Palau: Diving, Swimming with Jellyfish, and Shopping at the State Prison

This trip has been a steady progression in comfort from the Spartan accommodations in the Marshall Islands, to the rugged and underdeveloped Micronesian state of Chuuq, to the traffic and chain restaurants of Guam, and finally now to Palau. Nice roads, streetlights, sidewalks, boutique stores and restaurants, numerous resorts catering to a large number of Japanese tourists mark a real change from the prior stops. Palau is a fantastic tourist destination. The attraction is the natural unspoiled beauty of the place, which is a tricky thing to manage for a destination. Palau seems to strike just the right balance of welcoming visitors while keeping attractions like the rock islands and Jellyfish Lake pristine. We spent a full day kayaking in Risong Bay around various rock islands and I never once saw a piece of trash or evidence of human presence. There is even very visible and accessible “string coral” that is hundreds of years old and can be made into pricey “black coral” jewelry, yet it remains untouched. When I think about the trash floating around parts of the main islands of Chuuq, or the bleached coral off of the Seychelles main island, or the sewage-linked algae bloom off of Boracay in the Philippines, or, well, almost any site in China, the untouched beauty of Palau is all the more remarkable. The only place we’ve been that rivals this place is a far-flung atoll in the Maldives. And yet here I’m talking about the main island and surrounding area in Palau. The coral is brilliantly colored and teeming with life, the land is clean and green; it’s just really beautiful. Add to that some nice hotels in a range of budgets and some great food, and Palau has been a really fantastic stop.

We spent three days with Sam’s Tours, one of the bigger and well-known outfits on the island. We did two days of diving, and got our Nitrox certification in the process, something Sam’s pushes a little bit. It gave us more generous bottom time and seemed to leave us less wiped out after a day of diving. The highlight of our scuba diving was called “Blue Corner,” which has appropriately been recognized as the best diving site in the world a few times. We were there on a “bad” day, but there were still numerous sharks, Napoleon Wrasse, turtles, and massive schools of fish of all sorts. One of our dive days also stopped by for snorkeling at “Jellyfish Lake,” a saltwater lake where thousands of (nonstinging) jellyfish live in a very isolated ecosystem. We also kayaked for a day and snorkeled in some private bays among the Rock Islands. Our last day, today, we did a little shopping and roamed around town a bit.

A sought after handicraft in Palau are carved wooden “storyboards” that depict classic island mythology. The interesting thing is that local prisoners make the best storyboards and in Palau they are able to sell them in a prison gift shop. Other gift shops around town have (often inferior) storyboards for sale at a significant markup. Our plan was to go direct to the prison, which was an interesting experience. When you go in through this one marked entrance a few corrections officers yell a bit and they had a lady inmate that came and they unlocked a very densely packed shop with storyboards. All of the prices were pretty inflated and we had been informed that you could likely get them down to about half of the marked price. Every storyboard had a prisoner’s last name, the name of the mythological story, and then an item number. After browsing a while it was obvious there were two or three prisoners who made (by far) the best storyboards. The rest were mediocre or poor by comparison. The lady said that to negotiate price on any of the nice ones she’d need to call the artist and have them come down. So we took note of a few of the best pieces by the convict we thought did the best work and had her call him down to the shop. It didn’t take long to get down to a reasonable price, and, well, that was that. It’s just a bit of an unusual transaction. What was our guy in for? Who knows, but he’d been there long enough to really turn out a lot of storyboards and hone his craft.

We’d really love to come back here for another visit. I gotta say I’m a bit bummed to leave.

Palau Slideshow: