Palau - The End Of The Rainbow‏

The 343 islands of Palau, in Micronesia, are known as 'the end of the rainbow'. Visitors seeking a pot of gold wouldn't find one, but they would find a broken necklace of misshapen emeralds, scattered in a shallow turquoise pool. That's Jan's description for the hundreds of limestone karst islands, covered with trees and vegetation, that decorate the lagoons around the main island. The '1000 Places To See..' book describes them as 'emerald mushrooms', and some have that distinctive shape, partly due to the shoreline overhangs that have been carved out by the sea.

But while Palau is beautiful above water, it is fantastic below, and that's the main reason we'd flown through the night to get to this tiny part of the Western Pacific. Few tourists outside of East Asia make it here, unless they are very keen divers.

Normally Keith is the most experienced person (apart from the divemaster) on a dive, but of the nine people on his boat, he was the "novice", and not by a short way. The second-least experienced person had clocked up nearly twice as many dives as him. Everyone was well-travelled and shared experiences of some of the best dive sites in the world. Like Keith, they had all come to Palau because they'd heard it was right up there with the very best and they weren't to be disappointed.

Palau has everything for the diver. Vibrant, colourful coral gardens, spectacular walls and legendary drop offs plunging into the cobalt blue void, incredible visibility, more than fifty wrecks from World War II and millions of tropical fish. In fact, because of its location - the meeting of three major ocean currents - it supports more than 1,500 species of fish and four times the variety of corals found in the Caribbean.

The top dive site is known as Blue Corner. It's what put Palau on the world diving map, when Jacques Cousteau first discovered and publicised the place in the 70s. Anchored to the reef (because of the strong current), divers watch what seems to be a 'best bits of diving' film, as dozens of Grey Reef Sharks, hundreds of schooling Barracudas, elegant Eagle Rays, Giant Trevally, huge Napoleon Wrasse and the occasional Turtle perform on the clear blue screen in front of them. Everyone on Keith's diveboat emerged from the water gushing about Blue Corner.

Another aquatic highlight of Palau is the unique Jellyfish Lake. The lake was once a lagoon but became landlocked, trapping some jellyfish inside. Without any predators, the jellyfish have multiplied, and even adapted to their safe environment by dropping their defensive stingers. There are thousands of them floating up, down and around the lake, following the sunshine. Swimming in the middle of the swarm is a strange feeling. You can't help flinching when you touch one, even when you know they are harmless.

While Palau is a remote location for Americans and Europeans, it's a popular holiday destination for the Japanese, Taiwanese and Koreans. As a result you get large groups of inexperienced divers from those countries. They're the ones crowding around a little turtle, blinding him with the strobe lights on their cameras and breaking the coral they are kicking or lying on. Fortunately the best dive sites are out of the range of novice divers and so are largely still in pristine condition.


The Micronesia leg of this trip, including diving on three different islands (with some pretty awful flight connections), was Jan's birthday present to Keith. She has never got into diving, and certainly wouldn't have enjoyed the mass 'Discover Scuba Diving' course we saw on one lunch-break island stop. The 20-odd participants had only one instructor, and were having their trial dive off a beach known to have a strong current. We heard later that four got separated, drifted out to sea and had to be rescued. 


Even though, for most of the time, the skies were grey and the seas were choppy, Jan was tempted by Keith's tales of underwater adventures, and decided to join him on the diveboat to do a bit of snorkelling. She was rewarded with calm seas, some playful dolphins and 100% cloud cover to stop her getting sun-burnt ! Like the diving, the snorkelling was brilliant, which prompted Jan to comment that 'the beautiful corals and the colourful fish darting around them, are Palau's real pot of gold'. Keith, thinking of the deeper dive at Blue Corner, had to agree that the rainbow didn't end when it hit the horizon, but went much deeper, into the lagoons and reefs around Palau.