A tour of Nouméa’s buffets
October 23rd, 2007 by Tim Uden
Well after about two hours wandering around the confines of Nouméa La Tontouta Airport I am told that my flight is being delayed a further five hours! But fortunately Aircalin will provide a bus to a nearby restaurant and lay on a buffet. Lazing around the swimming pool at the Rivland Resort in Paita eating complimentary creme puffs, after a nice buffet lunch sure beats hanging around the airport café.
After around three hours at the Rivland Resort we are told that the flight will now be delayed until 3.50am the next day. Apparently our plane is in Wallis and Aircalin have arranged for Qantas to send a new plane across from Sydney, but Qantas won’t have a plane available till around midnight.
This further delay means the evening at Le Surf hotel in Anse Vata (which actually isn’t as nice as its stars would suggest) along with another buffet. The hotel may not be that great, but the buffet is very nice and would have cost me 4900F (AUD $65, EUR €41, GBP £29, USD $59) if I were to pay for it. Oh, and Aircalin paid for drinks as well.
This delay also gave me the opportunity for another Cointreau sorbet at La Sorbeterie in Baie des Citrons (about a five minute walk from the hotel the airline put us up in); well it would have if I hadn’t spent the last of my francs at the airport.
Small airports vs big airports
October 23rd, 2007 by Tim Uden
I usually love small airports. Customs and immigration queues are shorter and virtually everything takes less time. In a small airport like London City you can checked on to your flight in less than the time it takes to get out of the tube station at Heathrow.
The downside with small airports becomes more apparent when your flight is delayed. A two-hour delay at Nouméa’s La Toutouta airport is no fun. After spending an hour or so in the café munching on a bacon panini and drinking Orangina, one tends to get bored and restless. What else is there to do? Well there is a small souvenir shop/newsagent where you can flick through French magazines and if you get really bored you can check that your hand luggage fits in cabin baggage gauges for Air France, Aircalin and Air New Zealand. After that it’s time for a walk around the carpark to look at those cute French cars that they have over here.
A delay at a big airport isn’t such a big problem - it’s just like spending an extra couple of hours at a shopping mall. You sometimes even get to kill time by taking a monorail between the different terminals.
Citroën C1 (rental car review)
October 22nd, 2007 by Tim Uden
I love French cars and after renting the Citroën C1, it is my new favourite. It is a small zippy city car that is also great on the open road.
I rented from Europcar on route de l’Anse Vata (across the road from the Super U Michel Ange supermarket) in Nouméa. The rental deal wan’t too bad for New Caledonia (4043F - AUD $53.57, EUR €33.88, GBP £23.64, USD $48.50 - a day), but unfortunately like most rental deals in New Caledonia it only includes 150km and the extra kilometres (24F - AUD 32c, EUR €0.20, GBP 14p, USD 29c - per km) are a killer. However New Caledonia has some very good long term rental deals that are worth considering if you’re here for a month or longer.
I initially decided on Europcar because I they had the cute Peugeot 107 that I had seen around town, and having a great experience with Peugeot in the past figured it would make a nice car for a day trip out into the countryside. But then I saw the Citroën C1 parked outside rental office I chose it over the Peugeot.
My opinion concerning French cars is that Renault are the more economical option (if a little boring), Peugeot have the best handling and performance and Citroën have the best design. Overall all French cars are nice, but I would probably chose between a Citroën or Peugeot if I were in the market for a new car.
The Citroën C1 looks small from the outside but it is quite spacious inside, like many European small cars; although the boot space is limited (but more than enough for my needs). It is easy to drive (an important consideration when you’re not used to driving on the right-hand side of the road), it has a smooth gearbox so changing gears feels very natural and all the controls are initive and easy to reach from the drivers’ seat.
A few unique design features include an all-glass rear hatch and a single large front windscreen wiper.
It also has an AUX socket right on the dash so you can plug in an MP3 player or GPS unit without messing around with those FM transmitter things. It seems like such a small thing - it would only add a dollar to the production cost - but it makes a big difference especially if you want to listen to your own music.
The only thing I would have liked is a tachometer, but perhaps this is an option on a more expensive model.
The car handles really well. Nice and zippy around Nouméa but it also runs well when you put the foot down on the tollway north of the city.
Would I rent a Citroën C1 again? Absolutely. I would even consider buying one.
Driving on the other side of the road
October 22nd, 2007 by Tim Uden
Most travellers experience some hesitation about driving on the opposite side of the road to what they are used to. American and European tourists are wary of renting a car in the UK and Aussies and Kiwis think twice before renting a car in the United States or Europe.
Although I normally drive on the left, I have spent a lot of time driving on the right - although that was over 10 years ago - and I hestiated a little before driving on the right after so many years of driving on the left.
It really isn’t too big a deal and it’s surprisingly easy to get used to. For starters you’re sitting on the opposite side of the car, which makes you naturally feel comfortable on the other side of the road; also it is fairly easy when there is other traffic to follow. The two things you really need to pay attention to are roundabouts (which flow in the opposite direction) and left-hand turns (or right-hand turns for Americans and Europeans driving on the left for the first time) particularly in small villages where there isn’t too much other traffic.
Half a day of driving on the opposite side of the road is enough to get used to it. That’s much easier than trying to get used to driving an automatic, fortunately most French cars are manual but the rental companies also offer automatics for those people that prefer them.
New Caledonia on a budget
October 20th, 2007 by Tim Uden
Before visiting New Caledonia I heard all sorts of horror stories about what an expensive place it is. It is true that you can pay $50 for a steak and $30 for a salad but it is also possible to visit New Caledonia on a budget. I won’t go as far as to call it cheap, but it can be affordable if you’re careful how you spend your money.
Eating out in New Caledonia can be very expensive and wine in restaurants is pricy (even though you would expect French wine to be one of New Caledonia’s few bargains) and a rum and coke can cost 1200F (AUD $15.90, EUR €10, GBP £7, USD $14.38). Even McDonald’s isn’t cheap with a 50c cone costing 140F (AUD $1.85, EUR €1.17, GBP 82p, USD $1.68) and a Big Mac (or a Royal Cheese) going for 435F (AUD $5.76, EUR €3.65, GBP £2.54, USD $5.22).
However you can also live cheaply in New Caledonia. Snack bars abound where you can get lunch for around 500F (AUD $6.63, EUR €4.19, GBP £2.92, USD $6) and patisseries sell sandwiches and panini for 300-500F (AUD $3.97-6.63, EUR €2.51-4.19, GBP £1.75-2.92, USD $3.60-6). Supermarkets and convenience stores sell baguettes for 85F (AUD $1.13, EUR €0.71, GBP 50p, USD $1) and you can buy a six-pack of locally-brewed Number One or Kronenbourg 1664 beer for 600F (AUD $7.95, EUR €5, GBP £3.50, USD $7.20). A can of soft drink from a convenience store costs 120F (AUD $1.59, EUR €1, GBP 70p, USD $1.44).
There is only one hostel in New Caledonia so budget accommodation is hard to come by, but Nouméa’s youth hostel is no more expensive than a similar hostel in metropolitan France, and it boasts a better view than any of Nouméa’s fancy hotels.
The biggest obstacle to a cheap holiday in New Caledonia is the cost of the flight there. Nouméa is only a two hour flight from Brisbane, which makes it closer to Australia than New Zealand, but it costs a lot to get there. The Qantas/Aircalin codeshare has a monopoly on the route with return fares from Sydney starting at AUD$730 (EUR €462, GBP £322, USD $660) for a fare booked around five months in advance. Compare this with a return flight between Melbourne and Singapore (three-times longer than the flight from Sydney to Nouméa), which you can get for as little as AUD$550 (EUR €348, GBP £243, USD $498).
If there were more hostels and a bit of competition between airlines flying to Nouméa, then New Caledonia would be cheaper and it could become a popular destination for backpackers. It has plenty to offer including watersports (brilliant for kite-surfing, windsurfing, snorkelling and diving) and I can imagine backpackers coming here to learn French (just as Spanish language schools are popular amoung backpackers to Latin America).
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.