The Île des Pins, the Isle of Pines, is an island off the southern tip of New Caledonia, in the French Pacific, where columnar pines found nowhere else on Earth line every shore like a fence of dark spires above white sand and turquoise shallows, and where the reef fills a natural pool through one gap with the tide. The pines are Araucaria columnaris, sixty metres tall and thin as pencils, which Cook named the island for in 1774, and they lean slightly toward the equator wherever they grow; the island is the land of the Kunié, the Kanak people who own it, and the visit runs on their terms, with the villages, the beaches and the bays under their clans. The Piscine Naturelle at Oro is the famous swim, a shallow basin ringed by pines that the lagoon spills into through a break in the coral, so that the rising tide brings the fish in with it and the water is clear to the sand.
At Upi bay the Kunié still sail carved outrigger pirogues across the turquoise, threading between limestone needles and mushroom-shaped rocks that rise straight out of the water, and the tour ends with a walk through the forest to the pool. Kuto and Kanumera are two bays back to back across a narrow neck of land, one for the sand and one for the snorkelling around a sacred rock that may not be climbed, and the climb to Pic N'Ga, only 262 metres, gives the whole island at once, the pines, the lagoon and the reef. A short path through forest and a stream ends at the cave of Queen Hortense, a high limestone chamber where a Kunié queen sheltered for months in the 1850s while her right to rule was contested. From mid-July to mid-September humpbacks pass close inshore, seen from the headlands. The Île des Pins is an island of trees that grow nowhere else, and the water they stand over is the reason to come.