Noumea, New Caledonia

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Day 28 - February 12, 2007, Monday, Noumea, New Caledonia

Time: 6:58 am, Monday (1:58 pm, Sunday CST)
Latitude: 22 degrees 16.51 minutes S
Longitude: 166 degrees 25.86 minutes E
Speed: 0 - At Anchor
Seas: Smooth
Wind: Calm
Distance traveled from FLL: 10,084 nautical miles
Weather: 80 degrees / 75% humidity, Sunny

Noumea is the beautiful capital city of the French territory of New Caledonia. As we arrived the sun was shining! We were happy to see that! The French established a settlement here in 1854. The area first served as a prison colony from 1864 to 1904, and then as a center for the nickel and gold that was mined nearby. Later it served as the headquarters of the U.S. military in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, the U.S. military headquarters was taken over as the base for a new regional intergovernmental organization: the South Pacific commission. We found the island to be a very beautiful and friendly one. The language here is mainly French and they use the French Pacific Franc here, just as we used in Bora Bora and Tahiti. We had very leisurely day walking around the city center for a little bit, visiting the Cathedral, and then taking a cab for a drive along the water’s edge to a beautiful beach area where we spent the majority of our day, swimming and sunning. It was a beautiful sunny day and we ended up a bit sunburned! New Caledonia is a fairly large island and it would have been nice to see more of it than we did but there’s always next time…..

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Comments

[Jim]

Beautiful
What a great place! I made the photo of the palm trees and water my desktop background. So you'll be going back some day?