Bonjour from Nouvelle Caledonie (New Caledonia) - Noumea and south New Caledonia

Where? New Caledonia! It's a French island northeast of Australia - it was about a 2.5-hour flight from Sydney. Rony's friend, Justine, lives here, and she invited us to visit. So we did. :-)

Rony and me in Noumea, New Caledonia

This group of islands is actually the basis for our entire trip. Flights to N.C. come from Australia, so Australia seemed like a great destination for us to explore, and the flight to Sydney is through Bangkok, so Thailand seemed like a great addition... you get the picture.

Anyway, after 3 fun-filled days in Australia, we took our flight to N.C. and arrived around 1 am. Luckily for us, Justine picked us up from the airport, and of course we just fainted on the couch of exhaustion (the drive is almost an hour long).

While our trip had already been planned for a while, a few weeks before we left Israel, Justine told Rony that while we would be here, she and her partner would be having a wedding party. A fairy-themed wedding party at that! So our first couple of days were spent helping her and her partner get ready for their big day, shopping for clothes for the wedding ("fairy-chic" is not my clothing style), and making all of the decorations.


As I previously noted, this is a French island. Which means they speak French. You know what happens when someone comes to you, kisses you on both cheeks, says their name, and you say "I don't speak French?" They giggle. That must be the local custom.

So my first day was awkward, but this house is just full of people at all times, and all of their friends and roommates are really fun, so I quickly felt very comfortable. We met tons of really nice people, one of whom invited us to call her when we traveled up north, but more about that on a later post (about north New Caledonia).

Just one of the gorgeous views in the Noumea region. Doesn't it look like a postcard?

This island is seriously a tropical paradise. The emphasis for our first few days here, though, is on tropical - it rained. That was just sad, although we had a great time anyway, as you can see from the pics. After all the wedding celebrations were over, we rented a car and went on our first adventure to the south of the main island.

We started with a trip to the Blue River and the artificial lake. The south is just a mix of red from the earth which is full of iron, green from the vegetation that is all around us, and blue from the sea and the sky.

So the lake was beautiful, even if it's actually made for the hydrological dam that provides electricity to the region. We could see dead trees in the water where a forest was before. Beautiful and sad at the same time.

The trees that were cut down to build the dam

We could also see true wonders of nature: waterfalls, beautiful scenery that can not be described, the sea at our feet, literally - the side of the road ends on the shore. Everything was beautiful even if it rained a lot.

We had only 2 small setbacks: Because of the (very heavy) rain, we could not see Prony, a miners' ghost town, and the road back was so insane and poorly built, that we were seriously driving at like 20 kilometers per hour, if that, for a large portion of the way.

The streets and why we had to drive so slowly

All in all, it was a great day, even if it was long and mostly gray. The next day we went on a 4-day camping adventure up north, but more about that in our next post.

Until then, au revoir!

Pics from Noumea and southern New Caledonia - direct link:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=573973&id=906005363&l=4b7776c170