We went to have a look at the airport in the daylight. I might have seen smaller, but I can't tell you where. Be sure to have US $20 in cash or travelers checks when you leave for the airport tax. They don't accept plastic or other countries' currencies.

If you take the left turn to the airport, you'll find the road turns to dirt just past it. Babeldaob is quite hilly, so you go up, down, around, and over hills on a narrow, rust-red road firmed with crushed coral in places. You get a few fleeting views of the ocean from the tops of hills, but unfortunately most of the road is not so interesting.

Although we had seen a map that showed a road going all the way up to the northern tip of the island, we found that the road ended, of all things, on a reclaimed mangrove flat that had been filled in with crushed coral. My guess was that, since we had just passed a big coral pile, the round reclaimed area was a place for the dump trucks to turn around and that the crushed coral was for surfacing newly created road through the jungle. Anyway, it was the end of the road, so it seemed that if the car was going out of the state of Airai, it would have to be on a boat.

Here's a coral pile with a front-end loader on top, and, yes, I'm scraping when I start adding pictures like this. No pun intended.

On the first page I showed you a section of the main road across Koror. The biggest shopping center on it is called the WCTC, and it has a big supermarket downstairs and a Ben Franklin's upstairs. Although I remember Ben Frankiln's as a dime store in the States, it's about the closest you'll come to a department store in Palau to my knowledge.

Palau does not have any traffic lights at all. OK, there are two, but they only flash yellow and there is a traffic cop directing traffic below them in the daytime. It's pretty neat driving around a place with no traffic lights in this day and age.

Can't tell you why, but there are a lot more pink buildings in Palau than you see in other parts of the world. Maybe that color's "coral," not pink? That's a store and karaoke bar, not a private house.

Palau doesn't seem to have much industry beyond tourism, or maybe they keep it well hidden. There is some mining, and a local brewery, although most empty cans I found strewn around seemed to be Budweiser. Although there may not be much industrial development, there are tons of grocery and convenience stores, like this one on the main road not far from our hotel.