“So lets go check out this place”, I said to myself this morning after two strong coffees. It was this, or Plan B involving sparking up PlayStation and cracking open a beer. And at 10:30am on a Saturday, Plan B just seemed unseemly.
Komoot (a cycling app I’ve got) suggested I do a nice and easy ride around a place called Tina’s Loop – this is the top loop in the below picture.
I also took the opportunity to go on a tiki tour and I saw some stuff.
The Ride
On a technical, “lets talk cycling” level there’s only one thing special about today’s ride. I didn’t do massive kms. I didn’t ride all day. I didn’t go fast or climb stupidly tall mountains.
But I did do it and an AVERAGE OF 37 DEGREES CELCIUS OF HEAT. The “coldest” today’s ride got was 33 degrees, and it maxed out at 44.
Testament to the three month’s I’ve been here, I wasn’t curled up in a little ball underneath a tree in the foetal position. I drank a truckload of salts when I got home though.
And here’s the views from Tina’s Loops 🙂
The full sized picture of this is here: https://jameshogan.nz/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IMG20250222121301-scaled.jpg
Lovely day, and a very enjoyable ride 🙂
Let’s Go for a Toodle Around this Place
After cycling the South Island, something like Tina’s Loop was pretty pedestrian, so rather than follow the same trail on the way back, I decided to go off the beaten track and have a look around this place (its 37 degrees remember).
And it wasn’t hard to see evidence of the troubles from last year at all!
The tragic part is I travelled through some STUNNING areas of “old Noumea” – residential areas that dated back to the colony’s foundation. They’re the circled red bit below
Very quaint 🙂
Signs of the Troubles
Even on the way out to Tina’s Loop, it wasn’t hard to find evidence of last year’s Troubles:
The circled purple bit above was where I saw the following:
All of these above photos were taken in front of this stoopidly ugly housing complex, that looks like this (full sized media) and which, to me, has inherited all of the architectural styling of this:
Economic Decline
Things are a little bit “on edge” in Old Noumea Town at the moment. There’s a lot going on. I’m looking for the recent news citation, but I saw that the economic boffins estimate the troubles last year lost New Caledonia 20 – 30% of its Gross Domestic Product. As I cycled through Noumea’s CBD TODAY, there were mostly closed rental cites. CBD retail has collapsed (probably related to tourism). I brought some t-shirts, but paid $NZ116 for 3 shirts happily because the retail pegged me as a “tourist”, so I spread some wealth.
But… this place… Is on an economic knife edge. Its just about to very very very much collapse (in my view). With transport links throttled, I am not seeing where new money into investment is coming from. I would like to think they might do what New Zealand did here but I just don’t think thats the “French Way”,
Whipping up a Lather
Slapped onto the front of the burnt out police station in the above picture, immediately in front of the about tenement area and beside the graffiti that says, “Here is Kanaky” are the posters below. These posters are appearing all around the city. I’ve dropped the original photos on the left into Google Translate which has translated them into English on the right:
This second guys turns out to be Manuel Valls, the French Minister of Overseas Territories, who is over here in New Caledonia having a chit-chat about options for independence: https://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/nouvellecaledonie/manuel-valls-en-nouvelle-caledonie-tres-attendu-le-ministre-est-arrive-1563517.html
Things are heating up again, now he’s here: https://la1ere.francetvinfo.fr/nouvellecaledonie/province-sud/mont-dore/manuel-valls-en-nouvelle-caledonie-echange-houleux-sur-la-voie-publique-entre-le-ministre-des-outre-mer-et-des-loyalistes-1563547.html including the French equivalent of the Proud Boys who I am guessing are plastering these overtly pro-French signs all around town, including into the heart of what is clearly Kanaky residential areas.
And all around the place are seeing things like this, which don’t seem to me to be about a “New Caledonian” way, which is a blend of their Eurpoean and Kanaky people who seem to blend seamless between the two worlds (because I sat next to one on a plane – worst statistical sample from a practicing statistician).
There is all this shit around the place, which is just inflammatory:
And recently, these things are now starting to turn up in my “Warning” texts from work:
At the same time as this type of stuff is also happening again:
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Yep, there’s enough here to tell me “the problems” are not solved. And until the local Pro-French movement “calms the farm” Noumea (because this is where all of the foreign investment lives) is a still a tinder-box.