New Caledonia

So it is almost a year since of cruise, I can't sleep due to dramas relating to the recent purchase of a new home. So here I am, I am going to conclude the tale of our most recent overseas trip, and promise myself that next time (December, when we head to Singapore and Hong Kong), I am going to blog as we go. Why do I lie to myself so often?

Hop on Hop off bus

 I highly recommend getting tickets for the hop on/hop off bus. It took us to all the places we wanted to see and I don't remember having to wait very long for a bus to arrive, each time we rocked up to a bus stop a bus was just around the corner.

Markets!

Second breakfast of champions

The first stop we made was to the markets for some after breakfast pastries, which were delicious. We look at the markets. Marvelled at the extremely expensive hats (I think there was a $60-$70 hat Imogen has her eye on.) I think we ended up distracted her with a slinky or bouncy ball. 

The entrance to the aquarium

The second stop was to the aquarium, which really impressed me, so such a small little place, they had a lovely selection of sea creatures including on of these:

The nautilus 

 I hadn't seen a nautilus before. Fossil records indicate that nautiloids have not evolved much during the last 500 million years. Nautiluses are much closer to the first cephalopods that appeared about 500 million years ago than the early modern cephalopods that appeared maybe 100 million years later (ammonoids and coleoids). They have a seemingly simple brain, not the large complex brains of octopus, cuttlefish and squid, and had long been assumed to lack intelligence. But the cephalopod nervous system is quite different from that of other animals, and recent experiments have shown not only memory, but a changing response to the same event over time.

In a study in 2008, a group of nautiluses (N. pompilius) were given food as a bright blue light flashed until they began to associate the light with food, extending their tentacles every time the blue light was flashed. The blue light was again flashed without the food 3 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours later. The nautiluses continued to respond excitedly to the blue light for up to 30 minutes after the experiment. An hour later they showed no reaction to the blue light. However, between 6 and 12 hours after the training, they again responded to the blue light, but more tentatively. The researchers concluded that nautiluses had memory capabilities similar to the "short-term" and "long-term memories" of the more advanced cephalopods, despite having different brain structures.^[17][18][19] However the long-term memory capability of nautiluses was much shorter than that of other cephalopods. The nautiluses completely forgot the earlier training 24 hours later, in contrast to octopuses, for example, which can remember conditioning for weeks afterwards. However, this may be simply the result of the conditioning procedure being suboptimal for sustaining long-term memories in nautiluses. Nevertheless, the study showed that scientists had previously underestimated the memory capabilities of nautiluses. (Wikipedia). 

Glow in the dark

 I wasn't a big fan of the glow in the dark, dark room. We managed to enter at the same time as a group of school kids, and it was noisy. Our kids started to have a bit of a freak out. So we left and came back when it was quieter. It was quite pretty.

Don't eat here

 The worst part about cruising is that at each given destination you are under a time crunch and unfortunately in Noumea the place we went to for lunch LA BARCA decided that our time wasn't really that valuable. An hour after we'd ordered that hadn't even started to cook the kids meals (which were like hotdogs or chicken nuggets, they would have taken minutes to cook) the worst part was the waiter kept coming passed, at LA BARCA, and telling us that our food was "five minutes" away. So like chumps we waited. In the end we left, after paying for our drinks but refusing to pay for the food that was "on its way to the table" - yeah right.

AVOID

 So after the complete bust that was LA BARCA we had crepes at a place near the dock. They were devine, the salted caramel was so good. 10/10 would recommend.


So that's our adventure at sea. Our next holiday is going to be on land. But I'm glad our friends convinced us to go on this adventure, and I think I wouldn't mind going with them next year. If we can.

x T