Melanesia with French dressing

By GERARD HINDMARSH

Once little more than a sleepy colonial backwater, New Caledonia's capital of Noumea is now about as cosmopolitan and tres chic as you get in the Pacific.

The city of 80,000 spreads over a peninsula half the size of Paris, and boasts a plethora of cordon-bleu restaurants, rave and disco clubs, casinos and topless beaches. Nothing sleazy, just Parisian.

Some residents do complain though: "Noumea is a scandal," one told me.

Fine restaurants total 130, but forget trying to find a non-smoking one - smokers still rule supreme here - but it's a small price to pay to crumble your brioche and linger over cafe creme or freshly baked croissants.

Freshly caught fish, lobsters and molluscs are served up, exquisite in taste. Even top hotels will cook any fish you catch.

The wackiest eatery must be "L'eau Vive du Pacifique" run by a bunch of singing nuns.

After cooking and serving the meal, the nuns provide a floor show with a rendition of Ave Maria and whatever else takes their fancy. Only in Noumea.

Leaving behind the bright lights of Noumea, I travelled 100km north to the countryside around La Foa, a favourite weekend retreat for many Noumeans.

The 125-year-old Banu Hotel is characterised by thousands of hats pinned to the ceiling and images of local military heroes in marching pose that adorn the walls.

When the buxom Mme Tisiot, owner for the past 22 years, realises I am a Kiwi, she marches me out the back to explain the significance of some hanging racks. "This is where they dry the skins." Obviously I am supposed to know that a dedicated band of New Zealand hunters arrive here every year to shoot the elusive rusa deer.

New Caledonia's 120,000 deer population, with many a splendid trophy head among them, are all descended from 12 animals from Java given in 1871 as a gift from the Sultan to the Governor of the day.

The steep and rugged backbone of New Caledonia rises to 1630m and runs the length of the country. The west coast is the domain of large cattle ranches, typically 500ha to 2000ha.

Along with its 24 huge carved Kanak statues that adorn the town square, La Foa is famous for its 80-seat cinema, complete with twin arm rests put in at the mayor's insistence. Every year the tiny theatre hosts a French film festival.

New Zealand's Pacific campaign during World War II had its headquarters near here. At the Commonwealth war cemetery at Bourail, the bodies of 360 New Zealand soldiers who lost their lives lie buried.

At nearby Teremba, the remains of a huge stone fort commemorate the French establishment of its first agricultural convict settlement in 1871. When it closed in 1909, the complex found new life as a girls' boarding school. Now it attracts a huge crowd every November when the local cowboys of the Association Marguerite put on their fabulous light and sound re-enactment of local history.

Thanks to enormous nickel deposits, New Caledonia is still France's only profitable overseas territory. After years of struggle against their "colonial oppressors", local voters surprised world commentators in 1998 by 98 per cent voting for another 15 years of French rule.

"We have attained a political maturity," said one Caldoche, the name for the long-time French residents.

The landslide voting, however, reflected the realities of island economics.

While most independent Pacific countries struggle in Third World subsistence, New Caledonia boasts a higher GDP than New Zealand. The minimum wage is around $2000 a month, while a waiter would expect no less than $3000. Don't expect bargains here. "Affordable" is the term promoters prefer to use.

Around eight nickel operations extract the valuable green ore used in making stainless steel.

The latest mine is at Goro, around three hours by torturous road south of Noumea. Setting up will pump an estimated $1.5 billion into the local economy over the next three years.

All around Noumea, new four-wheel-drive station wagons, their colour smothered in red dust, are driven by a new army of geologists, engineers and purchasing officers with six-figure mentalities.

A local appliance-shop owner struggles to fill an order for 80 new fridges by Friday. On the dock, a sweating beefburger of a man expresses his contempt for a newly arrived $35m shipment of 20 Caterpillar D10 bulldozers.

"I asked for D11s! No way these machines are going to shift the kinda rocks we've found down there."

The University of the South Pacific has responded to the upturn by now offering a "Diploma in Nickel." A no rust degree.

New Caledonia is fortunate to have 20 per cent of the world's nickel, the oxidised ore forming from the surface decomposition of red laterite soils which cover the peridotite rocks. The world nickel market has known long periods of boom alternated with periods of crisis, situations which are accentuated in the New Caledonian economy.

Off New Caledonia's Grand Terre (mainland) lie what are the real gems of the French Pacific, a handful of Melanesian-flavoured islands where the excesses of the colonial capital can be left behind.

Straddling the Tropic of Capricorn, 18km by 15km, Ile des Pins (Isle of Pines) is the smallest and best known.

Approaching it on the 25-minute flight from the capital restored my faith in travel brochures: flour-white beaches spill into pale turquoise lagoons which, in turn, slip into an abyss of sapphire blue.

The 1500 or so Kunie inhabitants are most hospitable. A strident blend of Melanesian and Polynesian, it was their ancestral high chief, Vendegou the Great, who gifted the island to the French, but it was his even greater daughter, Queen Hortense, who witnessed the arrival of around 3000 convicts in chains, all "Communards" rounded up and shipped out after the 1872 Paris Uprising.

A few crumbling ruins of the settlement remain, but today the push is for more high-spending tourists. Locals at first opposed the new, five-star, low-rise Le Meridien hotel at Oro, but now accept it as an integral part of the Island's economy.

Changes are inevitable. On previous visits, I had the "natural swimming pool" at Oro - which is actually a translucent enclosure of seawater - all to myself. This time I shared the experience with around 20 Japanese newly-weds having their honeymoon experience.

A few years ago, the Kunie people of Ile des Pins got wind of the scandalous excesses of Noumean society. They erected a placard on their gorgeous beach at Kuto decreeing that henceforth swimming costumes were obligatory. An innocent paradise faces the world, and tries to hold out a little longer.

www.newcaledoniatourism-south.com