Hunting Paradise in New Caledonia

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“We’ve got a 6-gauge shotgun, a semi-automatic rifle, a bottle of vodka, a six pack of beer, 60GB of music and a new 4×4 with fat treads. At this point, we’re practically a force of nature.”

I’m battling with a good lead in for this week, the last travel week, of Modern Gonzo. Do I start with watching Bambi get blasted in a night hunt, gutted, skinned and chopped up for dinner? Or maybe hand feeding those large tropical fish in a too-blue-but-true natural aquarium? What about eating a French cheese so rank it was quite possibly cultivated in the sweaty ass of a vindaloo-munching marathon runner? At least it wasn’t the narrow call with fruit bat stew, although I did enjoy the turtle casserole. Perhaps jet-skiing over massive swells? Spear fishing lobsters as big as next year’s pop fad? The waterfalls I could drink from, the Rasta hitchers, the cocaine-beach of Ile Des Pins? Reading all this, it looks like I’ve come up with a suitable lead in for New Caledonia after all.

It’s a cigar-shaped island in the South Pacific, a colony of France, with a population of about 250,000. About half the people are descended from white French colonialists, about half are black Melanesians, called kanaks, descended from Papua New Guinea. The currency is linked to the Euro, the government is run out of Paris, so what you have here is basically a little chunk of France floating 10 000 miles away from the mainland. Gourmet mustard, Bordeaux wine, Fois de Gras, patisseries, prominent noses, stable administration. Basically, New Caledonia unlike any of the other islands nearby (the French colony of Tahiti is a five hour flight away). Although it is staggeringly beautiful, New Caledonia does not get many tourists. There are some folks from France, figuring that a 19-hour flight is worth it to be in a paradise where seven thousand cheeses are available and service is in French. There are Japanese honeymooners, getting off on the Frenchness of it all, and the direct flights to Tokyo and Osaka. Otherwise, given its high cost, its remoteness, its inaccessibility, and its, well, Frenchness, most foreign tourists tend to hit Fiji and have never heard of New Caledonia. Incidentally, the name was coined by the explorer James Cook, who on discovering the island’s rich greenness and hospitable nature, named it after his native Scottish homeland. I was convinced that I was also exploring new ground, probably the first South Africanadian to walk these shores, and nobody could tell me otherwise, because they all spoke French.

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