Palau recommendations

[Cacia]

Somebody needs to organize a trip

Mike V doin anything there?

Cause I missed Palau last year..

I need a pelagic fix. Phoey on this macro

 

[Hammerhead]

Whoo hoo, a PPD Palau trip! I'm up! (no really!)

 

[clgsamson]

Whoo hoo, a PPD Palau trip! I'm up! (no really!)

next year?

 

[happybuddha]

Dadvocate,

If you decide to go land-based, I would recommend you use Keith Santillano at Dive Palau (www.palaudive.com). I used Keith for a trip over Christmas '05 (he was recommended by several people on scubaboard.com) and had a really good time, until the GF's ear got infected and we had to stop diving.

Keith is half-Pinoy American that took a short-time instructor job in Palau more than 15 years ago and stayed. He runs a one man-operation, is very service oriented and has a passion for Palau diving. The only 2 divers on Keith's boat during my trip were me and the GF...much better than the boats with 12-14 divers on them from the other shops.

I talked up the macro life in PG so much when we were there (very little macro in Palau) that Keith has made a couple of trips to PG since then, and of course loved it!

Agree with Catherine that the Taj is a great Indian restaurant.

Drew

 

[Mike Veitch]

Somebody needs to organize a trip

Mike V doin anything there?

Cause I missed Palau last year..

I need a pelagic fix. Phoey on this macro

Mike V retired and took a job as an internet chatter..

JBB, Peter Hughes has been out of Palau for years

 

[rhadamantus]

Also, while at Palau Pacific Resort, watch out for raving Singaporean prone to spontanious emotional outbursts...

Just keeding Tim!!

sorry for the hijack but....

i was not aware of this!!!

 

[manhattandiver]

I was in Palau in April and did 7 days of land-based diving from Peleliu. If you're looking for big fish, Peleliu and the other dive sites towards the South of Palau are where you want to go. Peleliu Cut, Peleliu Corner and Peleliu Express have more sharks than any other dive site, with the possible exception of Blue Corner on a good day. I don't think I saw less than 5 per dive, most of the time there were 10 to 20 of them and on one dive we saw more than 30. Tons of grey reef and white tips, a few balck tips, 3 hammerheads and 1 zebra shark. I also saw 3 Mantas, as well as huge schools of barracuda and trevally on approx. 50% of my dives. If you don't mind going with a Japanese operation with mostly Japanese divers, Maml Divers offers 2 tanks a day for $90, with one or two additional dives per day at $40 each. If you book a number of days, they will also offer you a discount. Since they're so much closer than the operators on Koror, if you want, they are happy to dive the Peleliu sites, Blue Corner and/or German Channel (for Mantas) every day. Even the best accomodations on Peleliu are extremely basic and there's no nightlife, but the Japanese food at the Yellow Wall restaurant was shockingly good. There's also a lot to see topside, since there was a huge battle fought on the island in WWII. If you want to dive Palau on the cheap, see big fish and don't mind roughing it a bit, Peleliu is the way to go.