We landed in Palau at 1 AM yesterday morning, after a waiting through a 3 hour delay in Guam. Not a great start… but things went very quickly very steeply uphill from there, because we got through customs and found our bagage quickly, and then we were greeted by a very nice lady from our hotel, and we received our first ever lei, which smelled wonderful. After 20 minutes or so we arrived at our room, which is actually an individual wooden cabin on a hilltop, with a lovely view of the ocean. We found that out the next morning at breakfast, which was served on or our own little balcony. The hotel had been good enough to confirm our dive trip with the tour operator, so we could dive on Friday like we had planned.
Usually, diving is much, much better than the boat ride to the dive site, but in this case, we found Palau to be so beautiful that it’s a tie, at least. Palau consists of lots of coral islands ranging from tiny to tall, and these are all overgrown with lush green vegetation. The ocean shows a wide variety of colors in the sun, ranging from bright turquoise to dark blue with all shades in between, and we were stunned by the shear beauty of it all.
I am writing this after our second day of diving and although I personally still think that diving in the Maldives is better, we have had good fun under water – there seem to be quite a lot of reef sharks, we’ve seen a turtle, eagle ray, and best of all: a manta ray! And we’re diving with nitrox again, which is a pleasure. Connectivity on Palau is fairly scarce though, so it may be a while until our next posting.
