Yaté
January 9th, 2005
Yaté is a small village on the southern tip of New Caledonia, on the
eastern coast.
All pictures are available either in tar
or zip formats. Also available is a tar
archive of the original pictures,
before being reworked (these are actually the same).
Note that the tarballs
contain all the pictures I took, not just the ones I present
on this page.
The road to Yaté takes us through several different kinds of
landscapes...
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I was always fascinated by the soil in New Caledonia. Here is one of
the many types of soil we saw.
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Lac Yaté
A 40km2 artificial lake created by a dam, un-surprisingly called "Barrage
de Yaté" (Yaté Dam).
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Lac Yaté, and the dam in the back.
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Stéphane, above Lake Yaté.
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The road from Nouméa to Yaté, around Lac Yaté.
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Divided in two by a river, Yaté is a small green village of about 1500 souls.
This is the place where we had our first contact with kanak people, the
indegenous people of this land before Europeans settled in.
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The final descent into Yaté.
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Buildings part of the school above.
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We were looking for a beach to stop for lunch. We were lured by the
coconut trees we saw North of Yaté on our way down from the mountain.
But we couldn't find any beach, any sandy beach that is. So we stopped
at this location (see also next picture). It turned out that Yaté has
been mined a lot and is the victim of a lot of erosion. So everything
is covered with red mud: the road, the shore, the water, etc.
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From left to right: Layla, Stéphane, Julien, and Joël.
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We met Julien and his daughter Layla while having lunch. They had their
house very close to where staying for lunch, and were walking to the
general store. Kanak people being very polite (they wave at you even
when you, a complete stranger, drive by them), it was easy to engage
into a conversation. We ended up offering to drive them, since the store
was about 2 to 3 kms away.
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The general store, and their tenants.
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Big coconut tree field surrounding the general store.
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The road to Goro was sometimes a bit rough for our tiny Renauld Twingo,
being closer to a dirt/mud road than anything else. But we made it to
Goro...
http://www.brobecker.org/
