Adobe Lightroom deals with a lot of data — sometimes thousands of images at a time, each one potentially huge by itself — so it uses a lot of computer resources. When setting up a machine for Lightroom use, one wants to know what kinds of upgrades will be most effective, and along these lines I got an email from James Palik, a professional photographer who also teaches processing and workflow with Lightroom, asking specific questions about Lightroom resource management.

Sadly I'm not the right person to ask about this kind of stuff, but luckily I have a contact within Adobe who is. I've received permission to reproduce the questions and answers here so that all my benefit.

The current version of Lightroom is 6.3 (LrCC 2015.3).

Q:

How much installed memory will Lightroom address. For example, is there any value to installing a full 64 GB on a Windows machine.

A:

Lightroom 6 runs as a native 64-bit application. In theory, the image processing engine can use up to 50% of the total RAM on your system to backup its internal virtual memory system. Typically, processing a single photo would not require 32GB of RAM. Current Lightroom heuristics set a maximum limit on the number of negatives cached in RAM at any given time (last 3 or 4 negatives loaded). So having more RAM adding to the machine would not be helpful. However, if you could use the additional RAM to setup as RAM disk. That would be immensely helpful to speedup the previously loaded negatives. This is the same reasoning why having the catalog and negatives (Smart Previews) on a fast SSD drive is very helpful. In the normal case, I would currently recommend 16GB of RAM.

Q:

Lightroom determines a set amount of Cache when it is installed. How does Lightroom determine this setting?

A:

I assume by “Cache” you meant the camera raw cache? It depends on your workflow. If you are following a DNG-only workflow with “Fast Load Data” embedded, the camera raw cache rarely comes into play. If you process the raw files (CR2, NEF, RAF) only, then having a bigger camera raw cache is very helpful. It depends on the number of photos that you would need to process through each time and how often that you need to go back and reprocess them. Having the camera raw cache directory on a faster drive is very beneficial.

Q:	When does Lightroom start to use Cache. (in what part of the development process)
A:	Every time that Lightroom would need to render the negatives with the adjustment settings, in the develop module or the quick develop in the library module.

Q:	When it comes to CPUs and cores, what is your best advice for purchasing the most powerful standalone machine when it is going to be used almost exclusively for photography processing in Lightroom?
A:	Lightroom likes multiple processors/mult-cores and make uses of them.

Q:	Will Lightroom take advantage of dual processors?
A:	Yes.

Q:	How many cores will Lightroom take advantage of?
A:	Since Lr 6.2, Lightroom will make use of all cores available. In all Lightroom versions, you can check the Lightroom's System Info dialog invoked from the Help menu. It has a field named “Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw” that tells how many cores that Lightroom will be using.

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There we have it. Some of the answers bring up further questions, but hopefully this information will be of value. The RAM disk for the Camera Raw cache seems like an easy place to win greatly, if you have the spare memory. The size and location of the Camera Raw cache is configured in Lightroom's preferences dialog under the “File Handling” tab.

It's been a mostly-lazy New Year break for me, just hanging out at home with the family, working here and there on my Lightroom plugins, from time to time updating roads I cycle a lot at OpenStreeMap.org with much more accurate road data than they currently have, and some general vegetating.

I did get to bookmark the change of year with a last bicycle ride in 2015 up into the mountains north of Kyoto on the last day of the year. There was even a bit of snow. Brrrr. Then on January 2nd, I did a lazy ride to the Kuuya-taki waterfall with Alain, a French friend visiting from near Tokyo.

When we arrived at the waterfall (which has appeared on my blog many times, such as “Cooling Down at the Kuuya-taki Waterfall”), a small group of what looked like members of a college karate club were taking turns going into the freezing water, similar to when I visited here last March.

Alain is a talented photographer, but was here for a bike ride so didn't have his real camera. He put the place on his “must return to” list.

The return trip can go over or through a mountain. We went over it on the way, and though my time was not particularly special, it was the fastest properly-recorded for the short but steep segment. Strava lists my time as the 11th fasted, but it turns out that those listed above had either gone through the tunnel directly underneath, or had not made the full trip up to the pass.

Strava's segment matching has to be necessarily fuzzy to allow for the necessarily-fuzzy results one gets from consumer GPS units, and so it's not surprising that some efforts get assigned to a segment in error, but Strava gives the user no control over fixing these kind of Strava errors. It'd be nice if they allowed the user to remove a segment from the day's ride, and to allow other users to flag the incorrect-application of a segment to a ride. Sigh.

On the way back, we did take the tunnel. The beginning from this side is fairly well lit and wide and boxy...

... but it gets dark and narrow and creepy...

I wanted to process it so that it reflected reality, but when I did it was mostly just black with a vague spot or two of light, so I settled on the rendition above, which is somewhere between reality and this overly-bright rendition from March.

My cycling one-year anniversary is coming up later this month, so that'll be a time for me to reflect on the past year. But never to pass up a chance to be a data geek, I compiled my 2015 stats...

Total distance: 5,756km (3,577 miles)
Total elevation gain: 86,810m (284,810 feet) this is actual gain, not Strava's voodoo gain
Longest ride: 228km (142mi)
Longest week: 486km (302mi) (rides of 228km, 115km, and 143km)
Most elevation gain in one day: 3,356m (11,010ft)
Fastest speed: 76.7 kph (47.7 mph) at this location on this ride.
Longest non-stop ride: a 125km (78mi) section within this 203km ride during which the wheels never stopped.
My Eddington number at the start of the year: N/A
My Eddington number at the end of the year: 37 meaning that I had 37 rides of at lest 37 miles
Crashes: 0
Times I fell due to being clipped in: 2
Flat tires: 5 at least

Weekly distance over the year:

I'm certainly looking forward to 2016 as my first full year of cycling, though it's getting off to a slow start.

The other day I went on a ride with Kentaro Kataoka (“Ken-chan”), who has been a friend for a long time. He's a sports-massage masseur with his own clinic.

He's been on my blog a number of times over the years, such as when he graduated from massage school four years ago, giving a friend an impromptu massage last year, or just seeing the sights with me (here and here).

He does a lot of running (street and mountain), but is new to cycling, having just bought his first “real” road bike. We went on our first ride together the other day.

We got our first taste of a hill with a short climb that on my best day I did in 58 seconds. He didn't really know what to expect other than “a short climb that takes a minute or two”, and just took off, and he did it in 68 seconds without much effort. I was stunned... that was faster than my 2nd-fastest time, which was the 72 seconds that I did trying to keep up with him.

He's new to cycling, but his fitness level is very high.

The eastern climb up to Mochikoshi Pass is 1.1km at an average of 9%, but the first half is much more steep than the second half. It's absolutely brutal if you try to go fast.

I wasn't thinking to actually ascend it with Ken-chan, but I wanted to show him the initial super-steep section. He seemed to handle it just fine, so we decided to make the full climb to the top. He made it in about six minutes with little apparent effort. (His time registered longer because he paused to let a truck go by, but had he stuck with me, he would have easily had my time. I knew the road and knew I'd get to the top before the truck got there, so I didn't waste 20 seconds pulling over to wait for him to pass.)

He's in such great physical shape that all he needs is some experience learning about cycling technique, and he'll quickly become one of the top riders around.

On the way home we stopped by NORU for coffee and cake...

It was a short, rainy ride but it was great to show Ken-chan some of the mountains that I've learned to love this past year. Can't wait to do it again.

On my recent trip to New Caledonia, I did a fair amount of driving. As someone with limited driving experience outside of North America and Japan, some of the street signs were not intuitive, such as this bicycle-related sign that I presented as A New Caledonia No-Bikes-Allowed “What am I?” Quiz:

To someone used to driving in North America or Japan, the sign above clearly and unambiguously means “No Bicycles Allowed”, because anything with a diagonal red slash through it means “No  whatever  Allowed”.

Along those lines, the sign at right would clearly mean “no cars allowed”, but in New Caledonia I'd see this sign at each expressway off ramp, a spot where a “no cars allowed” sign would be jarring to say the least. The first time I noticed it, it was at an exit that I was thinking to take, but upon seeing the sign I quickly changed my mind... “No Cars Allowed”!

Once the initial shock wore off, I realized that it must mean “End of Cars-Only Road”, and so in New Caledonia (and likely Europe as well), a red slash means “End of  whatever  Restriction”.

So, a superficial answer to my quiz question is “End of Bicycle Lane”.

Still, that leaves the question of why the sign appears in a spot where the lane clearly doesn't end. The path that continues from that point was quite new, so I just assumed that they'd not yet removed the sign from when it really was the end, perhaps due to a classic government-worker “not my job” issue.

However, as answers came in to the quiz, I had to re-evaluate my idea of what “Bicycle Lane” meant.

I had assumed that it was a restriction on what can travel in the lane (bicycles only), so the sign was a restriction against cars, pedestrians, etc. But then I realized that it could be the other way... it could be a restriction against bicycles, that they must travel in this lane and may not travel on the road.

Or perhaps it's both.

So further research brought me to this page on the site for French cycling-related organization, and it seems that a circular blue-background white-bicycle sign means “bicycles (and only bicycles) must use this path”, while a square version means “bicycles (and only bicycles) may use this path”.

bicycles must use path		bicycles may use path

In retrospect, this makes some sense. While driving in the middle of nowhere on a road with a bicycle path, every time we came to a short narrow bridge, there'd be an “end of bicycle path” sign at the start of the bridge, and a “bicycle path” sign a car length later at the end of the bridge. It seemed to me to be an excessively verbose level of detail for a road that might get a few cars an hour, but if it's releasing the cyclist from an obligation so that they can cross the bridge, well, I guess it makes sense. Somewhat.

The first sign that surprised me was the stop sign, which looked like an American stop sign:

Being a country with French as the national language, I somehow thought that the stop sign would, you know, be in French, such as “Arrêt”. It's been more than 25 years since I last drove in Quebec, but I seem to recall their stop signs being “Arrêt”.

Then I found this page that talks about how “Stop” is actually a proper French word (stop signs in France use “Stop”), and that because some areas of French-speaking Canada are so anti-English that they don't want even the possible misunderstanding that their “Stop” might be the English “Stop” instead of the French “Stop”, so they use improper French (“Arrêt”, which in proper French is apparently is more of a “bus stop” kind of “stop”).

No matter what's written on it, the red octagon speaks for itself across much of the world, so even if it said, for example, 「止まれ」instead of 「STOP」, most folks would understand. Then I started to think about Japanese signs, and I realized how opaque the must be to newcomers.

Here's a Japanese stop sign:

Here's a New Caledonia “warning, speed-bump ahead” sign:

I was very disappointed to find that the trees and hammock were not standard, but stuck on this particular sign by some happy, mischievous soul:

The signs above makes complete sense, but I'd often see the “!” sign alone, without any indication of what was being alerted. It felt a bit silly. I eventually realized that it could only mean “Ken Thompson Nearby”.

In context, speed limit signs are pretty obvious no matter how they're presented. In New Caledonia, they're numbers (kilometers per hour) within circles:

As I rode through this neighborhood, I realized that except for the street signs and the color of the road paint, this picture looks like it could have been taken in Southern California.

As I write this blog post, I realize that I was speeding. Oops.

Now, let's look at this photo from downtown...

... and compare to this photo of a traffic circle....

Both turn-restriction signs made intuitive sense to me, but again in thinking about Japan, I realized how different it is. When it comes to turn restrictions, Japan doesn't have signs that indicate what you can't do (there are no official “NO LEFT TURN” signs in Japan, for example), but only what you can do.

So of the pair above, the “Right Turn Only” would be the same in Japan, but the “No Left Turn” sign would instead be presented as a “Straight and Right Only”, as illustrated at right.

I've been driving in Japan on and off for more than 25 years, and this still gets me. I learned to drive in America, so it's ingrained at the neuron level to look for “No Left Turn” signs if I'm thinking to turn left, and not at all ingrained to look for some other turn-restriction sign to see whether it happens to include the “left” that I want to do. It's still very unintuitive to me.

(One exception to what I said above about Japan's “only what you can do” turn-restriction signs are “No U-Turn” signs, which are the same in Japan as probably everywhere on earth.)

Anyway, that's about it for now for my musing on street signs. I'll end with this photo from the previous post, a warning on approach to a traffic circle. It's my favorite New Caledonia street sign:

Actually, one more street-sign thing: in Japan there's one particular street sign that I think is by far the most common, perhaps by an order of magnitude beyond the next-most-common sign. What is it?

To be clear, I don't actually have any statistics to back up what I think the answer is, but if you've spent much time in Japan, the moment I tell you my idea, you'll say “Ah, yes, indeed.”    Probably. 😉

We had a family vacation to New Caledonia last week. When my wife suggested it, I had to look it up because I had no idea where it was. Here it is:

The capital, Nouméa, at 22 degrees south latitude, was just starting to enter its summer.

It's a bit more well known in Japan due to a well-known travelogue, 「天国にいちばん近い島」 (“The Island Closest to Heaven”), published in 1966. The book was also made into a movie.

Minimal research before I left told me it's a French Republic with, like so many islands in the Pacific, a marginalized indigenous population.

The language is of course French. (The indigenous population, where it still exists, have their own languages, but I didn't come across them on my trip.).

I'm really bad at human languages. I can pick up a new computer language just by walking near a reference book, but my brain is not wired for human languages. I've formally studied English, Spanish, German, and French, but I can speak only English and Japanese.

The extent of my French study was a single semester in college 30 years ago, but it served me incredibly well. My mastery of the most-important 0.000052% of the language actually proved useful in about half of my spoken and written encounters. At a minimum, I could apologize for not speaking French (“Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas français.”), and let them know that I spoke Japanese and English. Some English was always available in the touristy areas, but outside them I had to fall back on my French, or just hand gestures and a smile. I never ran into anyone that spoke Japanese, except Japanese.

I quickly learned that my American credit card was not the type they normally handled. It seems that they're set up for some kind of electronic chip that's read when the card is inserted an inch into a slot on the cash register, rather than a magnetic strip that must be swiped. But the hand gesture for “credit card swipe” turned out to be universal, usually garnering a brief look of surprise at the archaic technology, followed by a “let me see whether I still know how to do this” attempt to make the transaction.

The currency is the French Pacific Franc (XPF). There are about 110 XPF to the US dollar, but because it's such a minor currency one must pay a huge premium to convert (from dollars, yen, euro, etc.). About the best place to exchange money in Japan are the banks at the airport, and if you exchange, say, dollars for yen and then turn right around and exchange back, you'll end up with about 6% less... that's the cost of doing the exchange. In the case of XPF, you'll end up with 30% less.

Anyway, for rough practical purposes, I kept in mind that one XPF is about one US cent.

For no apparent reason, the main international airport is an inconvenient hour's drive through nothingness from the city. The one direct flight from Osaka Kansai each week arrives late in the evening (10pm), so I prearranged transportation for the five of us (Me, Anthony, Fumie, and Fumie's folks). An email exchange with Smith Voyage and we were confirmed for Manu to meet us. Manu was fantastic in all respects, and I highly recommend him for your Nouméa travel needs.

The cost for the shuttle for the five of us was about $100, on par with the cost of the shuttle that brought us from Kyoto to the airport. New Caledonia is said to be an expensive place, but that's only because it is expensive, both for visitors and for the locals. To visit New Caledonia, you must be mentally prepared to hemorrhage money at all times. Almost any manufactured product you encounter (cars, cups, shoes, nails, clothes, toiletries, windows, etc. etc. etc.) must be brought from somewhere by boat or plane. One Japanese resident I talked to said that his car in New Caledonia cost twice the price of the same car in Japan.

New Caledonia has a land area about the same as the US state of New Jersey, and from what I could tell, is mostly uninhabited mountains. The main city, Nouméa, does not feel crowded.

Our hotel, the Hilton Nouméa, a contradiction to my preconceived ideas of what to expect from a large US hotel chain. On the plus side, because it's a “Residence” category, it was spacious, with three separate bedrooms, a normal-sized kitchen, a clothing washing machine, two sets of showers and toilets, a huge living room, and a nice veranda. On the minus size, there were very few services, such as a mini shop near the lobby in which to buy late-night snacks. (And I suppose the cockroach was a minus as well, though they allowed us to move rooms after the first night.)

The hotel did not, however, contradict my idea that large US hotel chains are ridiculously expensive. Normally things work out much more smoothly with our travels if my wife makes the plans and I don't see how much it costs (I'm a tightwad, so if I see the cost, it's difficult for me to enjoy), but I unfortunately got a glimpse of the hotel bill. I tried to block it out.

But in the end, the space and convenience was worth it for our week-long stay. Four adults and one teenager made for a dynamically-changing mix of activities and schedules, and so with three separate bedrooms and two sets of showers/toilets, we didn't always have to be in each other's hair. We could retreat to a bedroom for quiet relax time as needed. In retrospect, I have to admit that had I made cheaper plans, we would have been stressed the whole time, negating the whole purpose of the trip.

Power in New Caledonia is 220v. All the electronics we brought were for charging things (laptops, phones, cameras), and all could handle 100v〜240v as is, so we didn't need any kind of power converters.

In preparing for the trip I'd packed a 6-port USB charging hub recommended by a friend (thanks Jason!) to handle things like our phones, and a normal five-outlet extension cord into which to plugin it in, as well as plugging in our computers and other chargers.

New Caledonia uses “type C” plugs, so we would need a simple converter to handle the plug shape. But I figured that a high-end international hotel chain like Hilton would have multi-type power outlets, or, at least, US/Japan-style outlets. They didn't.

So, I'm glad that on a just-in-case whim, I bought a plug-shape converter at the airport in Osaka just before jumping onto the plane. Six dollars well spent.

(It turns out that you could get a plug-shape converter from the hotel's front desk if you asked, but seeing how they just rummaged around in a box for one, I don't think it's something I would rely on.)

Food is expensive, whether cooking it yourself or going to a restaurant.

Baguettes are a basic staple, and it's common to see people walking down the street with one tucked under their arm, one in their hand being eaten, and a drink in the other hand.

Toward the end of the trip I realized that I didn't have a photo of this quaint “baguette culture”, so I made a quick snapshot as I was walking by someone getting back into their car at the market. It didn't come out well, but perhaps illustrates the point anyway:

We visited a couple of supermarkets, including a big modern one far away from the tourist areas, where one needed French (and hand signals) to get by. They were just as big and nice as one would find in Japan or The States, but as I said before, the prices were very high.

Other than restaurants, most businesses closed by 7:30, including supermarkets and convenience-store-like markets. Vending machines are also essentially non-existent (I noticed only two during the entire trip, one at the airport and one at the hotel), so one must plan their food well or be caught without anything to eat. We first arrived at our hotel around midnight and were sort of stuck for food and drink except for the pathetic little vending machine in the lobby.

Many businesses are closed for an extended lunch (e.g. noon to 1:30 or 2:00). Walking around on the first day to visit car-rental and bicycle-rental shops, having left the hotel around noon, I found them all closed.

Making the same rounds again later in the afternoon, I ended up renting a car from the Budget office not far from the Hilton. I got a car that could fit five easily for about US$80/day, which seemed to me to be one of the only reasonable prices that I ran into all trip. As a bonus, the car I was given was brand new; I was its first renter.

Almost all cars in New Caledonia are standard (manual) transmission. I don't know why. A Japanese resident I talked to seemed confident in his understanding that European car makers simply didn't have good automatic-transmission technology, so it had never taken off here. That seems ridiculous to me, but I don't know.

In any case, the car I rented was a manual transmission. My parents made sure I learned to drive with a manual because it's a good skill to have (thanks Mom and Dad), and for this I was thankful when settling in behind the wheel at the car-rental place.

As I slowly pulled out from the parking space and down a steep bank to the narrow exit onto the street, a truck started to pull in. And so I found myself driving a manual transmission for the first time in a decade, facing down but needing to back up, with little margin for movement or error. Baptism by fire. It was the comical scene you might be imagining, replete with stalls and revving engines, haphazard clutch work, and much embarrassment.

To top it off, after I could finally get to the exit, I turned on my wipers instead of the turn signal.

But it's a bit like riding a bike, and I quickly got the hang of it again. Driving in New Caledonia is mostly a pleasure, and driving a manual-transmission car with a beefy engine is its own pleasure as well.

There are relatively few traffic lights, with intersections usually controlled by traffic circles or “yield” signs instead of “stop” signs. Traffic circles are much more efficient; if traffic is light, you almost never have to stop. And even when traffic was rush-hour heavy, or when I was on a bicycle, I never ran into issues where I felt traffic was rude or dangerous. It was wonderful.

Basically, it works the way it's supposed to work. It would never work in Kyoto because Kyoto drivers are much too selfish... it's common to see Kyoto city buses run red lights! Sigh.

I just love that sign. I'll write more about New Caledonia road signs in a different post.

Directional signage can be spotty at times. For example, you can drive right by the airport without noticing if you don't notice the one sign that tells you where to turn (a normal traffic-circle sign, with one of the minor arrows leading off to the side marked “airport”).

To find my way around, whether by car, bicycle, or foot, I relied on Galileo Offline Maps (Name changed Feb 2019 to Guru Maps) on my phone. Prior to the trip I downloaded the vector map for New Caledonia, which turned out to be excellent. Since it's on the phone after the initial download, I could use it while my phone was in airplane mode for the duration of the trip. I didn't want to pay steep data-roaming charges, and with this app didn't need to. It was absolutely invaluable.

I could also keep a track of our movements, then refer to the track later if I needed to retrace the path, or use the trace as my path back home. I can't overstate how useful this $4 app is. (I also use it while cycling in Japan, where I'm often deep in the mountains with no cell coverage.)

One non-pleasure part of driving in the rural parts of New Caledonia is that if you're unlucky, you get stuck behind someone driving at half the safe/legal speed limit, just because, and there's little you can do about it.

In some really mountain-curvy rural areas, I sometimes found that the posted speed limit was well faster than I felt safe to drive, but mostly one could easily do the 110kph (70mph) speed limit common on the nicer rural roads. A long drive like this could be quite pleasant, but sometimes you'd come across someone doing half the posted speed limit and not giving the slightest care to the long line of cars piling up behind them. There were plenty of places to pull aside to let other traffic go, but few places to pass safely (especially at night where you couldn't see ahead in the pitch dark), so it was extremely frustrating. You were limited both by the speed of the slowpoke causing the problem, and by how daring each person in front of you was in choosing when to try to pass.

One day, stuck behind a big construction truck for the better part of an hour, I imagine it was sport for the driver to watch the car immediately behind jockeying for a good view, hoping for a chance to pass. If/when they did, it started all over again with the next person in line, nonstop, for their entire drive. I imagine that for this selfish asshole, a good head-on collision would have made their day.

I asked about it to a local New Caledonian who drives a lot. He said that that's how it is in New Caledonia... they don't care about other drivers and would never pull over to let someone pass. I just can't comprehend this kind of selfishness.

One kind of flip side of this is that they apparently don't feel too bad about tailgating. I was happy to let folks go by if they wanted to go faster than I wanted, but when I wasn't able to find a place to move over, I'd sometimes be tailgated quite strongly.

This was the only kind of inconsideration I ran into on my trip. There was a lot of graffiti everywhere, which illustrates that there are a lot of remarkably-selfish people (or a few that are remarkably active), but in person, people were universally friendly.

Once you're out of the city, there are almost no services. Driving around in the south part of the island, we went for hours without seeing a sign of human civilization except for the road itself, and the occasional deserted national-park type place. For hours of driving, no houses, no farms, no stores, no businesses, no industry, no nothing.

If you look carefully you can see a few power-line towers, and the far ridgeline at right has some wind turbines, but otherwise there's no indication of human presence. The same scene in Japan would be festooned with power lines and dam construction and any number of other visual-noise elements.

Sometimes, even, no bridges:

The falls above were in a provincial park that seemed, other than us, devoid of humans. There was a parking lot and nicely-manicured trails, with signs and steps and information boards (in French that we could not read), but no people. We wandered about the place freely.

For tourists, though, New Caledonia is known for its marine sports...

Some days the wind was dead calm, and other days it was briskly strong, and on those days the kite surfers were out in force, with dozens visible at any one time.

The water is very clear.

The 1200cc jet ski was fun and responsive, and we were flying over the water at more than 60kph (40mph). The guide said that it can go faster, so perhaps we were limited because it was a bit choppy out where we could let loose.

In Japan one needs a special license to drive these, but here you needed only money. I let Anthony drive for a while, and we had great fun.

One day we took a tour to an uninhabited island to snorkel and explore the coral. When we asked how popular the tour was, the guide said that there are up to 90 people on the tour at one time, which I imagine would fill the small beach and the surf, destroying the whole “deserted island” ambiance that was the whole point in the first place.

Our timing was good; on the day we went, we were the only five customers, so we had everything to ourselves. It was the following week that the huge influx would start, the guide said. We're glad Anthony's school got out for the New Year break a bit earlier than most other schools.

I'm fairly sun-averse, with skin that sublimates from “beached-whale white” directly to “the Colonel's Extra Crispy” burnt, so I generally keep covered up when I'm out. But with liberal amounts of sunscreen I thought I'd be safe from getting burnt.

So, on this trip I learned the difference between “SPF” and “how long does it last”. I had super-high SPF lotion, but I neglected to reapply often enough. It seems that regardless of the SPF, the protective properties break down in the sun at the same pace, so regardless of the SPF, one must reapply every two hours or so. I ended up with some mild sunburn on my back and shoulders. Doh! Lesson learned.

Being a bit sun-averse was one reason that I didn't really explore the beach directly outside the hotel, until the last day. I really regret that, because just a few seconds out into the water and there were all kinds of thick puffy colorful starfish, sea cucumbers, and other assorted marine life that was super fun to explore with just goggles. Had I known I would have gone out with Anthony every day.

The country seems to be very cycling friendly, aside from the lack of places to get food and water away from the city. I'd see lots of cyclists each day, from the early morning until dusk.

Helmets are not compulsory, but it was quite rare to see someone without one. For my one bike ride I spent $25 to rent a bicycle, and another $10 to rent a helmet.

Nouméa can be quite hilly, with many short but really steep (10% ~ 15%) slopes.

Because I didn't know the city at all, my sort of random cycling trip brought me through what turned out to be less affluent areas.

Regardless of where I went I never felt unsafe, or that a run-down area was “seedy”, but I also didn't feel comfortable leaving the bicycle unattended, as I had no lock. (Actually, the rental place gave me a lock for it, but neglected to give me the key.) So in one particularly un-affluent area I was happy to find a market that was surrounded by a high fence, almost like a prison. I could put the bicycle inside the fence by the door of the market and feel that it was relatively safe while I bought some water inside.

While I was there, the little boy seen above took interest in my “real cyclist” look, and returned to his bike with vigor. He tore around the parking lot and streets at breakneck speed. He could slow himself only Flintstones style, as his bike had no brakes and his feet no shoes. He was a natural.

As I prepared to leave, he stood aside and watched everything. Then as I started to pull away, I bid him an “au revoir”, which he politely bid back. I regret that I didn't buy some candy or something for him.

There's the thought that island cultures like this tend to take things more slowly, and this was evident in the stores being closed for a couple of hours mid day, or the occasional super slow person on the roads.

It was also evident at the airport when we left. We arrived almost three hours before our flight, but the line to check in was already long and it moved very, very, very slowly. Really, super duper slowly.

At the pace it took us to get checked in, the folks still waiting in the photo (seen from a walkway above as we passed from security to the gate) would still need a couple of hours to be checked in. There wasn't that long before the flight so I don't know how they did it, but we ended up reaching Japan on time, so in the end all was well.