Moving to New Caledonia with a Pet

When we were thinking of moving to New Caledonia in 2005, I had two burning questions. Call me silly, but among the most important to me were:

1. How we were going to bring our cat to the island.

2. Did New Caledonia have high speed Internet access.

Never mind that we did not have a place to live up to about a week before we arrived - and so did not know where Sophie would be going to school (or where to have our mail forwarded) - these details eventually worked themselves out. Figuring out how to bring our cat and get Internet access up and running were other major priorities.

I started the process of exporting our cat to New Caledonia eight months in advance of our move. For animals from Europe, the process is pretty straightforward, though a bit long. There are vaccinations to update, tests to take and proof to provide. Then our cat was assigned her place on the one flight a month. Then she stayed 40 days in a quarantine.

Then while we were still in France, I receive an e-mail to come and pick her up. But we were still in France, arriving a few days later. They couldn't wait. Things got complicated. And then we found a way. An ex quarantine employee could take our cat and keep her until we arrived. It was fun organising this from 22 000 km away (and 10 hours' time difference), but we did. And everything worked out perfectly.

If you are looking for how to bring your pet with you to New Caledonia, I recommend this site: www.spanc.asso.nc/pratique_dossier_quarantaine.asp. The process is very clearly outlined. To translate the page from French, you can try an online translation site, such as http://babelfish.altavista.com/.

As for Internet access, yes, we got that set up too. But it took six weeks from the date we requested it for the phone company to switch it on (we were told this is a normal wait period in New Caledonia). The positive side? Nouméa does have Internet cafés, so with a little patience and a little flexibility we found that despite the obstacles, life in Nouméa was not as hard as we thought it might be.