The Île des Pins is an island off the southern tip of New Caledonia where columnar pines line every shore, and not one of them is standing straight. Cook pines lean, and wherever in the world they grow they lean toward the equator — southward in the northern hemisphere, northward in the southern one, and steeper the further away they are. A study that measured them across five continents found an average lean of about eight and a half degrees, and could not say why. Here that means every beach has a row of dark spires tilted the same way above white sand. The island is the land of the Kunié, the Kanak people who own it, and the visit runs on their terms. The coral islet in Kanumera Bay is tabu: you may swim around it, but nobody climbs it.
The famous swim is the Piscine Naturelle at Oro, where the lagoon spills through a break in the coral into a shallow basin ringed by pines. The rising tide brings the fish in with it, and you float face-down in water barely deeper than you are tall while shoals drift past a few centimetres beneath you. At Upi Bay the Kunié still sail carved outrigger pirogues between rock needles and mushroom-shaped stacks, and with no engine there is nothing to hear but water and canvas. Most crossings end at a forest path that walks you on to the pool. Kuto and Kanumera sit back to back across a narrow neck of land, one a broad white strand and the other curling around that sacred rock. A short path through forest ends at a high limestone chamber where a Kunié queen sheltered for months, her right to rule contested because she was a woman. The cave still carries her name. From Pic N'Ga, only 262 metres, you get both coasts and the reef drawing its white line around the lagoon. From up there the lean shows on a whole island: every ridge of spires on both shores tipped the same few degrees north, toward the equator.