Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [37]
Bill concurs. “Maybe I’m already feeling a little better.” As convalescent wards go, New Caledonia ranks with the best.
That wasn’t our reason for picking it as a destination, of course. The idea of the French tropics has intrigued us for many years, since our early experiences in the French West Indies researching Best Places to Stay in the Caribbean. Surely, it seemed to us, islands with a similar heritage in the South Pacific would embrace the same kind of sensuous joie de vivre and enjoy a sophisticated cuisine as heady with equatorial spice as the Creole cooking of the Caribbean. Early in our planning for this trip, we made French Polynesia a priority stop, but the logistics for getting anywhere near the region proved unmanageable. Much more easily accessible, New Caledonia seemed like a reasonable substitute, a part of Melanesia instead of Polynesia but still in the vast South Pacific.
Viewed from this perspective, it disappoints us more than any other place on our itinerary. Our illnesses deserve some of the blame, to be sure. They leash us to Nouméa, preventing us from exploring more of Grande Terre, the main island, and from flying to smaller, more remote isles. The congestion also undermines our appetites, sense of taste, and willingness to walk much distance for dinner, a necessity for diversity of choice given the lack of nighttime transportation. Still, even at our healthiest, we’re sure New Caledonia would leave us wanting. It’s not, as we had hoped, a South Seas version of Guadeloupe or St. Barthélemy, and Nouméa falls far short of its self-proclaimed billing as “the Paris of the Pacific.”
The city is closer in spirit to a serene, sprawling provincial French town, pleasant in all respects but not exactly exotic or exciting. Beginning on Monday, we travel around the main streets daily, starting on tourist excursion buses to get our bearings and then graduating to public buses. Our most frequent route takes us from Anse Vata around a rocky promontory to Baie des Citrons, the best beach for swimming, and then passes a yacht harbor and the Port de Plaisance shopping and residential complex before reaching Moselle Bay, site of the municipal market, and the adjacent downtown. Along the way, several vestiges of the American presence here during World War II pop up, from an old hospital barracks still in use as a clinic to a major memorial of appreciation, the latter conveniently located by a McDonald’s.
During the war, many of the millions of Americans involved in the Pacific campaign spent time in New Caledonia, one of the main military staging bases for counterattacking the Japanese forces that had overrun much of the region. The central square downtown today, the Place des Cocotiers, named for its palm trees, used to be the army’s vegetable garden, and the navy made the port, a mile farther away, one of the busiest in the world for a brief period. Apparently, judging from the reactions of residents, we’re some of the first Americans to venture here since then. Almost all visitors come from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, or France.
The downtown doesn’t offer much except small-town shopping and it closes for all practical purposes at dusk at the same time as the stores. Clothing and lingerie boutiques compete with electronics warehouses and tabac/presse businesses, much like in any French burg. The bookstore on Place des Cocotiers brims with bandes dessinées, the distinctive hardcover French cartoon-character stories, and an adjacent cookware shop features Provençal table fabrics. For dining and drinking, for biking or playing boules, everyone goes to the shore.