Palau

Arrival
and
Hotels

In March, 2002, my family and I (I'm Glenn, in case you found this page through a search engine and not from my home page) went to Palau. So where is Palau, anyway? If you know, you're probably a diver, World War II buff, or a geography teacher. Otherwise, I need to tell you that the Republic of Palau is an island country due east of the Philippines' southern island of Mindanao. I came to know of it when I started diving, and rumor had it that the two best diving spots in the world were Palau and the Red Sea.

The Republic of Palau is made up of hundreds if not thousands of islands. When most people say they went to Palau, they actually mean they stayed in the state of Koror, and maybe on the island of Koror, as we did. The map above is a scan of the map I got from the tourist office there. I resized it and cut off the legend so that it would work better on this page, but if you would like to see what those numbers mean and maybe print it out, just click on it for the full version.

In these pages, I've tried to convey what a trip there is "really like," and I hope I'll either help you to decide whether to go there or not, or to give you an idea of what awaits you if you've already decided to go.

	If you want to get to Palau, chances are excellent that you're going to get there on Continental, and that means you'll be going via Guam. We had a four-hour layover in Guam, and we learned that since the events of September 11, 2001, even transiting passengers have to go through immigration. Well, since we had to do that, we decided to keep on going out the door and do a little shopping in Guam. This may not interest everyone, but for this American living in Japan, the unscheduled trip to K Mart was welcome.
We arrived in Palau late at night and had no idea where we were the next morning, as we couldn't see much out the windows of the van that took us to our hotel in the dark. The next day we rented a car (US $40 for a Nissan Sentra from King's Car Rental) and set out to get to know the island and decide if the hotel we'd booked on the Net was worth staying at. My first impression was that the island of Koror was bigger than I had expected, but this was because we made so many stops to explore. When we doubled back and just drove across it, we were able to go from Icebox Park (end of the road at the southern tip of Malakal Island - see #35 on the map above) to the bridge to Babeldaob (the island with the international airport) in about 15 minutes.
	One of our first stops was the Palau Pacific Resort. A lady I'd spoken with briefly on the plane had told me that it was the place to visit, even if you don't stay there. It really was a lovely setting, and I'd heard the snorkeling was quite good there. We walked all around the grounds and then found out at the desk that it would take $250 a night to get us into a bottom-end room. If you've got the financial wherewithall to shell out $250 a night for a room, I'd say you would not be disappointed with a stay at PPR, which is what everybody there calls it.
From PPR you can look up and see these bungalows, on the hill overlooking it. These belong to the hotel called "The Carolines." After I took this picture, we drove up there and took aclose-up look. Yep, the view from up there is great, and if you're the type whose dream vacation is going to exotic tropical destinations to sit on the porch of a bungalow and read a good book all day away from it all, I think you'd be very satisfied at The Carolines. I would need a car rental company with weekly rates to keep me from feeling trapped on the top of that hill, though. Call it a flaw in my character. The Carolines are actually much higher up than this composite picture would lead you to think, because I squashed two full-size pictures to make it, and that makes the hill look lower.
	As we continued across the island of Koror, we crossed a few small bridges and came to Icebox Park on Malakal Island. From there you have nice views of some of the Rock Islands, and there are barbecues and picnic tables free and open to the public. We happened to forget our charcoal and lighter fluid, so we just went to the Mini Mart and got plates of takeout food for a little picnic. It's nothing special for supermarkets in the States to have deli food, but it was unexpiected for us to find ladies with five choices of main course in chafing dishes at reasonable prices just a minute from Icebox Park. Later we discovered that this seems to be the norm in Palau; just about any supermarket sells a piece of fried chicken and your choice of main course with rice to go. Consequently, we didn't eat in so many restaurants while there. The snorkeling is also quite good from Icebox Park, as you can see here. More on that later.
After lunch we started back across the island, as I said before, until we came to a sign for the Hotel Nikko Palau. Now when I hear the Hotel Nikko I have come to expect a 5-star joint set up for Japanese on package tours, but what I found was an unpretentious-looking hotel that made me wonder if a local owner had decided to use the famous name until litigation became imminent. I was later told that the Nikko was about the first hotel on Koror, and used to be called the "Continental." The view of the Rock Islands from the Nikko is so gorgeous that we were ready to pull up stakes and move in. We didn't think the view was worth the $150 plus plus price tag, though, espacially because they had no pool for the kids. A taxi driver told me that the only three hotels on Koror that have pools are PPR, Sunrise Villa, and Waterfront Villa. By the way, although it wasn't at all obvious to me at first, a little exporation revealed that you can drive right down to the water's edge from the Nikko, and you could snorkel from there. I didn't though, so I can't tell you how it would be.	<
	So where did we stay? We stayed at the Waterfront Vlla. We found it on the Net and considering how difficult it was to find our way back in the car after we'd left, that would probably the only way we ever would find it. From the main road across the island, you turn north where you see the sign for it next to the Mobil station, turn right at the first intersection, then go through Palauan residential area until you come to the pink house, turn left and go past the basketball court until the pavement ends and you think you should turn around and go back - you get the idea. The web site says "coffee is free" but the help have obviously never seen the web site and have never been told about it either, because they'll charge you for the coffee you get with a Continental breakfast, a first for us, and then look at you cross-eyed when you ask them what "coffee is free" means. I know it's not a big deal, but we're coffee drinkers, and after we read that on the Net we didn't pack any coffee as we usually do. Later, they set things right.
Aside from that minor irritation, plus their sticking us in a room four flights of stairs from the pool and then stonewalling against our moving, even though all the rooms on the floor above were free, we stayed with them. The room we had was in the building just left of this picture, two floors below Captain Finn's restaurant and just above the water. Although there is no beach, at high tide the water almost laps against the building, so Waterfront Villa is not a misnomer. The room was adequate, the kids enjoyed watching Cartoon Network on cable, the guy that tidied our room daily and indeed all the hired staff were more than polite, and Arnold, the sleeves-up, hands-on owner went out of his way to book things for us and get us discount prices. We stayed there for US $76 a night, about half what other places quoted us. I've seen misleading web sites and pamphlets that come close to false advertising in my day, but if you compare the picture on their web site to this one I took, I think you'll agree that's what it really looks like
Palau's Rock Islands are world famous and no trip there should be without a tour. Our tour is on page two.