It's Budget

Travel For New

Caledonians

From Helen Rousseau,

in Noumea “We don’t have a barrel of money, But we’ll travel along, singing a song, Side by side . .

This is one of the songs being used on the French radio, perhaps unwittingly, to lure New Caledonian travellers overseas, on their tight foreign currency budget.

The song has been played to adver tise UTA French Airlines latest (pay in-francs) overseas travel—the Ame rica tour.

Biggest problem for Caledonians flying overseas is to arrange their trip with the minimum of foreign currency expenditure. Since the French franc devaluation last August, Caledonian tourists’ allowance has been reduced from SA27O to $237 for one year’s travel.

The greatest effort to overcome this problem has been made by UTA, which is offering prepaid all-inclusive overseas excursions. By this means, three groups of Caledonians have been able to plan visits to Expo ’7O in Japan, on a four-week air ex cursion.

Other group travel is regularly organised to neighbouring islands such as New Hebrides, New Zealand, Norfolk and Fiji.

However, more distant horizons are now opening up, particularly fol lowing canvassing among the nickel plated or cattle-rich of the inland.

In June, the first group of nineteen inhabitants of the Bourail region flew off for the USA.

Their three-week tour had been carefully planned so that the precious foreign currency would only be re quired for meals and personal ex penses.

Visitors agree that the capital, Noumea, looks bustling and free spending enough these days, but UTA has organised publicity films inland, where the airlines representatives have sniffed out millions of francs stowed away in modest villages.

Francs earned from mountains of nickel, acres of cattleland or shop keepers thriving from both.

It looks as if the overseas airlines —PanAm, Qantas and Air New Zealand—will have to work up some good foreign-currency saving tours too, if they want to keep the Cale donians moving.