Palau: Water

We went scuba diving in Palau: Daniel, Alma, Marco, Fab, Abda, Deb, Max, Jim.

Palau is a marvelous group of islands in the North Pacific, between the Philippines and Guam. The diving is outstanding, and the natural beauty of the place just adds to the experience. Here are just some of the things we saw:

Turtles

Nemo

Sharks (reef and white tip, I believe). We did a couple of drift dives (i.e., with fairly strong current, where the boat drops you at one end, you just control your buoyancy and let yourself float, and then the boat picks you up at the other end) - one glides over this alien landscape like superman. Very entertaining.

And then, for the sharks, we used reef hooks: a rope that you clip into your dive gear (the BCD) on one end, and hook into the reef on the other end. Then, one just hangs in there while the current flows past. We did this at a drop, where the current came from the deep, and presumably brought up lots of tasty fish food, so lots of fish were there, and that in turn attracts sharks. So, we were just floating there, mesmerized, watching sharks swimming back and forth like on a massive IMAX 3D screen, except that it was even better, because it was in fact real just in front of our eyes. In 3D. Awesome.

Coral.

There is also some wreck diving. Here's a gun, somewhere else we saw some old bottles of rum (or so, the label wasn't legible…)

Cuttlefish. It does change colours.

Caves.

Crazy divers.

Air bubble rings, or whatever you call them.

Awesome sunsets on the way back from the dive sites. That was Palau under and on the water.

Palau: Land

There's also plenty to do for non-divers. Some of us did a tour inland:

A traditional men's house. Here's the front of it:

Looks like they're mostly discussing seafood. Or so. (Incidentally, Palau has traditionally been a matrilineal society. 

 

The new Capitol building in the capital, "Melekeok", on the charmingly named largest island of Palau: Babeldaob. The whole country has just a bit over 20 000 inhabitants, and an area of 450 km^2, which is less than half that of Hong Kong (including Kowloon and New Territories - HK island itself is just 80 km^2).

Palau was briefly a German colony from 1899 to 1914 (as part of Deutsch-Neuguinea). (Note: Qingdao on the Chinese coast was a German colony during pretty much the same time, and still has the biggest brewery (Tsingtao) in China… ). Anyways, then it came under Japanese control, then during WW II under American, later UN control, and became independent 1994.

 

This is a Japanese plane wreck from World War II on the beach (visible are the upper part of the propeller and the radial engine). I used the propeller to crack open a coconut. Not easy.

 

Beautiful beaches. Really.

 

 

 

Sunset. That was Palau: Land. 

Palau: Air

And finally, a few pictures from the air (I took a helicopter ride). Here the natural arch in the Rock Islands, Palau.

 

 

More of the rock islands:

 

 

 

Honeymoon beach from above:

Honeymoon beach from below:

German channel:

 

Beaches:

 

 

This is the amazing jellyfish lake. You can see the jellyfish concentrated in the upper right corner of the lake (the slightly yellow tinge); apparently they migrate from east to west of the lake every day. The larger dots are people snorkeling and swimming towards the jellyfish (scuba diving is prohibited, one reason being that the lower layers of the lake contain poisonous gas that can be absorbed through the skin…)

The jellyfish, in the absence of predators, have evolved not to sting (or rather, their sting is not really dangerous or noticeable). It is quite bizarre to float through them. They feel nice and squishy.

 More islands and beaches:

 

 

 

 The helicopter pilot did a low pass through this "valley". Very remarkable (the passenger in the back seat screamed). It is reminiscent of the landscape in Avatar.

 

We saw a manta ray from the helicopter. 

Here is another remarkable sight: the Milky Way Lagoon. A beautiful small cove with a bottom of white clay/mud, apparently created by snails feeding on limestone.

 

 

 

 The water has an amazing color, and it's fun to smear the mud all over yourself (also supposed to be good for your health and your skin...) 

 This was Palau. Awesome diving and snorkeling and boating and flying. Wonderful holiday.

Diving in Cebu

Last weekend I was in Cebu, Philippines, for some diving with a few friends. Very, very nice.

We spent the day on this interesting kind of outrigger boat, apparently called Bangka:

They're fairly fast, and very smooth on the water. (I assume that this outrigger is used (rather than keel boats as in HK) because on one hand, there's lots of space, but on the other hand, the water can be very shallow.) Anyway, the water and weather were brilliant:

So, we went on two dives. A nice relaxing current moved us along, and we saw a variety of fish.

(I still have pretty bad sunburn on the areas not covered by the shorty wetsuit.)

We engaged in some (presumably ecologically questionable) fish feeding, and had clouds (schools? I love collective nouns, the English revenge for Chinese measure words...) of fish around us, among them a particularly greedy large yellow one that we dubbed the "investment banker fish".

Excellent dinner afterwards at this place called abacá:

On a side note, we had lots of fun emulating Asian poses, such as "Pointing":

Taxes, Sailing, and some edifying links

Just finished my Hong Kong tax return in under 18 minutes. You copy over a few numbers from your pay slip, apply a few deductions, and that's it. The top tax rate for salary tax in HK is 15% this year (last year it was 16%, but hey, the government made too much money, so they just returned everyone half of the tax they had collected (subject to a cap)). No taxes on capital gains, interest, etc. Can't complain, really.

(US citizens and green card holders pay US taxes, of course... (unless they're lucky enough to be dual citizens, and reside outside the US). And, if give up your US citizenship, or give up your green card (or the government rescinds your gree ncard!), you are subject to an exit tax of some 40% or so on your net wealth...)

On a different note, I've just completed sailing class (HKSF, level 1&2), that was a lot of fun. And great people, too. I'll carry on with it. The first two days the weather was awful, but the last two days it was brilliant. Mediterranean. Really nice.

Finally, a couple of good links (or, to be more precise, first two links to boring virtual presences representing good real places, then three links to good websites representing no real place):

Enoteca - my favourite restaurant in HK (well, it's just across the road, too, but the pizza and tapas are tasty, and the staff very friendly, and they have a good selection of wines open, as the name implies).

Chilli Fagara - Sichuan food. Spicy. Good for Western visitors (and me), in my opinion, in that it gets the spices and taste right (as far as I can tell), but has (what Westerners would consider) proper meat, rather than the mix of bones and skin and tendons that seem to be characteristic of authentic Sichuan food.

Kiva - Allows you extend a micro credit to a borrower in a developing country.

CouchSurfing - Allows a traveller to stay on someone else's couch, on a reciprocal basis.

Stickk - Allows you to enter a binding contract to help you fulfill a commitment to yourself, e. g. to lose weight, quit smoking, etc.