DIVING FROM KOROR
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| Kevin Davidson |
Easy in the Rock Islands:
submerged at the Iro wreck
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Under Japanese occupation, which began in 1914 and followed 300 years' presence by Spain—which eventually sold Palau to Germany in 1899—Koror was by all accounts a model city: grid-pattern streets, trolleys, the works. But after being bombed during the war and then exposed to American consumerism for 50 years, Koror is a sprawling,
automobile-choked town that houses two-thirds of Palau's population. That said, it's a convenient place to set up home base or to plan and provision a journey farther afield.
If you're interested in diving, your first order of business should be to make contact with Sam's Tours (preferably by phone a month before you arrive), the most knowledgeable English-speaking outfitter. Owned by Sam Scott, a 37-year-old native of Washington State, the operation has become the local hub for most Western travelers. (The majority of other
tour operators cater to Japanese and Taiwanese visitors, who make up about 50 percent of Palau's tourists.) Scott, whose Palauan stepfather inherited the title of high chief of Koror in the mid-1970s, headed to the islands after high school and started ferrying around the hard-core divers who showed up with their own equipment, ready to dive unguided.
Today, his 25 staffers guide up to 80 divers a day during the November-to-May high season, as well as one- to ten-day island-hopper trips via sea kayak.
WATERY RAVES
Frankly, few places on earth compare to palau when it comes to cutting-edge diving. But a handful come damn close. They're in Palau's general geographic neighborhood, the Indo-Pacific Ocean, believed to be the world's oldest puddle, and hence the most mature in terms of biodiversity. And they're extremely remote (read untraveled). Instant
bragging rights for heading to one of these four up-and-coming dive spots.
SOLOMON ISLANDS It's still possible to do spectacular "first descents" in this 900-island archipelago in the Coral Sea. But with a lack of modern hostlery and a surplus of malaria, the only answer for reaching the scattered, offshore dive sites is live-aboard diveboats. To book one, call Aggressor Fleet at
800-348-2628; seven nights costs $2,295.
PAPUA NEW GUINEA Like Palau, this place has it all: caves, shallow coral reefs, steep dropoffs, and everything from mantas and sharks to tiny nudibranchs. But as on the Solomons, infrastructure is minimal, so call Chertan Liveaboard at 011-675-641-1167; it charges $295 per person per night.
KUNGKUNGAN BAY RESORT, SULAWESI, INDONESIA (left) At Magic Rock, a site in the Lembah Straits the size of a car, you'll see more diversity than in your entire dive career—pygmy seahorses, frog fish, and cowries. Call Weaver's Dive Travel at 800-767-3483; seven nights' lodging, meals, and three tanks a day
costs $1,500.
BIKINI ATOLL, MARSHALL ISLANDS Irresistible to globetrotting divers because it only opened to visitors in 1996—50-some years after it was turned into a radioactive chamberpot by the detonation of a series of atomic and hydrogen bombs. Outfitter Marshalls Dive Adventures (692-625-3250) offers one-week land
packages with 12 decompression dives, food, and lodging for $2,750. It's your best option for glimpsing the sharks of Bikini's deeps—which, at 120 feet-plus, should be sufficiently deep. —S.E.
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Because of strong and sometimes fickle currents, Palau has traditionally been regarded as an expert diving destination. If, like me, you're freshly certified, don't worry—many of the best dives from Koror are manageable, especially with the help of a reef hook, a large fishhook ground down and knotted to a six-foot cord that, once caught on
rock or dead coral, allows you to loiter in the rushing current. (The hooks can cause minor reef damage, but much less than a diver simply grabbing at coral to keep from being dragged away.) You even learn to anticipate big tidal switches which bring fresh plankton and huge schools of hungry fish.
Like many dive sites across the Western Pacific, Indonesia, and the Great Barrier Reef, Palau suffered fairly extensive coral bleaching in late 1998, when El Niño simmered the seas at 95 degrees for weeks, causing hard corals to expel the symbiotic algae that give them both their color and nutrients. "One day while we were diving, the water
suddenly turned pea-green," a bleach-blond dive master named Scott told our group over lunch one day. "It was like the coral all gave up at once." A gradual recovery has begun, but according to Noah Idechong, full recuperation may take 20 years.
The fish, however, are still out in force. At legendary Koror-area dive sites Ulong Channel, The Blue Holes, and New Dropoff, I spotted reef sharks, sea turtles, and life-list additions such as violet- and turquoise-mantled giant clams, sofa-size Napoleon wrasses, and venomous banded sea krates. German Channel's nonstop fish frenzy had me struggling to
keep tabs on all the different species—I lost track after 30. A warning: The most popular dive sites like Blue Corner, about 20 miles southwest of Koror, can get a bit crowded by Palau standards, with bubble-spewers nearly outnumbering sea creatures. During one such dive, 15 of us bobbed like helium balloons on the ends of our reef hooks, flashbulbs
popping as we surrounded a 12-foot-wide manta ray being groomed by tiny cleaner wrasse. It was worth feeling collectively ridiculous, though, to look into the ray's wide-spaced black eyes and watch as it gracefully furled and unfurled its two antenna-like horns.
If you're not careful, diving can become an all-consuming routine: wake, eat, head out on the water till 3 p.m., nap, go for happy hour, eat more, sleep, wake up and do it all again. At first glance, this would seem to constitute the ideal vacation. But after several back-to-back days, I began to hallucinate a bit. Human behavior became uncannily
fishlike: The slow swivel of a companion's head mimicked the suave muscular locomotion of a circling shark; the nervous gestures of a sushi bar patron seemed to indicate she'd been separated at birth from her piscine twin, a skittish parrot fish. Finally, I got the message: It was time to dry out and start paddling.
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