Yellow Fish cruises: Day 56: Noumea, New Caledonia

The Ruby Princess was not yet docked when I met up with G in the DaVinci Dining Room for breakfast. He’s been scaling back his food intake lately, but knew that we’d likely be skipping lunch and went all out and ordered eggs Benedict. I had my usual (oranges and smoked salmon)...plus a once per cruise special treat for me. My favored pastry is found only rarely in the Horizon Court Buffet. It’s a not-too-sweet cookie outside with a melted chocolate interior. It was first rolled out in conjunction with the Norman Love Chocolate Journeys treats, and, when I discovered it, on the Pacific Princess, it had special Norman Love labeling that stated what it was, but I’ve forgotten its name by now. I just know it’s really, really good. (Edited to add: CynCyn on Cruise Critic kindly provided me the name. It’s a Breton.)

Day 12 breakfast menu

A breton, which I think means ‘little slice of heaven’

Thanks CynCyn!

The Ruby Princess was moved into position at her berth in the Noumea freight dock while we ate, and we were treated to a local welcome by members of the islands’ indigenous peoples, the Melanesian Kanaks, who have been on these islands since between 3000-1500BC.

Local greeting on the pier

Since Noumea is a freight port, we gathered up what we’d need for the day (very little, just AUD $ and French Polynesian Francs (XPF; they have them in common with Tahiti), layered on copious amounts of sunscreen and took an elevator down to Deck 5, intending to collect tickets for the free 5 minute bus shuttle through the working freight port. Elite or not, everyone was instructed to go to the Michelangelo Dining Room for tickets to apportion us out to buses. Well, before 8:30am, no tickets were needed and we were directed right out to a waiting bus and at the tourist information center by 8:30am. Go us!

This was our third visit to Noumea, so we knew that we wanted to buy hop on hop off (HOHO) bus tickets for the day. They were very attractively priced this year at AD $10 or 650 XPF. I quickly did the math and saw that it was cheaper to use XPFs and so we did. (We had XPFs on hand only because we’d never gotten off the ship in French Polynesia, a low point in what has otherwise been a great time this season).

Noumea reminds us of a cross between Papeete in French Polynesia and any one of the small towns along the French Riviera, with a little of Waikiki Beach thrown in for good measure (all the tourist advertising and offerings). The people speak mostly French, signage is in French, but we got by just fine with English. New Caledonia attracts a lot of visitors from Australia and from French-speaking countries around the world.

We first stayed on the bus for the entire HOHO loop, which isn’t long, maybe 30 minutes at most. It simply goes along the waterfront past several beaches and marinas and museums. It served to refresh our memories from two years ago. We stayed on the bus back to the tourist information center and from there walked nearly back to the Ruby Princess (but not into the port) to visit our first museum of the day, the New Caledonia Maritime History museum. This was located a stone’s throw from the Ruby Princess next to the ferry terminal. For 500XPF (less than US $5) total for seniors, we purchased two tickets and went inside.

This museum was very well done, with a lot of history about how and from where the first Kanak settlers arrived over 1500 years ago. There was a large map tying their arrival into the further migrations to the Polynesian Islamds (we always find that interesting), and several displays about the type of boats that eventually sailed these waters, and the lights used to protect them from the many reefs.

An early map design used by Marshall Islanders

The shells were islands and the sticks were currents

The migration from SE Asia to New Caledonia and then further into Polynesia

Early sailing “canoe”

Lights on poles initially marked the reefs surrounding New Caledonia

The original light from the first lighthouse, the Amadee Island Lighthouse,

opened in 1865.

A model of the Amadee Island Lighthouse

This can be explored on an all-day Princess excursion to Amadee Island.

It costs AU $270pp. I predict that this model may be as close as we ever get. ;-)

Love these old travel posters (even copies)

New Caledonia offered many military hospitals during WW2 as injured troops from the Pacific

battles were brought here to be treated and recover. This photo shows American nurses taking

a break on Amédée Island, near Noumea.

There were two special exhibits about the history of the marine carpenters in New Caledonia who used the islands’ hardwoods to combine traditional Kanak and newly introduced European boat building techniques to build the many boats that sailed to and from the New Caledonian islands.

Also of particular interest to me was the journey of La Pérouse, a French ship sent out to discover a Southern Continent (eventually known as Antarctica) but failed when it disappeared in 1785. Several items from the boat have been found in the Solomons, but there is also oral history of a boat that went down in the Torres Strait along Australia’s northern coast in that timeframe also. This exhibition presented how La Pérouse was sanctioned and funded at the highest levels in France, how it was supplied, and then shows some archeological finds from an island in the Solomons.

It was about 11:30am by then, so we walked back to the tourist information center and boarded a waiting HOHO bus and took it down to the Aquarium. For the equivalent of US $10.45 each, we bought a (senior) ticket to enter. Frankly, based on the low admission price, we weren’t quite sure what to expect, and it’s true that not all fish and corals that we could see appeared on their sign boards, but it was actually very good, and well documented in English.

Longhorn cowfish

(With great thanks to Susie!)

Beautiful starfish

The coral displays were fantastic. It was such a joy to see beautifully healthy corals

Finding Nemo!

Bioluminescent corals

The scourges of the seas, lion fish, who decimate other fish populations.

I just about fell over at this point.

There was ONE (just one!) Emperor Angelfish in the entire aquarium.

Look how different the same fish appears in this light...

...versus this light. I found the same thing when snorkeling with it on Dravuni Island. Sometimes

it appeared to be shades of brown but most of the time it was shades of mostly blue.

I think it was like that blue/brown dress controversy of a few years ago.

Since I couldn’t snorkel due to a cold, this was the next best thing.

Look at the size of that bumphead wrangler compared to that of the black tip shark

Stingray at the top

We left the Aquarium around 2pm and took the HOHO bus toward the Ruby Princess but got off at Lemon Bay to sit along the beach for awhile. There are chairs and loungers constructed out of concrete and wood conveniently placed to be used for quick stops like ours.

This stretch of street probably has the steepest street honors in New Caledonia.

We walked right off the HOHO bus at the tourist information center and directly on to a shuttle back to the ship. All day I had been using a facecloth to sneeze and cough into, and was feeling worse as the day went on. It was obvious that whatever I had was making its way into my lungs. This is the story of my life on a cruise ship. I returned to the cabin and showered and was at the Medical Center when it opened at 4pm. Best care anywhere..but I was given a face mask and placed back in a hospital room until they ruled out the plague. ;-)

Doing time in solitary until they figured me out. ;-)

The doctor and nurse I saw were both so very sweet and very solicitous. They ruled out pneumonia (so far) and influenza, had me use a nebulizer and over two hours later I left not feeling better but feeling hopeful. G and I had stayed in touch via text, and he had joined a large table in the DaVinci Dining Room for dinner, after giving up our table for two. I went to the Horizon Court Buffet where- great fortune!- minestrone soup was on the menu. After a couple of bowls of that and a roll, I am tucked into bed well medicated and looking forward to a better night’s sleep.