Sunday March 1, 2026
Hi Gang! As I mentioned yesterday, we diverted our itinerary from Mystery Island to Noumea, New Caledonia and will be here for two days. Noumea is the Capitol of New Caledonia. The head of their government is a High Commissioner, which is similar to a Governor, and is appointed by Emmanuel Macron every 3 years.
James Cook found the island and thought it looked like Scotland. So he named it New Caledonia since that’s the Latin word for Scotland. The island became part of France in 1853. It has the second largest Great Barrier Reef after Australia and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.
It’s not a huge island and takes only 6 hours to drive around the entire island. Roughly 80% of the people are Catholic and since we were here on a Sunday, most places were closed. But that was fine since we did a tour to several lookout points as well as this really cool aquarium which was open.
Our first stop was at the Notre Dame du Pacifique (an open air church with a huge statue of the Virgin Mary). Not only was it a beautiful religious site, it had a nice view over Noumea.
After that we went to the aquarium. While we’ve seen some cool fish snorkeling thru all these South Pacific islands, this place had them all under one roof with air conditioning and free WiFi. Can’t beat it! There was also a beautiful beach right across the street.
Our last stop was to another lookout point where US Troops were stationed between 1942 and 1946 during World War II. It was such an idyllic location you can’t even imagine any war time activity here.
Our bus then brought us back to the pier and we boarded, had lunch and caught some rays in the afternoon. I would say that New Caledonia is a very beautiful, clean and well developed island and in my opinion nicer than Tahiti and Bora Bora. And that’s saying a lot! I’ll do another update later tonight.
The Wandering Italian 