Adventures in the Wild: Limestone Forest

Today I decided to go for another walk in the forest that lines the trail between Baie d’Upi and Baie d’Oro. It had rained during the early hours of the morning, and so I woke up and made doubly sure that none of my things were touching the sides of the tent, dreading that I might wake up with everything soaked. When I was in Nouméa, thinking that it was the last time I would use it, I washed my tent in the washing machine. It came out so clean and silky that I wondered if the detergent had perhaps washed off some waterproofing. But in the morning all was still dry, so it would appear that all I had washed away was 14 years of grime.

With the overnight rain, the forest was all steamy in the morning sun, pungent with the smells of earth and decay. The first part of the trail south of Baie d’Oro, where the land is flat, runs through a forest in the process of transformation into a coconut plantation. Conversion here is not a dramatic process, but a gradual favouring of coconuts over the indigenous vegetation, with large trees felled in the traditional way, by ringbarking them and then lighting fires around their base until they fall over where they appear to be left to rot into the earth.

In the interim it’s still an incredibly rich environment, full of the calls of endemic birds, flitting between the coconuts and the pines.

As soon as the trail left the flat however, it entered the forest proper. Yesterday I had run into an Australian woman Rosemary and her teenage son Paul, so I don’t remember seeing very much on the walk through this forest. But it’s a world that repays close attention.

A world of rich, lush green, where miniature green butterflies pollinate miniature green passionflowers;

where tiny snails are lost on enormous green leaves;

where diminutive skinks fight over little flecks of sunlight, and when approached hold their heads still, regarding the intruder, while their tails quiver as if to say “Pick me! Pick me!”

This mantle of green is thrown over the most unlikely substrate, a rocky plateau of limestone rock, where tree roots disappear down into holes in the earth,