Day 7 – Spectacular and Surreal: Rock Island Tour

I like to call the Rock Island Tour the visual highlight of Palau. By now the students know how special of a place Palau is, but they had yet to be on the open waters… until today. Today we spent the entire day in the water visiting 4 different snorkel sites:

The Milkey way: which smells like sulfur, but has “magic” mud, the kind you find at Glenn Ivy or can buy in the store for $100 a bottle. Yep, that’s fancy mud we have ALLLL over ourselves.


The Drop Off: Characterized by its shallow waters and then quick “drop-off”


The Giant Clams: Pretty much self-explanatory.


And finally, Jelly Fish Lake: Basically, outer space… I mean there’s really no better way of describing it… What on Earth can you compare swimming with a plethora of pulsating, tentacle laden, pink jellys? I ended up at jelly fish lake twice last year and I STILL wasn’t prepared for what I saw today, the jelly fish were THICK, it was almost Claustrophobic feeling. At one moment your worried that any sudden move might hurt an unsuspecting jelly fish and then the next second, your rational mind kicks in and say OH MY GOODNESS, this isn’t normal, where am I??


The rest of the day was spent skimming the crystal blue waters with Charles at the helm and Malahi our guide (also a friend from last year’s trip). Our crew was so awesome, they ended up staying with us 2 hours longer then intended, which meant we had more time to dive and had a longer lunch. Sams Tours (the awesome folks we schedule all of our site seeing through) packs us special Bento box lunches to take with us to the beach; however, the highlight of the lunch was Malahi and our “coconut hunt.” A few of us had noticed coconuts on the ground and wanted nothing more to crack them open. But these weren’t chopped coconuts at the store, these were full husk still on coconuts. Malahi not only showed us how to pick a good coconut, she also showed us how to husk them and then crack them open. YMMM Fresh coconut.

After we arrived at the docks we were all ready for food. So instead of having Sams drop us off at the dorms, we had them drop us off at the Flamingo for a hearty dinner of fresh fish, fries and other tasty treats.

Tomorrow is Pelelu, we will travel in the same boat across the same waters, but it will be a completely different experience tomorrow.

P.S. A special thanks to all the folks (especially Timon) this trip who have grabbed my camera to make sure I too can be in some of the pictures, you make my mom a happy lady!