Nouméa V

This is only the fifth part I am writing about this city, instead of the whole island. Actually I wanted to give it a bit more time, seeing as I have not really experienced anything since the last time. What day is it anyway? I am so completely out of it somehow.

I had actually wanted to comb through the whole island, actually. But I got stuck in the capital and now do pretty much the same thing every day. At around 5 pm I head to Lemon Beach, Plage de la Baie des Citrons, and, like many others, simply sit down on the beach and watch the sun sink into the sea rather quickly. At around 5:35 pm the show is already over again. Then another half hour of waiting until even the last spectacular lights in the sky have disappeared, and that is it. To my surprise, quite a lot of other people stay on the beach until the very end of the spectacle. In the cinema, far more people leave before the credits roll. It really is very beautiful. I even changed hotels, from my truly wonderful downtown hotel in the Latin Quarter with its excellent tropical breakfast and phenomenal inner courtyard to a hotel in the immediate vicinity of Lemon Beach. Just to make sure I would not miss a single sunset. They are so much nicer than the ones at Port Moselle, and I do not get approached by people with questionable intentions either.

What do I do between sunsets? Walk around, drink coffee, lift, go on boats, snorkel and, to be honest, actually work as well. And write. I do write fast, but I do not write a hundred pages every five days in three minutes either, it does take ten. And new music. You have to imagine, I have more than ten thousand songs, several tens of gigabytes, and I know almost all of them by heart by now, so at some point a bit of boredom creeps in. It is not as if I prefer simple music or three minute pop songs, but when you know every note of a twenty three minute progressive metal song by heart, a certain routine can set in. So I had to do some research and picked out ten new bands I did not know yet, and I am currently working my way into them. And what can I say, new music is always something special. And before the next one starts in with Spotify or other streams: I am old school, I respect artists and their copyright and I am perfectly willing to pay a little something. That is called respect. On top of that, streaming services do not work here. That is how far out I am. I would have been pretty screwed if I had relied on that. Seriously.

And what does new music do? It opens. It does not just open the ears, for me it opens thoughts as well. Since I like to imprint myself musically, meaning I connect certain music with certain places, when I hear a particular song at home it does bring certain situations back into my mind, but the downside is that you keep thinking the same thoughts over and over again. And new music helps me break out of that loop and lay my thoughts bare. And so it happens that I now lie on the beach and can finally separate the important from the unimportant and think about the future. What matters to me, what do I want to keep, what do I want to change. And once again I notice this: travelling is beautiful and important and I love it, but once it becomes everyday life, it slowly becomes exhausting and I start missing other things. And that is important for me to realise. What do I miss, where do I want to go. Do not worry, I still do not want to start a family and bring children into the world. That train has left the station, there is no longing there. But what else? And then it dawns on me: at some point I really would like to have structure in my life again. Getting up in the morning, working, going home, going to training, cooking, preparing food for the next day, sleeping, repeat. Weekend. Weekend with its own routine. Farmers market, art or a tour. I kind of miss that right now. Routine. That is what I am noticing. Above all the regular training routine, working toward goals, every day.

I am slowly approaching fifty, well not slowly, pretty soon actually, and by now I can feel my age. No, I do not want to complain, but you do notice it. A lot of things are no longer as effortless as they used to be. Everything still works just as well, some things even better, but not as effortlessly anymore. It is as simple as that, this getting older. You just have to go through it, until death.

And apart from these thoughts I seem to be indulging in a new hobby. By now I have a guy on WhatsApp who offers me boat trips every day, and so I keep hopping across the most different islands and diving into their underwater world, and that is impressive. I mean, I only snorkel, and in the distance you can see the Pacific crashing into the coral reef and being stopped there. Right there it drops off steeply beyond the coral banks, hundreds of metres down. I know that, I have seen pictures, and I know I need a diving licence for that, and I also know it is not difficult to get one. I had something like that once, ages ago, and I will do it again. But for now all I have are the islands and the offshore corals, and what can I say: out of the six hours you get dumped on an island, I spend almost four in the water. I really only come out to change the GoPro battery, put on more sunscreen and eat something quickly, then I am back in the water with Nemo and his friends. At first, when you swim over the corals, you do not see any fish, but they seem to get used to you, and then after a few minutes every niche is full of a different colourful fish. Maybe they also know that I do not eat fish? By now I can associate fish species with certain corals. I already know which fish are found at which corals. And some of the fish always have the same stopping points, you find the same fish at the same corals again and again, making its rounds there like on a pub crawl and always stopping at the same spots. This is a completely new world for me, and I find it fascinating.

I still want to take the catamaran to Amédée, but he summons me in the morning, 8:45 am, for roll call, only to tell me that another boat is going somewhere else today. Fine too, today it was Île Larégnère. And tomorrow? No message about Amédée, so probably some substitute programme instead. And I should probably keep my skin out of the sun for a day, so I will likely buy T shirts, wash clothes, drink coffee in my favourite pub vis à vis the Lemon Beach, morning and evening, and go lift. I found a gym here, with an ocean view. Just imagine that, you press your barbell over your chest and stare out at the ocean. What could be better? And something I still cannot understand at all, they are still sitting on their machines staring at their phones. I cannot get over it. In general I do not understand how people can go to the gym and then stare at their phone and read the newspaper for ten minutes between sets only to do one more repetition with little weight afterwards. Long rests between sets make sense for maximum strength training, otherwise not so much. While some people in thirty minutes have managed one machine and three repetitions, I have usually already done the mandatory part with four to six sets of three to four and then eight to fifteen. Do they wonder why they look the way they do and do not get fitter? A good strength session should rarely exceed forty five minutes, unless of course you are simply enjoying yourself and have an ocean to stare at. In that spirit.

P.S. Pictures, meaning more pictures, are on the other channels I keep active. Just because the question comes up again from time to time. I only have limited storage here and do not want to pay for the upgrade.