are dominated by small melensia farms, with men wandering around with machettes and woman in mother hubbard dresses ( though not as many here as in Vanuatu and Fiji). Also the independance movement is strong here. It's a pretty weird mix, the groups don't mix to much, nor get on too well politically. Tue Mar 19 02:04:22 2002 (rr) Book: South Pacific Moon Guide After a number of days in Noumea, we took a high-speed boat over to Ile des Pines, an island southeast of Noumea. The ride took two and half hours, and was mostly uneventful. We had taken sea-sickness precautions, but others hadn't. I sat and stared at the waves and watched birds flying right above the waves. And listened to the discman. The boat pulled through a narrow reef break and headed in for the island, which is covered in araucaria pine trees. This makes it look very different from the often palm-tree covered islands. The boat pulled up into Kuto Bay, where we would spend a few afternoons playing in the waves, and where Nathan's glasses now reside. (I think his glasses fell in love with Ile des Pines, and decided to take an early retirement there, very much like other local residents.) I was not up to booking accomodations over the phone in French so we didn't having anything arranged beforehand. We had no luck at the first gite we tried, but did luck out at the second and last, reasonably priced option. We had some language difficulties as this was perhaps our first real encounter with having to communicate entirely in French, and depending only on our trusty phrasebook and hand gestures. But we got a room, for multiple nights, even. Ah, I forgot. Before we went we knew that it would be expensive on the island. We decided to try and bring a lot of food with us to make our own romantic picnics - cheese, wine, baguette, the usual. This means we lugged over four bottles of wine, one small bottle of cassis, many wedges of cheese, olives, artichoke hearts, and what we thought was a jar of roasted red pepper paste (it was hot red pepper sauce). We could only count on the store having baguettes and expensive Number 1 beer for sale. We ate a lot of baguette - one in the morning with butter and jam, usually a baguette sandwich for lunch from the local snack, and one or two for dinner with the aforementioned ingredients. It was a lot of baguette. One night we lost electricity (no ceiling fan!) during a particularly gusty storm. No baguettes that day. Nathan suffered withdrawal. That night though we had a particularly delicious dinner because of this baguette drought - Nathan made us buy couscous. I thought it silly. We made a salad of couscous, goat cheese, tuna, and various vegetable items. It was excellent. Enough on food. In between eating, we hung out on the beach, read books, and played chess. There were two different beaches, Kanumera and Kuto. Kuto was the beach with waves. Nathan hurdled over the waves. I attempted to body-surf. We eventually switched to body-surfing as a form of entertainment. The waves really weren't big or frequent enough to body-surf in, but we did it nonetheless. The other beach, Kanumera, was protected from the wind. Nathan didn't like this beach as much. I believe he found it boring and over-populated. I liked floating in the water there. The swimming was nicer too. On our last day there we went snorkelling and saw an amazing variety of fish. New Caledonia has the second largest barrier reef in the world. If I stoppped swimming, I would become surrounded by these silvery fish with very long swordfish-like noses. Lots of bright yellow fish with various patterns in black on them. Larger uglier bottom feeders that blended in well. Fish that were pink and green, fish with many many colors. Tue Mar 19 01:42:30 2002 (nmcfarl) Book: South Pacific Moon Guide Location: Fiji, Taveuni, the lagoon. and a kite So this missed the blog for fiji, and there was no inet access in New Caldonia (except for weekdays 8-11 and 2-5 in noumea, and we just weren't there,then). But on one of the rainy days on Taveuni, probably one with brownies as dessert, it cleared up, and we flew a kite. The kite was an X-mas present from Mum, a travel kite. It folds up to about the size of my journal and a tenth the weight, so seeing as rachel thought it sounded fun, it actually made the cut for the trip.{packing was very difficult task and we brought an extra bag of stuff to Anchorage so that we could have a few more days to figure it all out} So this day it cleared up, and we figured we ought to get out and enjoy it so we grabed the kite, walked across the street and onto the lagoons floor, it beeing low tide and there being a large tidal flat. Out we went and flew the kite walking in and out of the water wading a good bit of the time. The wind was pretty hard and the sky cleared up so we could see the colours of the kite, looking like stained glass from the suns rather bright illumination, It was really cool. And it's definitily worth carrying a kite all around the south pacific, just to fly it in a lagoon. |
nmcfarl.org email us email Rachel email Nathan See the pictures. Palau Pictures Yap Pictures Hawaii Pictures Taiwan Pictures View the original itinerary
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