My dad is an avid scuba diver who has traveled all over to dive, and he believes that the best place to dive in the world is Palau.  So when we saw that it’s a popular 5 day holiday destination for many Taiwanese, with reasonable ticket and hotel package deals leaving from Taipei, we signed up and went, foregoing some of our time in our next stop China.  My dad warned us though that if we went to Palau early on in our diving careers, it would be very hard to match the experience later on.  Though I really hope that’s not the case, after a few days of blowing bubbles here I’m almost sure that it is.

We did a bit of research online to find the best dive outfit in town, and Sam’s seemed to be the one that most of the English speaking clients went with.  When we got there we realized we were in a real diver’s shop.  On our boat alone there were a couple of marine biologists and a US Navy diver.  Though the Taiwanese may fly here to relax for 5 days as it’s pretty close to them, it is really out of the way for most people.  There aren’t many nice beaches or resorts either so it’s not much of an international well known holiday destination like Bali.  The people that make it here are divers, and serious ones at that.

Our first dive was at a site called the Ulong Channel, and there we saw an unreal array of colourful soft corals and sea life.  When I saw my first reef shark diving in the Philippines previously I got really excited, as did everyone else we were with as it supposedly was a rarity.  At the Ulong Channel, I saw 5, thinking that was amazing.  Our next dive was at Siaes corner where we did something Di and I have never done.  The divemaster gave each of us a reef hook, which is basically a rope about 4 feet long with one end attached to your BCD and the other end a hook which is supposed to attach to the reef.  This way you are hooked down into position, with the current having no effect on you so you can enjoy the view without expending much energy.  As I looked at all 8 of us divers hooked in, it reminded me of a bunch of kites sailing effortlessly in the air.  However, at any one point in time there were about 10 reef sharks circling around us.  The kite-in-the-air analogy soon gave way to bait-on-a-line in my mind.  The white tip reef sharks look friendly enough, but the grey reef sharks are quite a bit bigger and fatter, and can look quite menacing, especially with their icy-cold eyes.  Though I knew that they are rarely dangerous, I will fully admit I was a little bit nervous with that many in our midst.  We later unhooked and just let the current carry us as we glided over the rainbow coloured coral with marine life teeming all around us.  We even saw giant 500 pound clams!  After diving everyone just chilled at the bar at Sam’s, drinking beers and telling stories.  It was a great day to say the least.

The next day, September 3, was Di’s birthday, and for her present I planned with the sea gods to give us an unforgettable day.  Thankfully they delivered.  Our 2 scheduled dives were the Blue corner and the German Channel.  We hopped into the German Channel first and were told to keep our fingers crossed as there is a manta cleaning station (as in manta’s come here to get cleaned by other little sea creatures) here, and we were dying to see a manta ray.  It’s not manta season yet so we were actually the only boat there, though we were told when it’s high season you can easily see over 20 boats at this spot.  Anyways, we descended to the ocean floor, about 20 metres deep, and were instructed to rest on the sandy bottom and wait.  We stayed for about 5 minutes with no luck, so we went to dive around a bit to check out the coral and fish.  About 10 minutes later we returned to our manta watching spot, and almost immediately the most amazing creature I have ever seen slowly glided over us.  Its wing-span was easily over 8 feet, and it moved effortlessly as it gracefully flapped its “wings”.  The picture above is of a manta, unfortunately we had to jack this picture from another website as we didn’t have an underwater camera but felt that a pic of a manta was really needed for this blog post.  The one we saw kept circling around us, and if I reached out my arm just a little bit I could have felt its underbelly.  Di was so excited she kept shaking my arm every time it slowly approached and went over or by us.  It looked as though it was conjured up in the pages of a Harry Potter novel (I admit I like Harry Potter movies), one of those creatures with magical (I admit I like magic), hypnotic powers.  It graced our presence for about 5 minutes before it disappeared into the ocean, and as we returned to the boat a baby manta with its puny 4 foot wing span came by to say hi.  For almost everyone on the boat it was their first manta experience, and the excitement was definitely palpable.  I would have been sceptical that our second dive could have matched the German Channel experience, but we were going to the Blue Corner, constantly ranked as one of the top 10 dives in the world.  The blue corner is a wall dive, and once you get in the water you immediately descend with a large coral wall on your right.  We followed this wall for about 20 minutes before getting above it to once again hook into the reef.  As we followed the wall we saw a spectacular collection of fish and coral.  Large schools below us were circling in a tornado-like fashion.  When we hooked in we were again surrounded by a lot of sharks.  I was the one hooked furthest out on the reef at the edge of the wall drop off, and one large grey reef shark keep coming by me, the last time at arm’s length.  Yup, I won’t lie, I was a little scared.  Thankfully I’m a yellow belt in karate and a tae bo aficionado so that shark would have had nothing on me if it charged.  In addition to the sharks there were large schools of all sorts of fish: barracudas, Moorish idols, angel fish, triggerfish, so many that I can’t come close to naming even a fraction of them.  The comical-looking and massive Napoleon fish would swim around us as well.  If it weren’t for that minor issue of running out of air I could have stayed hooked into that reef for a long time.  What an unbelievable day of diving! 

I even forgot to mention that before those 2 dives we went to Jellyfish lake, a lake that formed a long time ago when land isolated a body of water from the ocean on an island.  Over time the salinity of the lake decreased and the jellyfish were able to survive and thrive while other organisms died out.  As they had no natural predators, they eventually evolved to lose their stingers.  Snorkelling in the midst of thousands of these bobbly, bouncy creatures was kind of weird, yet really fun.  They ranged between 3 millimetres wide to about 15 cms, with mushroom like caps.  Though they differed in size, everything else about them looked identical.  With a little kick of your fin the current produced would send these little creatures into what looked like a death spiral.  Once they got out of it though, they would just continue on bobbing, as if nothing happened.  Pretty cool.

As you aren’t allowed to dive 24 hours before boarding a plane, we really only got to log 4 dives.  At least we now know how close this diver’s paradise is to Taiwan, and with proper planning, we’ll be able to do a lot more next time.  I hope the experience here doesn’t cause me to be disappointed with dives everywhere else; if it does, my dad can tell me he told me so.

As a little addition to this entry, on our flight back to Taipei from Palau I ended up sitting beside an older Austrian Biology prof who was diving in Palau for 10 days.  As we chatted he got excited hearing about our one year adventure, as he had done the same in 1980.  The fire lit up in his eyes as he told me about his experiences and the incredible adventures he had back then.  It was inspiring to listen to his stories, see his enthusiasm, and hear his encouraging words.  I wonder if one day I’ll be that same older dude on a plane.