June 16 and 17, 2015
(A rare current post from Cyndi)
New Cal is not just about visiting its little islands. The main island Grand Terre, 215 miles long, is beautiful in its own right and worth at least one big road trip (or several little ones which is how we prefer to travel).
We had a few options for a car trip, but a great internet deal made the decision easy: a night at the Sheraton New Caledonia Deva Resort was available for a great price. It was about a 2-hour drive north, and there were several places we could visit along the way. Baie des Tortues, La Roche Percee, Poe Beach, Bourail, Sarramea’s La Cuve pools and cascades were all worth a visit. Plus it was definitely worthwhile spending a night in the Sheraton, quite a fantastic sight in itself.
We have a lot more we hope to see on both Grand Terre and the surrounding islands of New Caledonia. So why did we leave for Fiji a few days later? The main reason is we only have a 3-month visa in New Cal. That means within that time we need to find a weather window to our next destination and be gone by August 16.
If we were going on to Vanuatu, this wouldn’t be much of a problem as weather windows do come around periodically. We could probably safely start looking by the end of July to be gone by mid August.
Fiji, on the other hand, has very infrequent suitable weather windows; so we needed to start looking earlier. A window came long on June 20, and we decided to go for it. We could have gambled and waited longer, but it starts to feel more and more like the clock is ticking and we’d be nervous about whether another suitable window would come along.
We’d gone back and forth on going to Vanuatu this year, but with the post-cyclone rise in malaria and dengue fever, we’ve decided to stick with our original decision to see it next year. Meanwhile, we have yet to see the west side of Fiji and now seems like a great time to start.
Whether we’ll be back to New Cal this season remains to be seen, but we will definitely be back at some point. We love this place and don’t feel anywhere near done. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
Below, a gallery from our New Cal road trip, including a few pictures of that wonderful Sheraton Resort. It’s new and has a few wrinkles to iron out, but the place is gorgeous! –Cyndi
