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Palau

Rambling, Travelogue

Friday Leaving Palau was a relief. The first few months were fun thanks to the thrill of the incredible diving. It really is unreal. The last month or so was a good time because we started cramming in all the touristy things we hadn’t done yet. We visited Peleliu and had an awesome and fun-filled couple of days with Sam. Fletch and I had a relaxing overnight trip to Carp Island Resort where we hiked and kayaked and napped in hammocks on the beach. We saw the breathtaking sight that is Palau from the air. Sam took us wake-boarding. But the

Palau

Culture, Travelogue

This post is dedicated to my Great Uncle who was stationed in Peleliu during World War II. The second assignment of the first marine division hit Peleliu on June 2, 1944. Not being allowed to reveal their location, my uncle wrote a letter home spelling out the first letter of each paragraph with the letters P-A-L-A-U. During the battle, he was shot by a round of artillery, and laid unconscious all night on the beach. The platoon sergeant recognized him and tried to drag him to safety. A sniper hiding in a tree shot two rounds, hitting my uncle in

Palau

Underwater Photography

I had so much fun flipping through the fish book trying to identify the last set of fish pictures that I decided to post another set of them! Plus with 2000 or so odd fish to choose from, 23 just wasn’t a large enough sample size, so I present to you 18 more.  1. Manta Ray - I’ve seen numerous manta rays by now but have yet to have my camera with me on a dive. And I’m sure if I had had a camera, the mantas wouldn’t have shown. But the other day when we were heading out of the

Palau

Activities for Your Bucket List, Paradise Island

Happy New Year! My new year’s resolution for the blog is to post at least one post a week, and multiple posts in a week do not carry over to the next. There, it’s out for the world to know; now I have to stick to it! Last time we visited the states I asked Fletch to look for flights during the day time so that we could see Palau from the air. I love seeing countries from the air when I arrive someplace new. It’s like seeing the live version of the map. If you google image search ‘Palau’ you

Palau

Crazy Cat Lady

Another awesome year is gone! But you know what they say, out with the old and in with the new, and Fletch and I are very, veryveryvery ready to say our goodbyes to Palau. The travel bug is itching and new adventures are calling. A whole year on a rock in the middle of nothing but ocean has given us both a bad case of the island fever. This is a new sensation for me. I know the blog has been a little stagnant as of late and for that I do apologize. My writing is inspired by new experiences and

Palau

Crazy Cat Lady, Romantic

Fletch and I celebrated our two year anniversary this past weekend. Two years already! I am as enamored with him as ever and can’t believe how lucky I am to have found such an amazing man who takes me on wild adventures. When he asked me what I wanted for our anniversary, I told him a cat. That may sound a little odd seeing as we’re only staying here temporarily. Who would adopt an animal and then say goodbye to it right away? There is a wonderful lady here who started taking in all the stray cats and now she runs

Palau

Scuba Diving, Top Wildlife Experiences

Rainy season is finally over! We’ve been able to get out to Ulong Channel again, one of the funnest dive sites here where a ripping current tosses you down a channel like a roller coaster ride. The sun has been shining, we’ve been hanging out in our pool, all has been good. Saturday, my only full day off from yoga training, we signed up for a full day of diving, excited to go enjoy the nice weather. Only the morning arrived and we woke up to the sound of pouring rain. Not just a little raincloud over us either. Our

Palau

Yoga

I’m starting an exciting new journey in my life and it’s one I never expected to begin in Palau. But then again expectations almost never coincide with reality. That is the beauty of travel. There are always surprises waiting. I expected Palau to be a place where I learned some bad-ass spearfishing skills and learned how to live off the land, island style. Instead I found a nation that has developed past the point of existing harmoniously with nature and instead relies on shipments of processed foods for sustenance. C’est la vie. I’ve known for a long time that at some

Palau

Cute Animals

It is mid October and yet rainy season wares on. June, July, and August usually make up rainy season here, but September didn't see an end to the storms, and here we are in October and the winds are still too crazy to venture out with our little boat. It has been months since we last saw Ulong or Sies Corner, as dive boats are more often then not confined to the inner reefs. If I never see German Channel again I will not be disappointed. (German Channel is a famous dive site where people from around the world flock

Palau

Foodie

You’ve all heard me bellyache about the food here by now. The locals live on spam and rice. Finding anything fresh at the grocery store is reason to celebrate. There will be days or weeks even when the produce isles run dry and there is not a veggie to be found. Our meals are planned around what fresh thing we can find in the store. Eggplants grow locally so we make lots of curries with those. Beets occasionally pop up so I’ve learned how to make a mean veggie burger by adding black beans and quinoa. Several other dishes have

Palau

Culture

The Republic of Palau celebrates its Independence Day on October 1. It became a free country on this day in 1994, after being a United Nations Trust Territory under U.S. administration for 47 years. Apparently they learned well from America, because this year they decided to put on a fireworks display! (I say this year because I have no idea whether or not they do this every year). We were very happy to hear this because when you are an American living abroad, the number one thing you miss every summer is fireworks on the fourth of July. Unfortunately a fireworks display

Palau

Scuba Diving

On Tuesday Fletch and I woke up to a tremendous thunder storm. Thunder storms are a rarity in Palau. We get no end of rain, especially this time of year, but tiny islands out in the middle of nowhere such as these experience a saddening dearth of thunder. Something to do with the ocean surface not warming up as much as land does. So low-lying air cannot heat to the capacity that is crucial for thunder storm formation. (That science lesson brought to you by NASA).  Who doesn’t love a good thunderstorm? We woke up to booming and banging and rolling

Palau

Party All Night

10:00 AM I miss the days of being jet lagged and waking up at 6AM ready to roll. I always wanted to be a morning person but it just never worked out for me. I could set five different alarms and sleep through every one of them. Maybe I should look for a job product-testing alarm clocks. Luckily these days I don’t have any reason to set an alarm unless it’s a dive day. Otherwise I roll out of bed around ten. I know, life’s rough. 12:00 PM Normally we’ll cook breakfast at any hour of the day, but Fletch and I have

Palau

Underwater Photography

Palau is home to some 1500 species of fish due to its unique location at the crossroads of the Pacific Ocean and the Philippine Sea. They come in an incredible array of colors and shapes and sizes, from butterflyfish of every color imaginable, to fearsome apex predators such as tuna and sharks. This list is by no means complete, nor is it any sort of ranking of the most common fish. It is merely a selection of photos I pulled from my camera. Some of these I see every day. Some I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of

Palau

Guide Book, Scuba Diving

Choosing dive gear can be a very daunting task when you are new to the sport. It can get fairly expensive and the options are endless. Should you buy a full set straight away? Or accumulate a few pieces at a time as you become more comfortable in the water? Opinions differ greatly on gear so be sure to do your research. Here are my own personal preferences on gear based on five years of diving, two years as a professional, and a couple years in dive retail. First buy your mask, snorkel, and fins. Some dive shops will consider these

Palau

Cute Animals, Scuba Diving, Top Wildlife Experiences

For all you fish enthusiasts out there, I experienced something about as majestic as a hippopotamus ballet today. For all you people who don’t care about fish past what it tastes like raw over a bed of sushi rice, I get that, I do. I feel the same way about birds. Black bird, blue bird, woohoo, just please don’t poop on me. Give me an ostrich or a penguin though and then we can talk. This is a story about the dodo bird of the fish kingdom: the humphead parrotfish. Stock photo of a bumphead parrotfish. (from Adobe Stock) The humphead parrotfish was very

Palau

Culture, Guide Book

If you missed my first set of Palau Fun Facts, you can find those here. Total Land Area of Palau: 459 sq km, or 212 square miles. That is roughly 2.5 times the size of Washington, DC, or one third the size of the Hawaiian island Kauai. Coastline: 1,519 km or 944 miles. That is the driving distance from Boulder, CO to Blaine, MN. Population: 21,168 (2014 est.). That is smaller than the student body of University of Colorado at Boulder, which was was 29,772  in Fall of 2014. Religions:  Roman Catholic 49.4% Protestant 30.9% (includes Protestant (general) 23.1%, Seventh Day Adventist 5.3%, and other Protestant

Palau

Culture

Step 1: Find a map or a sign leading to a cool site like a tomb. Step 2: Locate it. Alternatively, locate said cool thing without any maps or signs showing you the way. Then you're really winning. My dreams of becoming Indiana Jones when I grow up are slowly crumbling as I realize I have zero skill as an archeologist. You might recall when we visited the stone monoliths and never saw any faces in the rocks. Well, today we went on a little road trip to Aimeliik, "the wettest spot in Palau." We meant to visit a tomb and couldn't seem

Palau

Cute Animals, Party All Night

Happy 4th of July to everyone back home! We had a party here last night for all of our American friends and everyone else who wanted to come celebrate with us. We even had a surprise guest who ended up being the life of the party. Meet the praying mantis who came out to celebrate her freedom. We could almost hear her miniature squee of delight when Fletch offered her some cheese. She made a few new friends, always remembering that eye contact is crucial. She accessorized some already stylin' hats.  She tried some of our homemade jungle juice (or hunch punch).  And she even

Palau

Scuba Diving, Top Wildlife Experiences

Ouklemedaol = the Palauan word for manta rays. Yesterday we went diving with Day Dream and for our third dive they brought us to a dive site that they found themselves, and only they know the coordinates to: Secret Stadium. The boat captain and two of the Japanese staff hovered around the GPS as we drove through the stormy seas along the outer reef on the east coast. When we reached the proper coordinates, one of the staff jumped in with a snorkel to go find the morning line, unmarked by a buoy so as to keep the sight hidden and secret.

Palau

Misadventures

All this time I have been referring to the people of Palau as Palawan, because spell-check seemed to like that word over Palauan. Come to find out though, Palawan is the name of an island off of Indonesia (yes, a different island). The proper spelling for the people of Palau is Palauan after all. Someday if I’m really bored I’ll go back and correct all of my blog posts. Until then, my apologies to the people searching the internet for info on Palawan and coming up with my blog. I haven’t been there. Yet

Palau

Misadventures

I know it’s at the top of everyone’s bucket lists to go to the dentist while they're on vacation. I mean what if you start having too much fun and need to tame it down a bit? Getting your teeth scraped should accomplish just that. Overwhelmed by too much beautiful scenery? Listening to a dentist’s drill will help. Or maybe you genuinely enjoy getting your gums stabbed. In that case, go ahead and go to the dentist. Be my guest. Unfortunately, when your life is a permanent vacation, those little necessities like dentist visits don’t go away. Fletch and I realized

Palau

Foodie

“Grand Bleu.” That’s what the sign said above the empty space in the building next to The Taj. It was a very attractive sign too, bold white letters over a blue background, reminiscent of water. It appeared over a month ago and we all wondered what it was going to be. I crossed my fingers that it wasn’t going to be another Chinese souvenir shop full of trinkets. A few weeks later the words 'New York Kitchen Bar' found their place on the sign. The prospect of a new restaurant was a welcome one. Even if the food was as average as

Palau

Culture

Apparently Palau has a problem with England because I picked up a local paper the other day and was stunned to find a quarter of a page dedicated to "Short England Jokes.” Take into account the paper here is only a dozen pages long and is only printed every few days. (My apologies to all of my British and anglophile friends).  Short England jokes Q: How do police know that Princess Diana had dandruff? A: They found her head and shoulders under the steering wheel.  Q: How does every English joke start?  A: By looking over your shoulder.  Q: What’s the difference between a smart English

Palau

Top Wildlife Experiences, Video

As promised to my followers on Facebook, here is the video clip of the pod of whales that greeted our dive boat the other day! (It only took a collective total of seven hours of attempting to upload). We were headed out from the dive shop Day Dream, towards Peleliu for a day of diving, when our boat suddenly veered sharply to the left and someone yelled "pilot whales!" Within moments, our boat was surrounded by bow-dancers. They would come up, several at a time to jump synchronized out of the water, and then leave the space free for the next

Palau

Guide Book, Scuba Diving

We found an amazing new dive shop and it is called Day Dream! I couldn't find them on TripAdvisor to write them a nice review, so I thought I'd highlight a few reasons why they rocked right here. Maybe someone Google searching the diving in Palau will stumble across this and be inspired to check them out. Or maybe this will give some of you ideas of what to look for in a dive shop. Since we have befriended most of the staff at Sam’s Dive Tours, they have sort of turned into our default shop to dive with. Unfortunately, since

Palau

Culture

Yesterday Fletch and I decided to go drive around Babeldaob, first of all because there’s some cool stuff way up north where we hadn’t ventured yet, and second of all because our car battery had slowly been dying due to constantly starting the car and then only driving half a mile. So nice long drive for the car, new territory to explore for us, it was a win win idea. I’ve already described this several times, so sorry if I am beginning to sound like a broken record, but Babeldaob is the big island just over the bridge to the north

Palau

Guide Book

While I’m not a huge car person, I do find amusement in seeing all the funny vehicles that drive the roads when I visit new places, and if I can get a chuckle out of the different cars on the road here, then I figured maybe some of you car people out there would enjoy seeing the cars of Palau. So I sat out on the roof like a total creep yesterday and took pictures of cars as they drove by. I’m probably already sounding like I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, so I went ahead and

Palau

Cute Animals

If you give a crab a mushroom, he’ll let it fall to the ground. If you give a crab another mushroom he’ll let you drop it again. If you hand a crab a mushroom directly into his claw he’ll pinch it, and then back himself into a corner and use it as a shield to protect himself against you. You’ll say, Silly crab, that little slice of mushroom is barely big enough to be a crab-sized hat. And then he’ll play peek-a-boo from behind his mushroom shield and wait for you to be gone. If you let a crab spend the

Palau

Guide Book, Misadventures

In the early hours of the morning I was having this nightmare that I was going to give myself a haircut (something I actually have done many a time before). I washed and shampooed my hair and then the water ran out (it sometimes does that here) before I could rinse all the shampoo out. So I decided that wasn’t a big deal and had wet sudsy hair and went to cut my hair, only to realize that my scissors were dull. I kept trying and trying to cut it, only the scissors were only folding my hair in half

Palau

Crazy Cat Lady

We got a very rude reminder of just how fragile life is the other night. You think everything is perfect and you have all your ducks in a row and then a meteor lands on one of them. We lost little Mars to one of the feral dogs here. I knew they were mean. I didn’t realize they were cold-blooded enough to harm a little kitten though. Mars was playing on the steps to our house (he never went all the way to the bottom by himself) and the white male dog who hangs out in the parking lot came

Palau

Scuba Diving, Sharks, Top Wildlife Experiences

Edit: apologies but the videos attached to this post were lost when transferring between blogging platforms. What I've seen these past couple days is so darn awesome that I'm attempting to upload a few short (and rather poor quality) video clips despite the internet working against me. Please leave feedback on weather or not they work. So the past two days we signed up to go watch some fish porn! Red snapper spawning to be precise. Most marine species of fish produce eggs. Some families such as wrasses, parrot, surgeon, and snappers release these eggs into open water in a behavior known as spawning. This

Palau

Scuba Diving, Sharks

Once upon a time we were headed through the rock islands on our way back to Sam’s Tours after a wonderful day of diving at Ulong Channel (again) and Saies Corner (again). Everyone was happy and relaxed after two fantastic dives. There hadn’t been too much current at Ulong Channel, so this time we had been able to take our time and enjoy the topography rather than being swept along so quickly that our surroundings became a blur. Saies Corner had been fairly relaxed as well, with the current only becoming difficult to work with at the corner itself. I’d

Palau

Guide Book

We’ve mostly just been hanging out and watching HBO and planting trees and tanning our naughty bits in our rooftop kiddie pool so I apologize that there haven’t been a lot of updates as of late. Fletch has been having some work done on our boat and that gets finished today so the adventures should continue shortly! In the meantime, here’s some things you may find interesting about living in the world’s forth smallest country (population: 20,879). The Moon - The moon plays a major role in Palauan culture. The light blue flag with a large yellow disk represents the ocean

Palau

Foodie

Palau is paradise, “the rainbow’s end” as many call it. The scenery is breathtaking, the diving is world-class, the people are hospitable, and the lifestyle is laid back. No place is perfect though, and this blog would get boring very quickly if everything was as wonderful as unicorns that poop rainbows. So I’m going to take a moment to discuss the sad food situation here. Let’s talk produce. It’s pretty much nonexistent here. There are three grocery stores and the produce sections of all three looked like this the first few weeks after we arrived here. They are slightly better stocked

Palau

Crazy Cat Lady, Cute Animals

Uh oh, not another kitten post! Guys, meet Bob. Before you go calling me a crazy cat lady, know that this one isn’t staying permanently, we’re just kitten sitting (I know, that's what they all say). Before we rescued Mars, one of our friends said the cat in her apartment complex had had four kittens that were ready to find homes if we wanted one of them. We were almost tempted, but then little Mars came along. That friend is moving now and needed someone to take care of the last kitten in the litter while she got settled in, so when

Palau

Crazy Cat Lady, Cute Animals

Say hello to Mars!  Fletch and I were saying that the only thing we’re missing here is a cat and then a couple weeks ago we came home from a day of diving and laid down to take a nap. As we were dozing off, our ears started tuning in on some animal’s cry. My first thought was that it sounded just like a baby kitten crying for mama, but the sound just kept going and going and going with no let up. There are some weird birds here that make the same noise over and over again so my next

Palau

Scuba Diving

The other day we got bumped from the Sam’s Tours boat (perks of diving at the local rate) and so decided to check out the other big shop, Fish and Fins. We had no idea where it was though, even after driving pretty much every bit of Koror and Malakal. I figured it had to be someplace really obvious we’d been passing all along that just wasn’t clearly marked. After driving the main road down the length of Koror and Malakal and still not finding it, we started driving around, looking for a poster with a phone number to call.

Palau

Activities for Your Bucket List, Other Water Activities

7:00 AM The alarm goes off. A really obnoxious ehk ehk ehk. Fletch turns it off and I roll over. 7:30 AM There’s a knock on our door. I don’t hear it because I’m sound asleep dreaming about this highly unpleasant person I worked with in a dive shop once, who then left to fill a conservationist position at another dive shop. In my dream she’s selling the island’s few turtles on the black market to Indians and Pakistanis who want the shells. 7:31 AM I wake up to Fletch scrambling out of bed and half asleep mumbling ‘Oh shit.’ He rushes over to the

Palau

Other Water Activities, Travelogue

The radio stations here play very eclectic selections of music. You’ll get a country song, and then a rap song, and then a few Indian chanting songs that will make you scramble to change the station. It’s nice because you never hear the same song twice. Ever. But then the songs you actually want to listen to are about one out of twenty. It’s like pushing the shuffle button on your iPod; you only ever get all the random songs you don’t even know why you have. The other day Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls came on as we were heading to

Palau

Misadventures, Scuba Diving

Our friend Kyle arrived! He’s going to be living with us in our house which is coming along quite nicely. We took him out on his first day of diving here the other day, the second day of diving for Fletch and me. We had to wait until he had his driver’s license because as a local, the price is about half of what it would be otherwise, and diving here is fairly pricy. We were told to show up earlier this time around as our divemaster wanted to do something “special,” so we did, met our two divemasters who were

Palau

Conservation

We got cable installed! We skipped on adding the American news channels package though because all the shows from ABC and NBC and Fox are actually tapes that are sent over from the U.S. They are usually two weeks old by the time they air here. That is if they receive the tapes at all; sometimes they don't get them and so have to show an old (older than two weeks) news program. How funny is that? I mean what's the point of even watching the news if it's two weeks old? If the world turns to chaos someone shoot

Palau

Scuba Diving, Top Wildlife Experiences

A while back a friend introduced me to an imax documentary called The Living Sea. It was shot after spectacular shot of the most stunning, underwater scenery you could dream of. Before departing for Palau, she told me that I should go back and watch that again because apparently it was filmed here. Maybe it was, but those are the kind of shots you can only get from going way out into the middle of the ocean where people don’t go and mess up the reefs on a regular basis, right? I’ve never seen scenery like that in real life.

Palau

Culture

Wednesday morning we woke up bright and early and headed over to the Remax Office. Risong, our new realtor, was going to show us houses on Babeldaob (ba - like a sheep, ble - like the end of bible, dob - rhymes with Bob). We picked up Risong in our rental car and the three of us made our way north. I’m sure I’ve described the layout of the islands by now, but incase you’re just catching up, Koror is the main island where everything is located. Businesses, hotels, government buildings, everything. There is one main road that runs the entire

Palau

Guide Book, Travelogue

We are really starting to get settled in here! I must say, my opinion of this little cluster of islands is improving exponentially by the day. I always give new cultures the benefit of the doubt, they’re different, I’m the one who doesn’t understand. I usually find wonder and excitement in trying to figure out new ways of life. Our first couple of days here though just were not promising. Between the Chinese overwhelming the tourist industry and making it impossible for us to do anything, Bianca standing us up, Ashley’s landlord trying to charge us a fortune for the

Palau

Misadventures, Travelogue

Our first few days here in Palau have been spent desperately trying to find a place to sleep, both short term and for the month or however long we decide to stay after that. Our search started about a month ago. We already had one-way tickets booked and I got online to look for a hotel to stay in for our first week, thinking that would buy us enough time to look for a house or apartment for rent once we arrived. I got on TripAdvisor, typed in some search parameters, and waited for the results. Several hotels came up

Palau

Travelogue

DEN to SFO Fletch and I arrived at the airport at 4am, an early hour that I would normally never see except in a dream. Traveling changes everything though. I’ll wake up at any hour for the promise of a new adventure. In about 50 hours we would be in our new home, Palau. From the research that both of us had done regarding this tiny island nation, neither one of us expected to stop in Palau for more than a couple of months; too many small factors were piling up, but those were just from reading. Reading is a far cry

Palau

Guide Book

Alright, the cat's out of the bag and the one-way tickets are booked. Next stop: Palau! Pa-what? Unless you are a serious dive enthusiast or a World War II veteran, chances are you might not have heard of this tiny island nation, and for good reason. Palau is 1000 miles east of the Philippines, 1300 miles southwest of Guam, and 1900 miles north of Papua New Guinea. Whoa! It's a little intimidating to think of spending a significant amount of time away from any large mass of land, but at the same time it is perfectly fitting. I love the ocean,