Adventures in the Wild

Mont Humboldt - that voice in my head

When I am alone, particularly when hiking, I talk to myself. Not out loud, I'm far too introverted for that. Rather, I often find myself having conversations with myself, in my head. More correctly, they tend to be imagined conversations with another, as if planning for a discussion when we next meet, so that, like a cooking show, I could well say without irony on starting a conversation "Here's one I prepared earlier."

The people I imagine this process with are usually people in my acquaintance. I remember a time when every trip to the bush would be accompanied by an internalised debate with Sally, the creationist at work. But usually it's more convivial an exchange of ideas. Often, when I do meet the person with whom I imagined such a conversation they will say something completely different to what I had expected, for their representation in my head, although modelled on them, is obviously just my own mind speaking.

Once, when I was living in Cairns away from my friends, it became obvious that many of these imagined dialogues might never eventuate in reality. While this at first disturbed me, I soon realised that the process was enjoyable regardless, so I continued to have the discussions, no longer so worried about whether or not they would eventuate.

So it was somewhat odd to discover, on climbing Mont Humboldt, that there has been a shift in my mind. For where I once imagined what I would tell someone close to me about the hike, I now find myself imagining what I will write in my blog, playing with a particular turn of phrase, crafting it for effect. Some of my family have remarked on how long my blog posts are, labelling them epistles or epics, but what seems of most surprise is how I could write so much in so little time. Well now you know the answer, I am drafting and redfrating my posts whilst out in the bush, long before sitting in front of a keyboard.

Extreme Botany

Back on Friday, when I really should have been heading south to pick up my friend Jarrett from the airport, I thought I'd just try and squeeze in a brief hike up Mont Yago, way up in the north of Grand Terre. My hiking guide said the walk should take a bit under 2 hours, and there were only 350 km south to Tontouta, so I figured that if I got down the mountain by 12:30 I should have enough time to do the easy drive down the west coast to meet the plane.

Close to a third of New Caledonia is covered by what are referred to as ultrabasic rocks. These rocks, formed when oceanic crust was slowly thrust on top of the original island's rocks during the Tertiary, provide an extremely difficult growing environment for plants, with low levels of potassium, phosphorus and calcium and high concentrations of toxic metals such as nickel and chrome. At the same time, this environment demands such dramatic adaptations from the flora that it is very difficult for exotic species to invade, and so the vegetation that grows on ultrabasic soils in New Caledonia is largely composed of species that occur there and nowhere else. The French call this vegetation maquis minier, which roughly translates as mining scrub, because these areas are precisely those that are most frequently mined for their rich deposits of nickel and other metals. Most of the ultrabasic rocks are found in the south, but there are outliers in the north, and Mont Yago sits in one of those, an area so rich that the nearby Tiebaghi mine was once the richest chrome mine in the world, being mined from 1902 until the reserve was exhausted in 1989.

View looking north from Mont Yago. In the foreground the ultrabasic rock of the mountain. In the background, what looks like a carpet of green grass is actually a forest of the exotic Leucaena leucocephala overtopped by scattered coconut palms Cocos nucifera. The Leucaena has colonised the entire sandy lowlands, but cannot invade the ultrabasic soils of the mountain slopes with their toxic levels of nickel and chrome.

When I spied the flowers of this Xanthostemon sp. blooming I just had to take some photographs, for its colourful blooms were just stunning. Xanthostemon, a genus in the same family as Eucalyptus, is represented in Australia by a number of species found in the Wet Tropics of Queensland. However, in New Caledonia the genus has adapted to the ultrabasic soils of the island and there are at least 19 species found in the island's maquis minier. This specimen, one of only a few in flower, was located on a slope, an innocent distance from the trail. However, it was while taking this photograph that the unstable rocky slope suddenly slid away. I frantically grabbed for the only available handhold to stop my fall, the plant itself, and then much more cautiously completed my series of photographs. So my feelings about these photos are mixed ones. Beautiful yes, but photographs to die for? I'll let you be the judge.

Xanthostemon sp. fruits.

Xanthostemon sp. capsules.

Niaouli

Having left the lush green of the north east coast I’m now in the hills somewhere between Ballade on the east coast and Koumac on the west. I thought that since I was up this way I might as well do the full tour of the island by following the highway that loops around the northern end of Grand Terre. I had thought that I might stay at a campsite just outside of Oegua on the Diahot River, but arriving in town the place looked so uninspiring that I just followed my gut reaction and kept on driving. However, as the sun neared the horizon, and with no good options, I decided it was time to look for a campsite and so have stopped in a quarry by the side of the road. I have initiated what Mike and I used to refer to as the naughty camp protocol, used when camping in locations where camping is either dubiously acceptable or outright prohibited. The procedure is described fairly simply: set camp after the sun goes down, break camp at dawn, no campfire. For some the last stipulation probably sounds like hardship, but I’m pretty lazy in any case, and generally have to be coaxed into making a campfire by more enthusiastic campers.

The landscape I am camped in is like Australia, but through a looking glass. The hills roundabout are covered with what all of the books on the subject describe as savannah, although there isn’t really that much grass. It looks like it could be anywhere west of the divide in New South Wales or Queensland except that on closer inspection the dominant trees are not eucalypts, but instead Broad-leaved Paperbark, Melaleuca quinquenervia known here as niaouli.

Broad-leaved Paperbark may look familiar as in Australia it’s the dominant tree in lowland swamps in a broad arc from around about the vicinity of Sydney, where you can see it dominating Lachlan Swamp in Centennial Park, all the way up the eastern seaboard and then across to the Top End. In New Caledonia it can be found in swamps as well and that presumably was its original habitat. However the firing of the landscape first by the Kanaks and then by the French opened up a niche that few of the native species were adapted to fill, so Broad-leavd Paperbark, with its tolerance of fire, spread across the landscape wherever the original forest has been pushed back by fire. The only real exception is in the vast block of ultrabasic soil in the southern third of the island where concentrations of nickel and other metals are simply too high for it to tolerate. Broad-leaved Paperbark is planted as a street tree in Australia, and so it is well known that it can survive outside a swamp environment. But nonetheless it’s a surprise to see it clothing dry hills and plains, and I can’t help but wonder, when seeing the odd plantings of eucalyptus around the island, whether the latter species might in time usurp Broad-leaved Paperbark’s position in the landscape, presuming that the current practice of firing the landscape continues.