Noumea

April 5
Noumea

Today we were in Noumea, New Caledonia. I got off the ship with Tina (yeah, the same person who got me lost on the mountain) and we went walking (after our original plan to bike failed) through the city hoping to eventually find a beach. We started out by going to some lookout, which was fine, then began walking through the back roads of the city in the direction of water, or so we thought, and maybe an hour later we found it. Today was fairly windy, thus bringing out all the wind surfers and kite boarders. Windsurfing has been on my to-do list for too long so I figured I’d look into it.
We walked down the beach that seemed to be wind-surfer-central and came across a hut that was renting out the boards and sails. To clarify, windsurfing is basically a surfboard with a sail attached in the center to use the wind for propulsion. I’ve seen wind surfers forever and never had a decent opportunity to try it – I was excited that today might just be that day. I approached the hut and asked about renting a board, to which they looked at me with a dumbfounded look. Problem was that New Caledonia is a French speaking island, yeah, go figure, and no one at the shop spoke fluent English. I tried talking with one guy who knew a little English and all I really got out of him was that the winds are too high for a beginner. Not that that would have stopped me, but the fact I couldn’t quite get any instruction if I spent the next hour floundering with a sail over my head did offer enough reason to further postpone my goal. We moved on.
The next stop was a beach where we could actually swim, as opposed to the windsurfing only area. The water was a little cool but nice, and there was a dock that stretched out into the water from which I tried (unsuccessfully) doing front flips off of. Next to this beach was another small cove overrun by Kite-boarders. Kite Boarding is where you strap a board to your feet and hold on to a big kite which then pulls you through and out of the water, a pretty cool thing to do (and also on my list). So we spent some time swimming at our beach watching the kite boarders getting pulled 30 feet out of the water by kites over at their beach, pretty cool actually. We checked them out for a bit, and not sure about how long it would take to walk back, we turned and left.
We ran across a few people from the ship as we were walking back, leading us to believe we weren’t too far from the pier, little did we know they took a bus to that beach. Anyway, we kept walking, around one cove and over another hill and past another beach, always thinking we were going to see the ship as soon as we turned the corner. This went on for over an hour, all of which bringing us closer to the last shuttle time, yet another nail biter walking through a foreign area with little knowledge of how long it would actually take to return. But hey, at least we weren’t running down anymore mountains.
But we did made it back on time, got to see a good deal of the city and do some swimming. Another successful day in my book…Thanks!