When you're stuck in a far-flung cauldron
trips go as planned. We were the last flight to touch down before the airport closed for an indefinite period. But driving down to Noumea, capital of New Caledonia, a French territory comprising dozens of islands in the South Pacific, we were still blissfully unaware of this.
For nearly two weeks, we would sleep with the sonorous drone of choppers circling over our Hotel Le Paris, and we had no way of leaving the island. A state of emergency had been declared, a strict curfew imposed, and no restaurants or shops were open for business. Had we greedily ignored the warning signs?
From East Timor we had planned to travel to Vanuatu via Sydney. But then Air Vanuatu announced its bankruptcy and cancelled all fights. Since we intended to travel onward to New Caledonia before returning to Singapore, we figured we might as well spend some extra time on Grand-Terre, the largest island in the Melanesian archipelago.
The road to Noumea had become the site of protests, with the local Kanak people angrily holding up banners protesting a bill discussed in Paris which would give voting rights to recent immigrants. Having advocated their independence from France for decades already, the Kanak felt this would disadvantage them even further as they account for less than half the island's population.
Heaps of tyres ablaze, the occasional car set aflame, black smoke billowed up, darkening the sky. Our hotel's owner, a jovial fellow from Mumbai who has called New Caledonia home for 30 years, told us that shops were being looted,
