Day 46 25th February 2011

View of Noumea

Chris on road train

Road Train

We arrived at Noumea in New Caledonia today. It is a French overseas territory and on first impression looks rather like the south of France. We have docked again in the container port. One of the side effects of this trip is that we are gaining an insight into the world container trade. We went on a tour of the city on a road train. This is a vehicle built to look like a steam engine that tows a series of carriages in which the passengers sit. There was a guide who in our case was a young American woman married to a Frenchman. The train had no space to carry a wheelchair so we had to leave it with the Aurora staff at the bottom of the gangway. It was a good trip and showed the place to be beautiful. Even the view over the nickel plant which is the key export failed to dissuade us that it would be a wonderful place to live. Every road seemed to be lined with coconut palms and round each corner was a view of the azure ocean. The water is very clam since the island is surrounded by a reef which keeps the waves, out to sea. Our guide claimed that the reef was the second largest in the world after the Australian barrier reef.

Apparently there are only two seasons, summer and winter with summer lasting nine mouths and winter three months. During the summer the daytime temperature is between 18 and 40c and even in winter the temperature rarely falls below 15c. Education and health care is the same as mainland France but the cost of living is very high. A house will cost you about £500,000 and because most things have to be imported commodities are two to tens times the price in the UK.

We saw the news from New Zealand about the effects of the earthquake in Lyttleton which is the port that serves Christchurch. This is where Aurora is supposed to call but it looked harder hit by the earthquake than Christchurch. We have not heard anything from P and O about what is going to happen but looking at the devastation it is obvious we should not go there.

We left harbour at 5pm and sailed out through the channel in the reef towards Australia.