This morning we awoke ready to be arriving at our first stop of the cruise which is Noumea in New Caledonia. Unfortunately we had a whole morning to fill in before we would arrive. We spent the morning hiding some ducks, having breakfast and going on a walk around the ship. We spent a fair bit of time watching some birds flying around the boat.
We had a quick lunch in the buffet where we starting seeing some of the small islands and reefs of Noumea. We then headed up to Deck 7 to watch the boat dock at the harbour. We watched the locals pull in the ropes and then attach them to a car to drive the ropes down to the next pillar. It was pretty interesting to watch.
At about 2:15 we were allowed to start leaving the ship. There was a huge line with lots of complaining people. But once all the tours were off the boat we were on land and put into a bus. As Noumea is a working port you have to be bussed off the port. They were very quick and efficient.
Once we made it to the terminal hub we met our beautiful driver Anne. She gave us a present of beautiful shell necklaces and welcomed us to New Caledonia. We had hired Anne to take us around Noumea for the day and had left most of the tour in her capable hands, my only request was to go across to the mangroves to look for crabs.
We started the tour driving through the town (and looking at all the signs in french) while Anne gave us some background about New Caledonia. Did you know since the riots last year tourism here is still down by 83% and it doesn’t look like its going to get better for a while. Nouméa was founded in 1854 as Port-de-France by the French, serving as a penal colony from 1864 and later a center for nickel and gold mining. It became a significant U.S. military base during World War II. The local people of Noumea are known as Kanak’s and there culture is mixed in with the local french people.
Stop one was up to a lookout over the town. We first stopped at a huge wooden statue statue carved from an old tree of a women with her back to the mountains. The lookout here was pretty amazing and while we stopped Anne gave us some bottled water from the fountain of one of the local mountains, Mt Dore. It was really good.
We then headed over to the mangrove walk to check out the mangroves and crabs. This place was really beautiful the mangrove roots were amazing and there were thousands of crabs. They were all different colours and would just stick their hands out of their holes an waved. We spent ages walking around and looking at the crabs. They were so hard to get pictures of but the colours were just WOW! While we were here so many locals stopped to talk to us or to say hello as this was a very local place with no tourists. We met a group of Kanak teens who wanted to talk before they all started work and they were so nice.
We headed to some lookouts to have a look at some of the old war cannons. Anne took us to a really local one first and then we went to the main tourist one. Anne also heard that Anthony collects the currency of the countries he goes to so she so kindly let him go through and swap his bigger noted for all the Pacific Franc notes and coins.
Our last spot was to head down to the beach for a snack. Anne had organised a baguette and french camembert cheese for us to eat. It was delicious and we had a beautiful view of the beach area.
We made a last stop to see Noumea as night fell. You could even see the cruise ship from up there. We had such an amazing tour of Noumea and it was such a beautiful place not what I was expecting at all.
We returned to the ship, had dinner and then turned in for the night as we have to get up early to explore Lifou.