NOVEMBER 2018

Hi Lesley, 

We had a fantastic time, all the hotels were great. We loved Hotel Beaurivage, it was quiet and very comfortable and the staff were great also.  It's a nice easy walk to a huge amount of restaurants. We loved the 3 Brassieres restaurant with their home brewed beer, wonderful meals and great service.
It was so nice to see lots of elderly locals doing water exercises in the morning in the ocean, the beach is wonderfully clean and very safe for children.

I’m glad we didn’t pick up our rental car early as it gave us time to check out the bus etc. The bus was very good, it is only 195franc per trip and if you brought a pack of 10, you could go anywhere within Noumea. We checked out WWll museum, which was very good, as were the Aquarium and the Zoo. I would not recommend picking up a rental and driving into Noumea on your first trip. Trying to drive on the other side of the road and concentrating on road rules etc would have been very tiring for us as they do drive very fast over there. I was very pleased the way we did it, by getting the car the day before we went up the island as we could pick our time to drive when traffic was less. Travelling up the island had very good roads and were mostly good though the west, which was much better than the east.

Hotel La Nea was nice, service and the food were great. The Koulnoue Village Hôtel was fantastic, the service and food really good, our bungalow looked straight out to sea which was terrific. Great trip up to Poum, amazing waterfalls and the only ferry left on the main highway at Ouaième. Once again Malabou Beach Hôtel was amazing its so beautiful and have a very safe beach. We did have trouble with our rooms fan not working, I mentioned it the girls and they sent the maintenance man to fix it and he said it was broken so they gave us another wonderful room close to the water. They were all very helpful, we managed to find a Water Taxi man to take us out to island for the day with a picnic from the Malabou Beach Hotel, he dropped us off and came back 2:30.

What a wonderful day! We then drove down to Hotel Evasion, again wonderful people and service. I think we need to go back because we didn’t get a chance to go to the national park there. They told me you can stayall day and see all native birds if your lucky.

Overall we had a wonder time, if we get to go back I’m definitely going to stay longer than 2 days at those places.

Thanks so much for arranging our trip on such short notice.

Kind regards,
Christine