New Caledonia

The city of Noumea on Grand Terre is a real western city. It is a city that has the things we were used to in Canada and minus the things we have become used to in the Pacific.
There are real buses. Buses with padding on the seat....not buses made out of a flatbed truck with wooden parts added on. Parts like wooden roofs and wooden walls and wooden benches. There are taxis, real taxis. Not taxis that shake apart all over the road with their broken windows, bald tires, and doors without door handles. There are real streets, streets without giant holes. Holes that would swallow two pedestrians and a cyclist before anyone would notice. Streets not made of sand or dirt, but of asphalt with curbs and sidewalks. Missing from the streets are homeless dogs, the chickens and the pigs.
Many other things are “Canadian” normal as well. Restaurants have washrooms, walls, roofs and floors. The city has police, fire and ambulance services. Lots of stuff. Just the basics, plus more. They have 3 museums, a cultural centre, a zoo, an aquarium, wonderful downtown parks, a new waterfront promenade and two beaches (topless, for they are French). All this for a city of about 150,000 people. And the city sits adjacent the worlds largest lagoon. No wonder so many French retire here. (also due to the increased pension perk that retired former French government employees get to relocate here).
Now all of this has a cost. The wooden buses elsewhere cost us an equivalent of $0.25 to ride while the city bus here cost $2.00. The taxi minus the parts cost $1.00 while the real taxi, the safe one cost $10. However, access to the museums, $2.00 and cultural centre $5.00 are a real bargain.