Ile des Pins - many adventures - back to Noumea

On Friday we had to go back up into town, to the poor long-suffering travel agent, beautiful Virginie with the impossible surname – something like Mohamoedouella - to change Nick’s ticket for about the third time, before we set sail for the south of the island. I took my postcards, hopefully clutched in their little paper bag, and went back to the shop where I had bought them. “Do you know where I could buy stamps for these?” I asked the woman who had sold them to me. She seemed like a nice, sensible sort of person, and we had had a conversation about how hard it was to find cards for my grandchildren etc etc. “Why, here, ofcourse,” she said! Why on earth didn’t she tell me this in the first place? Virginie told me where to find a postbox – at the tourist bureau in the Place de Cocotiers, the main square. So Pete and I went back through the Place, and couldn’t see a postbox at all. We went inside and asked the information officers – “Oh yes, the letterbox is around the corner, on the wall.” And so it was…as small and inconspicuous as possible, and painted in camouflage colours – lime yellow and blue, to blend elusively into the building.

We got as far as the Baie Uie, about 15 nautical miles from Noumea, and anchored in a very sheltered place along with three or four other catamarans, all lined up. Nick and Steve found a good big mooring buoy and very efficiently roped up to it. Hmmmm…. I could see Nick looking at the set-up a bit suspiciously. “Back up a bit, Pete, and see if this rope holds.” And...it didn’t, it broke instantly! Good thing we didn’t trust to its strength and go off to cook dinner and have an early night rocking gently on the ocean wave tethered to nothing at all! We carried this buoy and rope all the way back to the rubbish bin at Port Moselle, and a more manky, mangy rope you have never seen! Some of the other sailors looked at it dubiously, and said really, its only purpose was to decorate the buoy.

On Saturday we woke in the morning to find we were in the midst of a Gang of Four, identical catamarans, all from the same rental organisation in Noumea. They upped anchor and left in convoy. We waved nicely but they all turned up their noses and swept past. “Hmm,” said Nick, thoughtfully, watching the closest one. “They have both of their hatches open…” These hatches are almost at sea-level and are designed as escape hatches if a cat turns over. And the least splishety splash and…the boat will fill with water and sink, quite rapidly. We contemplated this pleasant possibility, then he (Responsible SailorBoy) went to radio them. But…they didn’t answer. One hopes that the sea remained calm until they noticed they had two big holes in their boat…

Pete cooked up an enormous breakfast of bacon, eggs and baked beans. We still had some of our quarantine eggs… Yannick had, sorrowfully, told us that he had to take our 14 eggs away from us. Well, actually, not the WHOLE eggs, just the eggshells! So we emptied eggs rapidly into a bowl and gave him a bag of shells. Today Pete scooped out a mixture of yolk and egg into rings and fried them up on the BBQ very successfully – waste not want not, especially in New Caledonia where all food (in fact all everything) is VERY expensive.

After that exhausting task (cooking, eating, washing up,) Pete and I retired to the couches to read our books while Nick and Pete, Explorers Extraordinaires, got into the tender and went off exploring up a little river. They came back a few hours later laden with coconuts – Nick had climbed trees for them, and has very grazed thighs to prove it. They saw some fish, a skate, a sea-snake, and were very pleased with their adventure.

I have been reading about the flora and fauna of New Caledonia. We haven’t seen any animals at all, except for the odd dog or cat. (And today, coming back into Noumea, a whole tribe of very agile goats, one of them halfway up a totally vertical cliff, looking very pleased with itself.) No road-kill, not even many birds. My travel guide says NC Has “very diverse flora and fauna” and I just looked to see what land mammals there might be, hiding in the (eroded) forests. Well…7 species of bats!!

Saturday we arrived at the Baie de Kunamera on the Ile des Pins in the dark. We could just make out the outline of pines and palms in the bay. When we got up in the morning, we could see the full beauty of our anchorage. The pines (Auraucaria) here are amazing – they grow straight and tall, all the way up. This does not seem to be a cyclone-proof way to grow, in this region, but there is no evidence of them crashed to the ground. The forest here is very beautiful, with big, complex banyans, casuarina-like trees, thick lush fruit trees, coconuts in abundance.

Nick and I went for a swim first thing in the morning. It looked very promising, but…no coral near the boat at all, just a bit of weed. This afternoon I went for a swim with Steve, and he found a good amount of coral and fish closer in to shore. He was happy; he hadn’t been snorkeling for a long time, and he found it all very wonderful.

Pete wanted some couch time so Steve and I went off exploring after breakfast – Nick took us in to the beach in the tender. We walked quite a long way, along beautiful beaches, through majestic avenues of wonderful, arching trees, and also along roads which looked as if they could have been in Tasmania. Lots of variety. Also LOTS of birds, small ones fluttering around; I made up for a lack of fish-viewing today with lots of bird-viewing. Bright blue birds, white-eyes, small colourful parrots, black and white swallow-like birds, and one sighting, I think, of a big bird of prey which might have been a balbuzard pecheur (our little guide-book is only in French…)

We stopped for a coffee at a lovely café on the next, and equally beautiful, beach. Lovely café, yucky coffee, but…never mind… There was a touristy shop attached, with a big sign, in French, saying, “It is forbidden to sell alcohol to the locals.” Ouch…

We walked on a few kilometres, hoping to find the old prison. New Caledonia has a dreadful history, very similar to that of Tasmania – it was a penal colony, and many people were sent here from France over a similar period of years, including a large number of political prisoners.
We found a little shop along the way, run by a cheery lady in a festive turquoise and pink floral muumuu. It advertised a rotisserie, surprisingly, and indeed there was a little row of roast chickens sitting in foil bags on the counter. I didn’t need a chicken but I did need an iced tea, and I was very gratified to find, not Nestles, but Volvic The, cheaper and nicer. The maps and signs on the Ile des Pins are not excessively informative, so Steve and I found ourselves wandering along a little track, heading off into the forest, looking for the prison. We were accompanied by two companionable dogs, one big, one small, who very soon became bored with our company and abandoned us. We did find some grave sites, up in the bush, and a sort of steep quarry. So we went back to the road and there, opposite the shop, were some stone steps, leading to – the old prison! The shop lady had told me it wasn’t possible to go inside, but I think maybe she had never been there, because it was all open and accessible, if overgrown, and falling down. So horrid, those thick stone cells, barred windows… Beautiful, now, with banyan trees growing all around the walls, replacing them in parts, but hideous they must have been for the prisoners. We looked all around and took photos of each other looking tragic inside the cells, then went back, along a circuitous route, to the café to have a truly horrid lunch. Steve’s was smoked chicken with a seafood sauce; mine was salami and hard boiled eggs,, in an enormous sweet and curiously unsatisfying bread roll. Fortunately, we found Steve and Pete there – they had taken the bikes ashore, and were off to look for the prison too - and I was able to give most of my roll to Pete, who didn’t like it much either.

Monday we sailed off to the Ilot Brosse – I suppose that, looked at from a non-lyrical point of view, it did look rather like a brush, with its crown of straight bristly pines… Nick and I went snorkeling but didn’t see many fish; most of the coral was either dead or very muted, a bit like moss, really, with just a few subdued-looking fish. It was a few hours to get there and I am very pleased to report that – I didn’t feel sick at all. (Our last day trip, from Noumea to the Baie Uie, was very gentle and pleasant and I felt most disappointingly unwell… Sick sick sickedy sick… I drooped dismally around, and lay on the couch clutching my ipod and listening, miserably, to podcasts from ABC Radio National while everyone else tiptoed considerately around me and had a lovely time.)

We left the Ilot and came into another very beautiful bay, the Baie d’Oro. There is a big five-star resort here, the Meridien. Nick and Steve rushed around exploring in the tender while Pete and I bobbed about on the ocean waves occupied with sundry domestic tasks.

Evenings have been jampacked with activity. Nick and Steve have had some heated chess competitions, and we have also had movie nights. Together we all watched a movie with Javier Bardem called When Night Falls. A very sad film about a Cuban writer, Renialdo Arenas, who eventually gets to New York and dies of AIDS. Pete loved it because there were lots of scenes set in Cuba, where he spent a very happy three months in 2002. Steve loved it because it was so different. Nick sighed deeply and said, “Oh no, a Fag Movie.” And I found it just a bit tedious… The next night we watched…The Fully Monty, which was just about the opposite of When Night Falls. Nick hadn’t seen it before; he laughed a lot, as did we all. And last night we watched a truly dreadful movie “starring,” if that could be the word, Helen Hunt as Pamela Wojas Smart – a True Life story (you may remember) about a teacher in the US in the 80s who gets her student lover to kill her perfectly nice and inoffensive husband for no very good reason. Oh and one night we also watched A Fistful of Dollars, an early Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western, which was nothing but SLAUGHTER.

The last two nights Steve and Nick discovered my backgammon set. They are more evenly matched at backgammon than at chess so competition has been fierce. Sadly, the set is missing three of its four dice so there isn’t quite the same amount of fierce rattling and throwing that there should be…they have to take turns with the one meek little die.

I have a lot more to write but…things to do, people to see, places to go!