Initial impressions of Nouméa, New Caledonia
October 18th, 2007 by Tim Uden
I’m in Noumea, New Caledonia. It’s the closest French-speaking place to Australia and I had been preparing for this trip by immersing myself in French culture. I’ve been trying to learn French on my computer, listening to French radio on my Squeezebox and watching French movies (if Mr Bean’s Holiday can be called a French movie). I love France and wasn’t able to get to Europe this year so New Caledonia seemed like a good compromise.
I really didn’t know what to expect. I was thinking that it would be a touristy place with lots of fancy hotels but I also thought that it might be a bit like a French version of New Zealand. It wasn’t exactly like I was expecting but then in some ways it exeeded my expectations.
Nouméa does have a touristy area with lots of expensive hotels in the beachside suburbs of Baie des Citrons and Anse Vata, but despite all the hotels it doesn’t really feel all that touristy. Maybe the tourists that New Caledonia attracts come here for the French ambience so they make an effort to blend in and speak French. In any case the only times I really noticed English speaking tourists was on the bus to the airport and even then French was the dominant language. It just feels very French and I really like that.
Nouméa’s French feel is reinforced by French businesses but some French institutions are sadly lacking. In metropolitan France you will find real traditional cafés and boulangeries on every second corner, Nouméa has patisseries and boulangeries but these are not as commonplace as in France and cafés in Nouméa are more like an Australian café than a French one. After a few days I managed to find a few boulangeries and a few half-decent cafés but they just don’t feature as prominently as in a city of a similiar size in metropolitan France. Also the architecture more closely resembles the worst of Athens than Paris. It would have been nice if the place looked a lot more French. However on a whole I like the place and it still feels French enough to be worth the trip from Australia and I would certainly like to return here sometime in the next couple of years.
I was expecting a place were tourism dominated everyday life, but tourism really doesn’t feature that prominently at all; especially when you get away from Anse Vata and Baie des Citrons. Even in the most touristy areas most of the people you see dining in restaurants will be locals.
When tourism dominates the local economy, everything is neat and tidy and sugar-coated to create a surreal image for the tourist. New Caledonia is different. It is a bit rough around the edges. Nouméa’s Quartier Latin is nothing like Paris’s Latin Quarter, some parts of town smell really bad and some buildings are maintained to the standard that you would find in parts of Greece or Latin America. That’s not a bad thing, and I feel it gives the place a more genuine atmosphere.
The place feels a little bit like a small city in the south of France. Nothing fancy like Cannes or St Tropez but more like a not so well-known city with a Mediterranean feel with a bit of Melanesian flavour thrown in for good measure. I didn’t care. I would have been happy visiting a city in France that doesn’t feature on any tourist itinerary - somewhere like Clermont-Ferrand, Poitiers or Saint-Étienne.
Also I find that people here are friendlier than I expected and it is an excellent place to learn French. In the past I had lived in both Paris and Montréal for six months each while trying to learn French. In those places there are a lot of people who spoke fluent English and it was easy to get by without speaking the language. I wanted to immerse myself in the French language so I could improve my French but everyone kept trying to help me out by reverting to English whenever I attempted to speak French. Here in New Caledonia, outside the tourist industry most people speak only French and if they speak a second language it would be one of 28 Kanak (Melanesian) languages, but usually not English. This means that if you come here to learn French you will have much more success in immersing yourself in the language.
I am surprised that New Caledonia doesn’t have a big French language school industry catering to students from Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. I am sure that it would be very successful.
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