la forêt Desmazures

Distance: 10.3 km.  Elevation low/high/total: 166/458/638 m.

Difficulty: 8.4/10.  Scenic: 6.1/10

A solo hike deep into a rain forest, generally with no visible path and only surveyor tape flags tied to branches as a guide.  Speaking of guides, a "real" French one gave me grief for hiking alone (made my day!). Click pic for Picture album.  GPX file here.

A beautiful, sunny, spring-like New Caledonia day practically yells for a good hike.  With my usual hiking pals all busy (or out of the country), I was left with the solo hike option, which is usually fine with me.  I scouted out an obscure hike not too far from Noumea and managed to identify one using a combination of OpenStreetMap and another local hiking blog.  The drive was only about 45 minutes out of town, but rather surprisingly I found nearly a half dozen vehicles parked at the trail head. a real novelty in my hiking experience here.

This is a difficult hike that is given less than a 9.0 only because of its relative brevity (4 hours, 10 km).  But the trail is essentially unmarked (save for surveyor tape) in many areas and the terrain is quite treacherous and dense in several areas. I made several wrong forays that probably earned me an extra km and half hour of hiking.  As much of the hike is rain forest, it was naturally raining most of the time despite the glorious sunshine that I could occasionally see in the distance over the ocean.

The main highlight of the hike are two pretty rivers that one crosses in the midst of the forest.  The first is about 5 km in and I had lunch there and cooled my feet.  I'd seen no one to that point; but at the second river (~ 7.7 km point) there was a crowd of about 15 people having lunch and soaking in river pools.  Turned out to be the group whose cars were parked at the trailhead.  It was a bit challenging to see where the path continued so I asked someone and they pointed me to their guide, a cranky old French guy.  I got within 5 meters of the guy and he just lit into me about how irresponsible and stupid I was to be hiking in this area on my own, yadda, yadda, yadda.  I smiled, thanked him (which only seemed to further infuriate him) and asked him which way the trail continued.  He would not tell me nor even look at my GPS, but a kinder English-speaking guy in the group said that he was pretty sure it continued across the river a bit further along.  Which it did.  Ah, the French being French; definitely added a bit of pep to my step the remainder of the hike.

There are several branch trails off the path I took so I think I'll be back to explore those (likely without a pricey, judgmental French guide).  Placed a geocache (linked here), got back to my vehicle without incident and returned in time to enjoy an ice cream treat with the family back in sunny Noumea.