10 things we learned on our trip to New Caledonia

1. Air Calin (the national airline) offers free liquor on their flights. It’s only a 2.5 hour flight from Sydney to the New Caledonia capital of Noumea, but, in addition to a nice meal, they give you an appertif, wine for the meal, and then the flight attendants walk around with a brandy bottle. Très French. Most certainly not très avion américain!

2. It rains during the dry season. October is the driest month of the year and prized for its sunny weather. But we arrived in a torrential downpour - we couldn’t see 100 yards in front of us – and it remained cloudy with occasional rain the entire time we were there. The sun only broke through on our last day. But we’ll say this for New Caledonia – it was a fantastic trip and never once did it feel like the weather got in the way of a good time.

3. French Colonialism has its upsides. Here we were on a tropical island and every morning we could have wonderful coffee, breads, perfect buttery croissants. All our dinners were amazing – especially a Vietnamese meal prepared by a family that left Vietnam with the French in the 50s. Best of all, because it’s a French dependency plenty of vin rouge and vin blanc is available and duty free from the motherland.

4. The natives call it Kanakyland of the Kanaks. OK, technically we learned that from an informational placard in the botanical gardens in Melbourne, but it was so odd we had to get the word out.

5. Theft is apparently not a concern. When we got to our hotel, we locked our “valuables” (i.e, about A$50 and our blessedly inoperable blackberries) in the room safe and set our secret code. When we tried to open it the next day it wouldn’t budge. After numerous tries, we called the front desk.

• Marlys: “Our code won’t work and we can’t open our safe.”
• Pleasant French-accented receptionist: “Just to enter 0000.”
• Marlys: “Will that work?”
• Receptionist: “All ze safes in ze ‘otel open to 0000. Voila!”
• Marlys: “Ahhh. The old ‘un-safe’ safe!”
• Receptionist: “Pardonnez-moi?”

6. Over 1 million US servicemen came through during WWII. We learned this at the small but fascinating Maritime Museum in Noumea. Because it was close to Australia but sufficiently far from Japanese conquests, New Caledonia became a massive staging area for the Pacific War and the country enjoyed an economic renaissance on the back of Uncle Sam's taxpayers. The legacy is a tremendous amount of good will for Americans and interesting place names. For instance, there is a suburb of Noumea called “Motor Pool”.

7. It’s surrounded by the world’s 2nd largest reef, making it the largest lagoon in the world. This means superb diving: we spent a day checking out the reef life. Lots of sharks, turtles, barracuda, and plenty of colorful fish.

8. It’s very multi-cultural. The dive company owner/operators were French (him) and Japanese (her). He was a former French Foreign Legionnaire. They have two kids: he talks to them in French, she in Japanese, and they talk to each other in English.

9. Obama mania is a global phenomena. They get few American tourists (mainly French, Australian and Japanese) and we never heard an American accent while we were there. When people learned we were Yanks they immediately wanted to tell us how much they hoped Obama would be elected and ask us if it was true, really true, that such a wonderful thing could happen. “He’s a new Kennedy” they’d say – presumably meaning the Camelot Kennedy, not the Chappaquiddick one.

10. We want to go back.