PHOTO GALLERY 4

I have no intention of turning this site into a brochure for the Palau Chamber of Commerce.  If you want striking photos of Palau's scenery, check out the Palau tourism links.  That being said, I realize that most Palau sites on the web that offer pictures are strong in the "Rock-Islands-and-fish" department, but few show anythng else.  So here's my attempt to rectify that.  Here are some of the lesser-advertised-but-still-pretty-neat Palau sights.

(By the way, some of these are big files. Sorry about the download times. But they're worth it. Promise.)

For military history buffs, Palau is a goldmine from top to bottom.   The photo on the left is a Japanese tank up in Airai left over from World War II.   It's one of three tanks I saw on a recent mountain biking trip along a now-impassable road through the jungle.  The photo on the right is the entrance to the harbor all the way down in Angaur.  The forground shows the hull of a U.S. tank, while up on the seawall are remnants from an old phosphate conveyor belt, a memento of the days when Angaur's natural resources had commercial, rather than scenic, value.  You're never very far away from war relics in Palau-- just about any hike or bike trip into the trees will eventually come to a rusted out tank, remains of a building, or some other remnant of Palau's role in WWII.  For the most part, the government doesn't seem to take much of an interest in preserving and cataloging these ruins, and it's only a matter of time before many of them are bulldozed away to make room for development.

	Sure, Palau's got waterfalls.  Granted, on an island where the highest elevation is only 700 feet, you're not going to have the dramatic cascades of Hawaii, but you take what you can get.  To the best of my knowledge, these are the only three waterfalls in Palau, all on the west coast of Babeldoab.   The upper left shows the gentle cascades of the "waterfalls" in Airai, just about a mile north of the airport.  Another seven miles or so brings you to the slightly-larger falls at Ngatpang, shown here on the lower left.  But to get to the Big Kahuna in Palau, you need to trek all the way up to the state of Ngardmau, near the northern tip of Babeldaob.  It's either an hour long speedboat ride or a three-hour ride in a 4x4 over buttocks-punishing roads, plus a twenty minute hike through a stream, but the falls, shown on the right, are worth it.

This is out on the very northern tip of Babeldoab, in the state of Ngerechelong, about 25 miles north of Koror.  The big attraction up here is a place called Badrulchau.  Although I've sacrificed the details of the actual ruins for the sake of a nice panoramic view, the valley contains about 30 stone pillars, up to about 8 feet high, arranged in two rows (with some stragglers off to the sides here and there).   Six have giant faces carved into them.  No one seems to know why they are there, but the current theory is that the pillars are the remains of a huge bai (meeting house) that once used the stones as a foundation. The faces, on the other hand, are a mystery.  My personal hypothesis is that this is where the aliens who built Stonehenge and Easter Island came to practice.

One final curiousity.  The Yap Islands, just north of Palau, once used huge stone discs with holes in the middle (to stick a pole through for carrying) as money.  The Yapese would canoe several hundred miles to Palau, quarry these pieces out of the limestone, then load them into the canoes for the trip home (the value of the "money" was determined by the difficulty, often measured in lives lost, in returning the piece to Yap). There are a few places in Palau where one can still find fragments of Yapese money partially carved out of the rock.  This, however, is the only full piece that I know of.  This piece apparently was finished and was close to being loaded for transport when the Yapese apparently gave up on it.  No one is entirely sure why, but the most probable explanation is that it broke during transport and was abandoned here, about 50 yards from the beach.  It may be hard to tell from the picture, but this piece is about 15 feet in diameter.  Think about that next time you go to the ATM.

<< Gallery 3        Gallery 5 >>

Diary      Photos     Main Page    Headlines    Virtual Tour