Palau Day 12, 13 and the trip home

Friday, December 3rd, was our last day of diving in Palau. We did two dives and a snorkel. Our first dive was at Blue Holes. This was a good dive, but it would have been even better if the sun had been out. It is a great dive for doing silhouette shots of divers and the sun's rays coming through the holes (on a sunny day).

Our second and final dive was at German Channel. We dropped in right on top of the pink anemone and then headed for the cleaning station. We did not see any mantas this time but we ended up seeing about 15 gray reef sharks and many large schools of fish and probably the biggest school of jacks we had seen yet that went from the sandy bottom clear up to the surface.

Our final time in the water was our snorkel at Jellyfish Lake (there is no diving allowed here). It was pretty amazing to swim with millions of jellyfish. They are so delicate. I was trying to move them out of the way as I swam so as not to hurt any of them. Nature is truly amazing.

Saturday, December 4th, was our last day in Palau. We got up early and “cleaned house” and did laundry and got most of our packing done. Then we went over to the Palau Royal Resort to have a “real breakfast” (most mornings we lived on Apple Jacks cereal). The Palau Royal Resort is located adjacent to Neco Marine so we walked down the street a ways and had breakfast in their restaurant. This is a very nice resort that was just celebrating its 5th anniversary. As we were having our breakfast it started to rain (not unexpected for the tropics). Unfortunately, it continued to rain and we had to run all the way back to our room in the rain. Needless to say, we were pretty well soaked by the time we got back.

After changing out of our wet clothes we headed down to the Neco dive shop. Shallum happened to be there so he gave us a ride to the Etpison Museum. We were fortunate enough to have a guided tour of the main and basement levels of the museum. It is quite an impressive collection of artifacts and history of Palau. We also got to meet Elvis the cockatoo (one of Mandy's hand-raised birds who lives at the museum). Elvis really liked Eric and rode on his shoulder on our tour throughout the museum.

We then went up to the second floor of the museum to check out the gift shop where they have a full-size hand-carved traditional Palauan canoe (very impressive). Mandy also has the skeleton of a baby whale that washed up on Neco Island hanging from the ceiling in this level of the museum—it's hard to imagine this was just a baby—it's huge.

After getting some video of Elvis we headed back to our room to get some lunch and finish up our packing. Our transportation was to pick us up at 10 p.m. to take us to the airport for our 1 a.m. Sunday morning flight.

At 10 p.m. our ride came to pick us up. We had all of our luggage ready to go. All we needed to do was take it downstairs and load it in the bus. The tile stairs leading down from our room were very slippery and unfortunately Eric slipped and fell down about four or five stairs (on his backside) before coming to a stop. Needless to say this caused a significant bruise in his sacral area—the largest he has ever had. Unfortunately, this also meant he had to sit on it for the 20+ hour journey home.

Our journey home began as a flight from Palau to Yap, where half the plane had to get off with their luggage (we ended up being the lucky half) and wait in a small room. Eric and I needed to use the restroom here and were totally repulsed by the brown water, both in the toilet and coming from the tap. Rest assured we are now sure we don't want to make a return trip to Yap any time soon.

The next leg of our journey was from Yap to Gaum. When we got to Guam we had to all get off the plane and go through immigration and security—again, and then reboard our plane—again.

The next leg of our journey was an 8-hour flight from Guam to Honolulu, Hawaii. Once we got to Honolulu everyone had to get off the plane and claim their checked luggage and go through customs and security—again, so that we could reboard our plane and take our same seats. As if this was not enough, we had to get them to retag our bags as they had originally tagged them to be put on another flight to Phoenix from Honolulu on US Airways—big hassle. We suspected they had overbooked the flight from Honolulu to Houston and they tried to get us to take a US Airways flight from Honolulu to Phoenix instead of the flight we were originally booked on which was from Honolulu to Houston and then Houston to Phoenix. They claimed it would get us into Phoenix two hours earlier, but it also meant we would have to sit in the un-airconditioned airport in Honolulu for six hours for that flight. We told them no.

So after we reboarded our flight in Honolulu it was another 8-hour flight to Houston. After a relatively short layover in Houston (which gave us time to grab some breakfast) we boarded our final 2-hour 43-minute flight to Phoenix—home at last. Believe it or not our luggage actually made it too—amazing.

This was some journey home. When we left Palau it was night time. When we got to Guam the sun was just coming up. When we reached Honolulu the sun was just going down and when we reached Houston the sun was just coming up again. What a trip!

Palau Day 11 - Thursday, December 2, 2010

Yet another great day of diving. We did three dives today. The first dive was at the wreck of the Iro Maru. The visibility was really bad but it was interesting to dive a true wreck. We did get to see a large school of mackerel. Eric and I have both come to the conclusion that we would not want to spend an entire vacation diving nothing but wrecks though.

The second dive was at Siaes Tunnel. On this dive you drop down the side of a wall and then enter the large tunnel opening and swim through to the other side. The visibility was actually pretty good on this dive.

After our second dive we went ashore on Ulong Island (the site of Survivor Palau) and had lunch. After lunch we wandered down the beach and in the rocks found a couple sea snakes and got some pictures.

Our third dive was at Ulong channel. This was our fourth dive at Ulong Channel but probably the best dive there so far. We got some pretty good shark footage/pictures and saw a bunch of turtles, two lobsters, and tons of nesting triggerfish which were becoming very aggressive protecting their eggs.

Palau Day 10 - Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Today was another three dives. Our first dive was at Ngerechong outer. When we got in the current was really ripping. We saw the usual stuff. There is a giant sea fan coral there. There was some serious current there so there was not really much time to linger and look at stuff.

Our second dive was at Ngerechong inner, which is the inside of the reef. The current was not as strong here so he were able to take our time and look at stuff a little more. We saw all kinds of neat stuff. We saw razor fish, two cuttlefish, a turtle, pipefish, a crocodile fish, a couple leaf scorpionfish, and of course tons of other fish.

Our third dive was at Chandelier cave. Some in our group had never dove the cave, so we broke up into two groups. One group went in and dove the caves and our group spent the whole dive in the shallow water in front of the cave opening looking for Mandarin fish and crabeye gobies. We spent over an hour filming and photographing both and poking around in the reef looking for interesting stuff. A great way to end the day.