Category Archives: South Pacific

One night in Noumea, the capital of the French South Pacific territory of New Caledonia, I wandered into a kava bar.

It was a difficult place to find. I had a rough idea of it’s location on a map, but darkness sinks as thick as lies in the South Seas night. There weren’t any streetlights and I didn’t know the name of the road. I circled the area half a dozen times, the headlights of my car sweeping a searchlight glare on enormous moths and potholes and packets of litter in a way that startled brief daylight without revealing more than a hurried glimpse of confused shadow.

I landed one day late in December 2010 to explore the French overseas dependency of New Caledonia. It’s the third largest island in the South Pacific, after Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Its coasts are fringed with barrier reefs, romantic lagoons, and more lost beaches than you’d care to count.

In the interior of Grand Terre — the main island — rugged mountains climb to mist-fringed heights with that “unknown” allure that draws you into the kind of wandering you look up from in surprise 6 years later.