Palau scuba diving trip report – an awesome diving adventure

Getting to Palau

This was a pretty good sized crew, 29 total.  Most of us where traveling from Honolulu, though we had a couple meeting us there from Germany and a couple from Korea.  The departure was a little over an hour late out of Honolulu, and but the time was well spent celebrating birthdays with shots at the airport bar!  The birthday boy held up the party torch for the rest of the trip, lol.  Not so cool was what awaited us in Guam.  We were one and a half hours late getting in with a one hour connection, and the plane do Palau didn’t wait for us!  Thanks United, you suck.  However, we got the work shortly that Sam’s Tours was going to make up our two missed dives with extra days of three tank diving – our heros.  Upside: we got to spend a day in Gaum, which was a first for most of us.  Tumon Bay Perserve was the highlight, with a side order of considerable bar hopping.  A good lesson here in travel insurance, those that had it will get about a $500 travel refund for missing day of their trip.  Trip insurance is always recommended!

The Rock Islands of Palau

Having arrived in Palau a day late, it was time to get to the dive shop and set up to go diving.  For many this was the first trip to Palau, so I was pretty excited for them, of course because the diving is awesome, but until you have had a high speed boat ride through the rock islands of Palau, you don’t really understand just how beautiful the rock islands are.  The video here doesn’t really do it justice, but it does give a taste.

There are plenty more pictures of the rock islands in the embedded FaceBook album at the end of this trip report, but the group shot was taken on one of the rock islands that we had lunch, and another one was was a deserted beach that looked like something out of a honeymoon fantasy.

Scuba Diving in Palau

The wow of Palau.  It is a little bit hard to describe how great the diving is in Palau without going on and on, so I’m going to give a few short phrases stream of consciousness style:

Manta rays on check out dives, giant wrasse sitting on your shoulder, fields of sharks floating by  while hooked onto reef flying in the water, dropping through holes in the reef to tunnels that drop down 60ft and open to huge caverns, hammerhead on a wall dive, coral gardens with massive swim throughs, walls of soft coral, schools of barracuda, horders of red tooth triggers, a virtual fish wall of the drop offs, massive mounds of lettuce coral bigger than buildings, macro nudies, dragonets, and flatworms, stunning giant clams, disco clams, massive jacks, tuna cruising wall dives, leatherback turtles, huge black coral trees, groupers, octopus, eels, sea fans  – it is all so much.  It really is one of the worlds greatest places to dive.  We ended up with three boats for the group, with 8-10 on each boat.  Some people bounced around, some stayed on the same boat. Again, there are so many good pictures, check out the photo album at the bottom of this page.

Jellyfish Lake

No scuba diving trip to Palau is complete without a trip to Jellyfish Lake.  The jellyfish have evolved to not have stingers and the get their energy from a brown algae that they hold inside their body.  By day, the jellyfish congregate in the sun to allow the algae to photosynthesize, and by night the travel down into the lake to the hydrogen sulfide layer (poisonous and that’s why it is a snorkel only trip) to get nutrients.  Great experience once you get away from the loading dock and hordes of Chinese tourists.

Jellyfish Lake clip

 Dining and Day Trips

The Taj

So one of the places that I found on an early trip to Palau was The Taj, some on the best Indian food I’ve had tucked away in a quite little corner of the planet.  This year the Taj had expanded to include a lounge and bar area, and it turns out that our dive Guide Alli has some serious pipes!  She plays in a band called the Squids and gave quite a show.  Followed by quite a little dance party lead by our group and joined in by many others.  Me and Sheila were first on the dance floor.  The locals said they couldn’t remember the dance floor being every that crowded.  The food at the Taj though, the food.  Be careful of the vindaloo though, it was so spicey for Michael that he had to get up from the table and walk it off.

Peleliu history tour

Most of the group spent the last non diving day taking a fascinating tour of Peleliu island, the site of a major battle in the Pacific in World War II.  The Japanese were very, very dug in when the Americans came to take the island and the group enjoyed the day tremendously.

Dinner at the Chiefs House

Turns out the Jake is the son on a Palauan Chief!  He is stationed in Korea, but he and his family were generous enough to invite us to one of their family properties for a feast.  And man was it a feast.  Turns out that brother Ted was a chef at Duke’s for years and you combine that with real Palauan cooking and we had a treat that was amazing.  Fresh fish, stuffed crab, taro three ways, and much more, it was amazing and so generous of them to have us into their home.  Perfect end to the trip.  Thanks Jake!