2nd-3rd Week(ish)

Random Palau Statistics:
Babies Saved: 0
Inhabited Islands Visited: 4
1.5L Bottles of Water Consumed: 42
Mean Temp Over The Last Week: 90
Mean Humidity Over Same Period: 90
Average Time Elapsed Before Drenched In Sweat Outdoors: 17s
13 year old girls frightened: 1 (not including those in the States)

A dangerous crisis has arisen, one entirely unforeseen on my part.

I’m running out of books.

I brought 8 with me, thinking “no, there’s no way I could go through 8 books in 10 weeks with all the other stuff I’ll have going on.” But from the time I opened the first on the plane ride down until now (2.5 weeks in), I’ve gone through 3. At this rate, I’ll be out of reading material with a solid 4 weeks left, and I’ll have to resort to renting movies, borrowing from Jodie (she does have War and Peace, which should just about cover me for the remainder of my stay, but then I have to read War and Peace), or hunting down a book store that sells English novels. I did see a friend of mine reading Cold Case down here, which is a book my father loved – so she obviously got that from somewhere. The catch is that I’m not very good at just picking up a book for the sake of picking up a book – I have to convince myself that I genuinely want to read a given book. I’m sure somehow I’ll survive.

I’ve gone out with Sam’s Tours twice more since the diving stuff. The first was a snorkeling tour Jodie and I went on which was, frankly, fantastic. Lolly, our comically-named guide, took us all around the Rock Islands (a series of beautiful, lush, and completely uninhabited islands that speckle the Pacific Ocean) – she said a lot of interesting things I can’t remember anymore, but the snorkeling was fantastic. For the most part, there’s not much I can say about the fish other than “colorful,” “pretty,” “large,” and “fishy.” There’s really no way to adequately describe the variety and colors that you see underwater, other than to say that it’s like swimming in a giant aquarium. To date, I still haven’t seen any fish that my dad had in his reef tank when I was younger – unless he had a blue tang… which I vaguely do recall he might have.

Our first stop was a downed Zero fighter plane – now encrusted with coral and teeming with fish – that was in shallow, current-heavy water. The pilot apparently had survived being shot down, and swam to the nearest shore (now called “Survivor Island,” though I’m not sure if that’s because of the show or because of him), and met up with his allies. (On a side note, we did see the beach where the survivors held their tribal councils – and the extremely wealthy WASP family that rode with us on our tour found this absolutely fascinating… Jodie and I just sort of found it amusing – we’ve heard tons of stories while we were down here about how the ‘Survivors’ wound up at Kramer’s, etc, hardly ‘roughing it’ their whole time here. They were, however, surviving, so I suppose that it is technically within the rules. There was a German lighthouse where they did their games and challenges that Lolly [hah] pointed out, too, near that same beach). During the 50^th reunion of the Battle of Palau (1994), the pilot of that Zero apparently came back down to the islands, which I found immensely cool. Most of the Zero was broken away – only the fuselage remained, and some of the tail, the wings were either buried or gone… and it was too heavily reefed-up for me to swim into the cockpit and sit down, sadly.

Next came “Milky Way,” so-named because the water there is, yes, milky. For those nerds in the audience, it was like that blue stuff Luke (or someone) was drinking in the beginning of the first Star Wars movie. Yeah, shut up. Anyhow, the reason for the extremely poor visibility was a sticky, clay-like substance that lie on the bottom and had dissolved into the water. Lolly (snicker) had explained the origin, but I can’t remember anything she’d said – however, people apparently make a living by jumping into the water, free-diving to the bottom (without being able to see), scooping up the mud, bottling it, and selling it – because it is apparently extremely healthy for the skin. Exfoliating, rehydrating, exsanguinating, ensconcing, ensorceling, all of that. It was only about 10’ deep, so we jumped in and gathered a bunch of the mud in a bucket and had a free mud bath, smearing ourselves with the pasty stuff until we looked like something straight out of Powder… or some sort of tribally-painted warriors. It was almost humorous enough to make me forget that I was partaking in a mudbath, easily my most emasculating experience to date.

The next stop was a more generic sort of snorkeling excursion, following along the crest of a reef and admiring the fish. There were so many of them that, if you held out your hands and cupped them together, they would think you were trying to feed them and they would absolutely swarm about your hands, nipping and nibbling to try to find the food.

We then went to Jellyfish Lake – an isolated salt-water lake containing the only two known species of non-stinging jellyfish. There are apparently five such lakes, four of which are preserved and not open to tourism – the last being a popular attraction. There are millions of jellyfish in each lake, and the ones we saw were ‘golden medusas’ or something along those lines – apparently there is another species that sometimes comes out, called ‘moon jellyfish,’ but we didn’t have the good fortune of seeing them. Isolated from the ocean millions of years ago, the jellyfish lost most of their stinging cells – and now will only mildly irritate the skin if you take them and rub them over your lips, armpits, or other really sensitive skin (or unless you just have sensitive skin in general). In order to get to the lake, we had to dock, and then, with the assistance of a rope, climb and extremely steep and rocky hill – in and of itself an adventure in flip-flops – and down the other side. Then, as we swam out towards the center of the lake, we saw a few jellyfish. “Oh, cool,” I thought, “jellyfish.” Creepy, but I knew they were harmless, so I kept swimming. Then there were more jellyfish – and it grew more and more crowded as we went to the center, each second I figured they couldn’t possibly get any denser, and each second I was constantly wrong. By the time we reached the center of the lake, I had given up trying to avoid bumping into the jellyfish – they were so numerous that you literally could not move without touching them, and you just had to get used to feeling slimy jellyfish bumping into your legs and back and hands. And, given that they were harmless, you could pick them up, turn them over, send them on their way – or get out of theirs, since once they bumped into you, they would continually try to push their way through you, as if attempting to shove you from their path with brute force. It also seemed like the jellyfish got larger and larger as we went further out, and a few of us speculated that there must have been some massive Queen Jellyfish down on the bottom of the lake (which apparently is high in sulfuric acid and is toxic to humans, so I wasn’t about to go find out). The larger the jellyfish were, the slower and more ponderous their movements – by comparison, making the tiny, quarter-sized jellyfish (the largest were grapefruit-sized) seem cute, with their rapid-fire exertions. On an odd aside, the soundtrack of the large jellyfish was a slow and steady tuba, while the tiny jellyfish were a fluttering piccolo flute. I know at least one person who wanted to know that.

After Jellyfish Lake, we had lunch on a gorgeous beach and explored around the various rocks and tide pools for a bit. Jodie was like a child in a candy store, finding eggs, crabs, a flatworm, a spidery starfish that was crawling along in an extremely creepy fashion, and a long, black worm which looked like a shoelace, but that I was convinced (after microbiology) would penetrate my bare feet and take up residence in my jejunum. I’d been informed that the snorkeling here was great, however, for sharks – and so I was eager to get in the water, so I left Jodie to her explorative machinations and went back to the boat. The guide had earlier made a joke about the sharks here being vegetarian – and it was amusing to hear an excited 13-year-old girl tell her mother that there were TONS of sharks out there, but that it was okay because they were vegetarian. Apparently catching the look of skepticism and the slight grin on my face, her enthusiasm faded:

“Lolly (haha) said they were vegetarian!”

“I think Lolly (snrk) was teasing.”

“…I don’t want to go back in. What if they’re not vegetarian, Mom?”

I’m a horrible, horrible person.

She did end up getting back in the water and having fun, so no big deal, though I did feel momentary regret for having accidentally scared her. Truth is that the reef sharks are really pretty harmless and it is EXTREMELY rare for them to bother people, and she was more likely to die because the boat’s engine exploded than because the sharks attacked.

It was all the usual assortments of fish – striped, spotted, shimmering and beautiful – plus a couple of notable additions. One of them seemed to be constantly swimming upside-down (much like some Japanese WW2 planes were designed to seem as though they were flying backwards) – with two fins coming at odd angles off the top, its top lighter than its underbelly, etc. These were remoras – or ‘shark suckers,’ because they attach to sharks and clean them off, eating the algae and whatnot which accumulate (much as some birds pick clean the teeth of crocodiles) – some of these were three to four feet long and swam with slithering, snake-like motions that made them seem far more dangerous than they actually were. Then, of course, there were the sharks – black-tipped reef sharks, perhaps 4 feet long, and there were at least twenty of them, swimming around just off-shore in packs. The water was about 15 feet deep, and they swam in front of, behind, around, and underneath us – but they weren’t circling us: they were circling the unfortunate fish beneath us. Fascinated by the seemingly-calm sharks, we followed them around, trying to get as close as we could without getting within proverbial arm’s reach of the fish. More than once, they passed within ten feet of us – or, rather, I passed within ten feet of them, given that I was free-diving and following along after it.

A sudden flurry of motion and the excited call of the guide drew me away from my chosen quarry, and to a large congregation of fish that was just behind me, through which the blacktips were racing at impressive speeds, scattering the schools of fish before circling around to make another pass.

We had, apparently, been swimming with a pack of hungry vegetarian sharks.

The feeding frenzy continued for about 15 minutes and was fascinating to watch – three or so of the sharks would dive and tear through the clusters of fish at a time, before circling around and allowing some semblance of calm to settle over the area once more… before a different team would repeat the tactic, chasing the fish to and fro along the length of the beach. If I didn’t know better, I would swear to God the sharks were playing with their food.

We then visited ‘Clam City,’ which was an underwater field littered with giant clams. Jodie and I enjoyed free-diving down and making all of the clams close (she apparently found an empty shell that she sat in for some time, and to this day laments she had not thought to have someone take a picture), though they still were not quite the size of the ones we saw with Keith. Jodie was driven by the urge to find a nudebrink, one of the colorful worm-like critters that Keith had found for her (the clams would, apparently, occasionally spit one out upon closing), but to no avail.

Last came a circular reef termed the ‘Graveyard’ because, when it was discovered, the coral was shaped like tombstones and many of the broken coral branches looked like human bones. Time had eroded away the ‘tombstones’ (though there were still bone-like fragments on the ground), and there were huge schools of fish to be seen. There was another Napoleon Wrasse wandering around, and I spent most of my time attempting to free-dive down to it and say ‘hello’ – though it always seemed to be just a few feet deeper than I could ever manage to get (my deepest was 20-25’). Lolly (chortle) had been complaining about needing something to tie her hair back, and I happened to find just such a thing trapped on the coral at 20’, so I brought that back up to her.

The family we were taking the tour with were a nice group, but something about them just absolutely screamed ‘wealth.’ The husband (apparently involved in the repair of CT scanners, which has become extremely technical, highly-specialized, and, undoubtedly, highly profitable) was a very nice guy, but he just looked like a man who led a life of luxury. His wife, probably 10 years his younger, was a Guamanian trophy wife who had the age-resistant look of someone who may well have had plastic surgery. Their kids were the only ones who looked normal, but they were on vacation in Palau with their wealthy parents, so I can only presume they were accustomed to such lavish trips (Jodie and I later bumped into the kids at Palau Pacific Resort, where they’ve been staying for two weeks at $250+/night, confirming our suspicions). The wife, at one point, commented about a ‘cheap’ hotel she had found for the thrifty pricetag of $150/night (Jodie and I later found that same hotel in our travel guide, under the heading “EXPENSIVE.”) When he found out we were medical students, the husband began to shill (teasingly) for his company, C-Men’s (or something of the sort, an unfortunate name, and I had to struggle to avoid snickering – I’m not nearly mature enough to be a doctor), and it occurred to me that the biotech and pharm companies were getting started on buying their doctors early. Remembering all too vividly how evil it is to accept even a slice of pizza from a pharmaceutical company, I remained evasive about my loyalties, promising only to consider employing these so-called “C Men” in the future.

            Jodie and Kristen went up to Babeldaob (the largest island in Palau and the second largest in the Pacific, after Guam) on Wednesday for some ‘girl time,’ so I went diving (having heard a great review of a smaller dive operation, Blue Marlin, I tried to go with them – but they didn’t have a weekday dive, so I went with Sam’s again). We went back to German Channels and German Wall, and then to Blue Corner again – a pattern I’m noticing with the larger operations is to go to most of the same places repeatedly (since that’s where most tourists want to go, and most tourists are only around for a week or so, so their clientele turns over rapidly) – but Jodie and I both want to see some of the other dive sites, so we may branch out on our company choice. I had some trouble with weighting on the first dive, and got separated from the tour group so I could go back up to adjust it, and then wasted nearly a quarter of my tank swimming against a current to catch back up to them (which is way harder than it seems like it should be), but somehow I managed to have about the same amount of air as everyone else by the end of the dive (which was damn near empty – the dive was about an hour long, and nearly everyone was almost out of air by the end). Once again, we failed to find manta rays, but we did see a leopard shark at the very end of our dive, which apparently is a bit rare, as well as a few more sea turtles.

            The current at Blue Corner was much weaker this time around (though one of the tourists on the boat said it was WAY stronger than it had been the last time she went, so I speculate that, perhaps, the current was much more ‘normal’ this time around) – but there were far, far more sharks. And they came much, much closer. After hooking into the reef and chilling there for a time, we saw some white-tips (a first for me), and a few of those and the grey reef sharks swam within ten feet of us. I like to anthropomorphize sharks as cunning and guileful, and to me they were just reminding us how easily they could move through the water, should they decide to come after us.

            Well-played, shark.

            Other than the increased number of sharks, the greater proximity of the sharks, and the white-tips, the only other remarkable part of the dive was that the same Napoleon Wrasse was chilling around the reef, but he could not be coaxed to come say hello.

            My dive buddy for the first dive, actually, was from Seattle – and lived on the boat that had originated from Seattle and was moored just off of Sam’s. Our buddyship quickly dissolved when I realized he was using Nitrox (a mixture which reduces the amount of nitrogen a diver absorbs while diving, allowing them to stay under longer at greater depths), and that he was diving a fair bit deeper than the rest of the group (which, since I’m on air, I shouldn’t be doing). Things were never the same between us after this – alas, but I still long for what could have been.

            Ah! I just found my disc with all of the Transformers comics on it! Perhaps my reading crisis has been, temporarily, alleviated!