What lies at the end of the rainbow?

The Palauan islands are described by their nationals as “the end of the rainbow” and they are not very far from the truth, although pretty far for almost everyone else on the globe. Luckily, for us it was a mere four and half hour flight.

Palau is not so much a beach destination as it is a divers’ paradise. Most hotels and resorts are gathered on and around the island of Koror, which is itself and like most of the Palauan islands: rocky! The islands in the Southern Lagoon on the other hand, have nice white sand stretches, but imply a boat ride of at least 45 minutes from Koror.

One of the beaches in the Southern Lagoon

Our trip to Palau lasted 9 days and it started off rather badly. Not only we had to rush out of the house to get the airport after waking up simply too late (damn you jet lag!), but we were also stood up by our guesthouse staff, who forgot to pick us up at the airport in Koror. The interesting thing about Koror is that there is a curfew and at 4 am in the airport (or anywhere else on the island) there is absolutely no taxi that could take us to the guesthouse. Fortunately a Palauan couple who had come to drop off some relatives offered to help and take us to town – we must have looked hopeless. Palauan friendliness: check!

The guesthouse had mixed up the dates and our room was not even ready. We finally hit the sack at 5:30 am and slept a few hours until breakfast. We spent the rest of the day scouting Koror, sipping the national beer Red Rooster (to put it politely, not the best one we have had) and tasting the local food, which revolves around taro, fish and crab. Though the best discovery was kangkung (water spinach) sautéed with garlic (I asked them to skip the bacon).

Red Roster Amber

Japanese food is widely available and with high quality too. The American influence is also quite visible, be it on the supermarket shelves or even more obviously, in the contents of your wallet – the national currency is the USD.

Palau is making huge efforts to preserve its marine life and it appears among the top dive sites in the world. Most of the dive shops have Japanese staff, since Japanese represent the majority of tourists coming to the islands. The other nationality integrating the labour force, especially in the tourism sector is the Philippines. This makes it hard to meet Palauans – but anyway, they are only 20,000 in total and many are studying or working abroad, mainly in the US, we were told, so they should be in some endangered species list.

We started diving the next day, with some pretty awesome sights. We swam with sharks for the first time – white-tip and grey reef sharks, and saw some “fishy” garden eels pretending they were plants, as well as snappers, trevallies, gobies and barracudas.

Diving sites

The next day we went on a “super rock island tour”, which gave us an overview of the southern islands, and scrapped some stuff off the bucket list, like swimming in a lake full of jellyfish! Scuba diving is not allowed since the bubbles can harm the jellyfish. To snorkel in the lake a permit of $100 is required, which is valid for 10 days. This is currently the only marine lake open to the public.

Milky Way

The Milky Way was also included in the itinerary. The white clay at the bottom of this cove gives the water a flashy turquoise blue and visitors scrub their bodies with it. However we saw once a documentary where it was said that it was not really clay one can find at the bottom… so enjoy the spa at your own risk.

From Koror we traveled onward to Carp Island, where we could for the first time lie on the beach, and it was gorgeous! The dives kept on coming and bringing amazing experiences: seeing the mantas in the German Channel made our day and the variety of fish in the Blue Corner, rated by some expert magazines as the best diving spot in the world, was simply unbelievable. The currents are strong and change rapidly, so they are not for the faint of heart.

Carp Island at low tide

Back in Koror, we said goodbye to the water spinach and almost went nuts with the Internet connection. It’s slow all over Palau (well, not really all over, but in a small fraction of Palau!) and it feels like going back to the 56k modem times.

We took the red-eye back to Seoul and put on the winter coats again, which were tragically waiting for us at the airport. Show’s over!