New Year's Adventures

I am writing this post to the readers of this blog and asking you what did you do for New Year’s Eve? You can email me the answer if you do not want to post in the comment box. How was your New Year’s Eve? I want to here what everyone did. This year I would like to collect everyone’s stories of adventures, mishaps and mayhem.

OOur New Year’s Eve was relatively quite. We sailed to Ilse of Pines, one of the small outer islands arriving Christmas Eve. It’s an interesting mix of tourism and island life. I wouldn’t call it touristy in comparison to the Caribbean, but you do see a lot of tourists. The island has a population of roughly 1500 people, so it is easy to for a visitng cruise ship to make a big impression on the population. There are cruise ships arriving every few days and there are resorts and gites throughout the island, but it is nothing like arriving in Nassau, Bahamas. In the fashion with Melanesian culture, the main beach has nothing for sale on it normally. When the cruise ships arrive there are some women selling fruit and some homemade snacks, but otherwise it remains a serene beach aside from the sole resteruant. I know the locals have worked to keep it that way. Lucky for us that the island cannot support a cruise ship entering it’s main harbor, so the cruise ship must stand off outside the entrance to the harbor and ferry people to land. So every few days the beaches would be inundated by Australian and Japanese tourists.

Isle des Pines is known for its beautiful white sand beaches. It is truly incredible to walk on the beach and have such soft white sand that is squeaks under your feet. We were in a beautiful location, but not blessed by the weather, as we had a lot of grey rainy weather, but it didn’t sop us from swimming. It did how ever stop us from visiting the other anchorages with the boat. As any passage through the reefs necessitates good visibility which we never got. We did make a tour of the island by bike. It is a small island and in a couple of hours of biking went around. Being out of biking shape we felt it the next day.

New Year’s arrived, and it was a grey rainy day at the beach. We did go swimming in the drizzle earlier in the day, and mother nature gave us some respite from the clouds with a lovely sunset before the clouds settled in once again. We were joined by our neighbors in Noumea, who were our neighbors in the anchorage as well. We did have wine, fois gras, and home-made bread (by me). We never got to the champagne, as we were so stuffed with snacks. Our neighbors, who just arrived in Ilse de Pines, had caught a fish on the way and gave us two giant pieces for us to cook later – quite a nice New Years present. Other highlights from the island were collecting oysters from a nearby beach which we cooked in a garlic sauce… so yummy

So that was my New Year’s Eve and the time leading up to the tranquil evening, and now I want to heart about from other people.