At last after months of reading books about it, in both English and French, I finally made it to New Caledonia. The flight was rather uneventful, as expected, but I had asked for a window seat for the brief pleasure of seeing the landscape as we flew in. Flying in I could see the encircling reef protecting a coast dotted with small islands, covered in a mix of savannah and open grassland, rising inland to an impressive range of mountains, scarred here and there with the orange slashes mining activity. Customs were very efficient, with only a minimum of questioning that seemed to satisfy whatever curiosity they had. After a brief inspection of my tent I was through. I had prearranged to hire a car so found someone waiting at Europcar for me. That process too was very efficient. I baulked at signing the form before inspecting the vehicle, but in the end there was nothing wrong with it so I needn’t have worried. Surprisingly, by the time I had everything in the car the brief pulse of activity in the airport had subsided and the place was empty. So I headed out onto the road en route for Nouméa, doing my best to familiarise myself with the odd feeling of driving on the right hand side of the road. Just when I was beginning to think things were running fairly smoothly, I passed an intersection detailing two different routes to Nouméa. After a few hundred metres I stopped by the side of the highway to confirm my suspicion that péage meant that I was actually on a tollway. Passing through the airport had been so efficient that I had completely forgotten to withdraw any money, despite having read admonitions not to forget to have some money for the toll. So I did a U-turn and headed back so as to take the long, but free, road to Nouméa. In doing so I had my first momentary lapse of confusion when I unwittingly turned into the left side of the road, only correcting myself at the sight of oncoming traffic, then ended up back on the tollway again! So after a second U-turn I was off on my way. What ensued was a two hour long drive that should have taken 30 minutes or so, including another long detour, when approaching Nouméa with the sun in my eyes, I ended up driving back on the tollway in the direction of the airport and had to loop back through a large part of where I had already driven. So when I finally got to my hotel I was exhausted and just had a bit of a rest, taking advantage of the wireless internet facilities.
Last night, on the advice of some locals I went for dinner out at the Baie des Citrons, but as always the experience of eating alone amongst a whole lot of groups eating out wasn’t particularly engaging, so after a Hawaiian pizza I headed back to the hotel. Feeling restless I considered just going for a wander and headed out again on foot, but after walking a block, it became rather clear that the streets were largely occupied by scattered groups of very drunk Melanesian men, with security being maintained by the occasional passing police van. So, feeling rather uncomfortable with the situation, I retired to my hotel.
I awoke rather early this morning at around 6 am to the sound of bird calls. It took a while for it to seep into my consciousness that I was not at home, because the overall sense from the sound outside was that I was in Australia, not Sydney it’s true, but the sounds cape was hardly alien, rather what one would expect in any Queensland town. The dominant sound was a honeyeater that to my ear sounded like a white-eared honeyeater, a common enough sound in many parts of Australia, so with mild interest, but not enough to get out of bed, I thought I’d just check my bird book and then go back to sleep. After all, I was in town, and serious birdwatching could wait until I was in the bush proper. But my bird book didn’t include a listing for the white-eared honeyeater, so I began to wonder what the sound might be. So there was nothing for it but to get dressed and go for a wander. I made off in the general direction of the Place des Cocotiers, the main square, lined with poincianas and various palms. By the time I had gotten there, most of the familiar birdcalls had been attached to familiar species, house sparrows, spotted turtledoves, Indian mynahs a legacy of introduced birds that New Caledonia shares with Australia. The screech of lorikeets, which I had imagined to be slightly higher pitched than the rainbow lorikeets back in Sydney turned out to be rainbow lorikeets after all. They were perhaps a bit redder in the breast, but I wasn’t sure how much of the difference was real, and how much was a result of my expecting to find differences. The rainbow lorikeet is an incredibly variable species found over a brought swathe of the region from the Moluccas through New Guinea and out into the Pacific. The birds of the Flores subspecies Trichoglossus haematodus weberi are almost all green http://www.oregonzoo.org/Cards/Lorikeets/images/weberlorie.jpg , but most subspecies are broadly similar to the subspecies found in eastern Australia with blue head, greenish yellow collar, green wings and tail, and a breast in various shades of reddish orange. So, a bit of difference would not have been unexpected, but these birds were just a bit redder in the breast, perhaps a touch smaller than on the Australian east coast, with an accordingly slightly higher pitched call, but unmistakably rainbow lorikeets nonetheless. Finally, in a large flowering bottlebrush, I could see and hear a large number of the honeyeaters I was seeking flitting about, the first time I had seen them relatively low to the ground. They turned out to be the rather unimaginatively named Dark-Brown Honeyeater Lichmera incana, a species endemic to Vanuatu and New Caledonia, but evidently rather common. From a distance the birds did appear a rather non-descript brown colour, but on closer inspection their sombre patterns resolved themselves, a bit of yellow on the wing, a silvery-grey patch behind the eye http://www.endemia.nc/faune/photo.php?code=2093 . So I had seen my first endemic bird species whilst still in town.