Pics from Palau & Guam

Hey all, just a quick post to put up some pics I've taken around Palau & Guam. 

 

Guam

TGI Friday's in Guam. We had to do it.

Belau Games Tree Climbing comp

Dehusking using a stake wedged in the ground

Belau Games Coconut Husking/Grating comp

Champion!

Coconut grating

This is Henrietta & her chicks. They got stuck in our apartment area for days as the chicks couldn't jump back up the stairs. Don't worry, we were feeding them and Amanda helped them out today.

Mini Update Part III: The Racist

Last Tuesday after picking Amanda up from work we were driving back along the main road. The traffic was heavy and moving very slow. As we sluggishly moved through one of the “bigger” intersections the traffic that was joining from the side road was merging 1 for 1 with us. As I let a car in front of me, the guy in car following that one floored it, trying to jam his way in front of me. Somehow we’ve both ended up braking and now both cars were side by side. We’ve looked at each other through open windows, I didn’t say or do anything but I probably had a cranky look on my face. I’ve then pulled ahead of him, he’s pulled in behind and decided to let fly with a string of racist comments like “f%ck you, white motherf$cker!” etc etc etc. He spent the next good few minutes and couple of kilometres with both hands off the wheel giving me ‘the finger’ and carrying on like an idiot. He calmed down a bit when we drove past a cop car and soon after he decided to use the middle ‘turning lane’ to speed past us and eventually turned off down a side road. Amanda noticed that when he sped past us he’d now wound up his window. Sounds like a gutless prick if you ask me. 

It’s not the first time I’ve copped some form of racial abuse, I’ve heard the odd comment muttered before in my travels overseas (nothing too serious) and I’ve also copped the odd comment when walking to or from work through Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. This time seemed a bit different though, maybe it was the length of this guy’s rant that did it but this one didn’t roll off the shoulders like the others have. It was a very strange incident to happen in Palau seeing how nice everyone has been to us here. I’m not sure what the guys deal was but by the way he acted and carried on he’s got a screw loose and/or is on something.

For anyone living in Palau: The number plate was Koror state, numbered 12140 (I believe) and the car was a light coloured, right hand drive, recent model station wagon or one of those short vans. (maybe a Volvo or Honda). The guy was young, probably early 20s, he turned onto the main road at the court heading towards Airai and turned left down towards the bakery just before WCTC. I would love if it someone knew who this was. Maybe you can ask him why he has an issue with skin colour.

Mini Update Part II: Rock Islands & Jellyfish lake

Last Friday we had our best day so far in Palau. Unexpectedly we were invited along on a trip out to the rock islands & jellyfish lake (two of the major tourist attractions in Palau). We knew about half the people on the boat and quickly became friends with the others. The ride out from Koror to the islands was in overcast conditions with frequent showers and stayed that way until mid-afternoon. Despite the weather the water was calm and it was truly incredible to finally get to see just how many islands there are. They are seriously everywhere, from small little mushroom shaped islands to massive long ridge lines. I honestly don’t know how the guys navigate through then without a map or GPS, I had no idea which was we were going for most of the day. We saw all sorts of cool stuff like birds diving down into the water for fish to flying fish who seem to defy gravity for an unfeasible period of time. 

Our first stop was Jellyfish lake, an inland lake populated by thousands of sting-less jellyfish. After a short but steep walk up and down the ridge line we arrived at the lake. After a short swim out into the lake we started coming across jellyfish, after pushing out a little further we were completely surrounded by them. They are all over the place, they slowly move in every direction and are constantly bumping into you. And no they definitely don’t sting.

It was an extraordinary experience to be floating around with thousands of these creatures all around. I can’t wait to return with a waterproof camera and on a sunny day. One thing I quickly adjusted was my method of swimming around. Once getting in the middle of the jellys I noticed I accidentally kicked a few, so I ended up using a modified front-paw only, slow doggy paddle. Even then occasionally I’d send one spiralling away, at least I wasn’t wearing fins! I’ve heard people can actually kill them when belting them with fins. For some reason that I don’t understand the use of fins aren’t banned in the lake however they are quite particular about you wiping off sunscreen and washing your feet in a bucket (before walking up & down to the lake)…

Our next stop was having some lunch on a small beach in the middle of the thousands of rock islands. It was a great little spot but due to overcast conditions the couple of pics I took really don’t do the location justice.  

After lunch it was time for some snorkelling. We headed to an area called German Channel, I’m not sure when but at some point in Palau’s history (most likely prior to WWI) the German Navy bombed a long channel in the corral between various rock islands. The spot is now favoured by divers hoping to swim with Manta Rays. In my limited snorkelling experience this is by far the best spot I’ve ever been to. The corral was incredible and there were lots of varied aquatic life. The highlight was following a 1 metre+ white tip reef shark around for a good few minutes. Apparently Amanda had a turtle come within about a metre of her as well. 

All too soon it was time to head elsewhere, we checked out a significant sized cave that formed in one of the rock islands when a section fell in and another marine lake with only a small channel running out to the sea. Our second and last snorkelling spot was a place called the cemetery. There appears to be a lot of dead corral at this little corner off the end of a rock island. For some reason that doesn’t stop a huge amount of fish hanging around. Again I was lucky enough to follow around a very large Napoleon Wrasse for around 5 minutes or so. 

The day was amazing and I’m very thankful we were able to tag along on the trip. It’s reminded me that whatever I end up doing over here has to involve the water in some way.

Stay tuned for the next mini update about how I got racially abused (yep, really).

Mini Update Part 1: The fence, the dog & the rooster

Welcome to another episode of Pieces of Eights: As I seems to write rather lengthy blog posts I thought I'd try to split the latest one up into a few mini updates that I'll post successively over coming days.

Today was day 17 of construction on the Great Fence of Palau

progress pic from a few days ago

. I'm happy to say it appears to be FINALLY near completion. The guys have had one day off since starting on the 5th of July but at least their working hours have decreased from the 13 hour days they were doing early on. This hasn't really stopped my frustration levels as it's still been constant noise, concrete dust & welding smoke all around our home. The fence has now taken shape as a chain link fence with 3 lines of barbed wire on the top. This only goes around 3/4 of the building, so is COMPLETELY pointless (and not to mention unnecessary). 

Now onto the dogs & roosters: It all came to a head last Monday night. After night after night after night of poor sleep due to constantly being awoken by dogs late night then roosters early the next morning it finally got to me. The neighbours dog was barking & howling endlessly at around 2am, I finally cracked it and bellowed a massive SHUUUUUUUUUUT UUUUUUPPPPP! Which of course did absolutely nothing, the dog gave me a cursory glance then kept going. No one else seemed in the neighbourhood seemed to stir. 

I was pretty much at my wits end with the constant lack of sleep. So I ended up going out for a drive in the early hours of the morning. Mostly I just found lots of stupid dogs sleeping on the road (no I didn’t kill any) but I did come across a late model Honda HR-V on its side at a main intersection in town. The cops and a towy were all around it with no driver to be seen. Watching the cops and the towy attempt to right the vehicle was comical. Twice they managed to drag it sideways along the road before they got lucky and managed to get it back on the wheels. They seemed to miss the concept of needing to pivot it off the two wheels that were touching the ground.

taken soon after sunrise

Anyway back on topic, after having some of our closer Aussie friends over for dinner & drinks on Tuesday night we discussed the noise problem and were informed that electricity doesn’t cost as much as we’d been quoted. It sounds like the $200 per month that we were previously told is if you leave your whole house air conditioned constantly. One of our friends gets $140 bills and that is with some significant air con use. So since then we’ve run the wall banger aircon unit in the bedroom at night. Even on the low fan setting it’s quite loud so we aren’t hearing anything from outside. Each night since we’ve been sleeping better and it’s making a big difference.

Ok that's enough for now, stay tuned for my recap of my best day in Palau so far: A trip to the rock islands & jellyfish lake. 

SERENITY NOW!

Our first full month is Palau has ticked over early this week and we seem to be finally settling into normal every day life. We've had some success with Amanda's contract finally being signed off (by the president no less), our visas are now completed and we've got our social security cards as well. Our drivers license test is booked for this coming Monday morning too.

WTF are they building? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Along with some wins we've had some frustrations as well. Since last Thursday our unit block has essentially been a construction site. For some completely pointless reason they've decided to build a fort knox style fence around 3 sides of the building. We've had a team of guys (regularly working 13 hour days) creating this monstrosity of a fence and concrete jungle. They don't seem to have gotten very far despite being into their 9th day of solid work. And I still don't understand exactly what they are trying to build, nor what the finished product will look like. The biggest problem with this work is the constant noise from power tools; grinders, hammer drills, compactors, welders & endless bashing with hammers. And not to mention the constant yelling. So if it's not the roosters and dogs waking us up all through the night Amanda & I have to put up with this nonsense ALL day long. At least Amanda gets a break at work :o

Just in case the noise aspect isn't bad enough they seem to like taking the grinder to task against the concrete blocks, creating clouds of concrete dust going EVERYWHERE. This has caused me to have to close up half or even the whole house for long periods. Don't forget it's typically 30 degrees and 90% humidity here. Multiple times I've had to madly drag all the washing back inside to avoid it being covered in concrete dust too. Of course there has been no communication nor consultation about the work, we've got no idea what is going on. Hopefully they finish the bloody thing off soon however and i can get back to complaining about the roosters & dogs.

my phone really didn't do justice to how nice this looked

Away from home we've had a good week with a number of social catch ups. The American 4th of July party under the KB (Koror - Babeldoab) Bridge was a good opportunity to meet some more people. Then we had an awesome Sunday Aussie lamb roast at the Aussie Navy compound called Aussie Acres (oi oi oi). Monday evening was the Belau Games baseball final (a good game with Koror beating Ngatpang 4-0). Tuesday was a Palaun public holiday called Constitution Day, this day hosted the Belau Games event called MAA (no, not MMA). MAA stands for Micronesian All Around and is comprised of a number of events like, free diving, coconut tree climbing, spearing and coconut husking & grating. We saw the tree climbing and coconut husking, both were very impressive. 

Rounding out the week we've had a nice Japanese dinner with some new friends and our regular Friday night drinks with fellow ex-pats. Hanging out with such great people has really made this experience for me so far.

This blog post has been inspired by and brought to you courtesy of the dulcet tones and gentle fragrance of the concrete mixing truck that has been parked right outside our living room window for near 2 hours with no sign of moving anytime soon. Stay tuned for the next edition of pieces of eights when Nathan finally loses his marbles (and I'll post some pics of the MAA events).

A more personal update

As promised after a rather functional post the other day here is a more personal.

Amanda tried to start work last week and had planned to do 3 days. This ended up being less than 2 days worth because they didn't want her to officially start until her contract was signed. She's been at work 5 days this week but the contract still isn't signed. God knows what they are doing with it, they had at least 3 months to get it ready from when we were confirmed. We've also heard that another nutritionist was due here in October last year but pulled the plug sometime before leaving. The latest we heard yesterday was that the president of the country now has to sign it off. It's a bit of a joke because they aren't paying Amanda, the volunteer organisation is. All the Ministry of Health is doing here is contributing to our accommodation costs. The lack of a work contract seems to be holding everything up; our work visa (which we applied for yesterday anyway), our social security number, Palaun drivers license and our 'local' cards which gives us cheap rates for things like dive tours etc.

Koror State Gym

After dropping Amanda off at work for her first day I headed to the Koror State Gym for a badly overdue weights session. With our wedding and moving to Palau my fitness has kind of fallen off in the first half of this year. Anyway the cost to visit KSG is either $1 per session or $45 for 6 months. One thing to note for anyone coming here is that KSG is not open on weekends. As expected it's a bit of a run down, non air-conditioned, old school weights gym. Don't expect any zumba or spin classes here. All of the equipment is old, a few machines are broken and some of the gear has some rust on it. While this sounds a bit dodgy it's also kind of cool. They have the largest range of dumbbells i've seen anywhere too (no jumping from 30 to 40 kilos here) although they aren't labelled well and i can't seem to work out if some are in kilos or pounds. The manager is a nice guy and very friendly, he even let me pinch a few chillies from the large bush out the front. Although I had to laugh when he had the same 80's rock song on repeat, after the third time I had to have a quiet word with him :o  Unfortunately about 2 days after my first visit the Belau Games (Palau's national olympic style games) have started, this means that KSG will be closed for about 14 days straight. I believe it re-opens later this week.

National Gymnasium

Prior to my gym visit last week I dropped into the National Gymnasium (large hall for indoor sports like basketball & volleyball) and had a chat to a bloke in the olympic office about playing baseball. Unfortunately i've just missed the season with the final series between Airai and Meyuens starting that very evening (Airai won the series 3-0). He did mention that the Belau Games baseball would start later that week and I should come watch some. After asking lots of questions I managed to get myself invited to training the following afternoon. I showed up a little earlier than the start time of 4pm and watched what looked like a mix of late teenage players sort of training and sort of mucking around. At some point someone asked me if i played and relayed this information back to a guy coaching from the comfort of his car. I had a quick chat to him about how I was new to Palau, wanted to play & the guy who organised baseball had invited me to join senior training. By 4:30pm I hadn't really seen any group of senior players arrive so was starting to wonder exactly what the go was. Soon enough I was invited down for batting pratice by one of the older kids. Instantly I had about 20 people around the batting cage watching, it must have been a bit of a sight, some whitey who talks funny suddenly showing up for baseball and smashing some balls around in the cage. After batting pratice there was some infield and outfield fielding practice. I noticed that the age group had slowly changed a little but mostly guys still seemed late teens or early 20's. I had a good chat to one bloke who told me they were the farm team for the state of Peleliu, most of the guys would be hoping for a call up to to play in the big team for the Belau Games. The whole training session was very casual, lacking organisation & intensity, the funny part was a couple of boys trained in thongs and at least three guys shared one glove. The skill level was rather mixed and I think on this example I should have a problem playing in the big league.

Belau Games Baseball @ Asahi Field

Turns out that Peleliu was due to play on the opening day of the Belau games against Ngerdmau. Amanda & I with our new Aussie friend Renee headed down to check it out. I straight away noticed that at least a few of the guys i trained with were in the team for that day. The game did not go well for Peleliu, errors and past balls cost them dearly with the score jumping away to 11-0 after three innings. The game was moving slow and the girls (and i) had had enough so we headed off for some sunset drinks with other ex-pats. The score ended up 15-3 but laughably Peleliu won by default as Ngerdmau fielded a player not on their team list. Since that game I've watched another 2-3 full games and another 2-3 half games. The quality has definitely gotten better, the Koror team has some very good players and there are at least a few good pitchers going around too. If the games I've seen are anything to go by i should be able to fit in fairly well in this league. I will definitely not be in the top group of players but i wont be in the bottom group either.

Readers of this blog will know about the saga of my laptop, which is fixed and currently in Adelaide with one of our new friends, Lis. She has very kindly agreed to bring it back over to Palau when she returns soon. However just to add insult to injury last week i had the SD card in my phone die (it's ok i have backups). Then my main hard drive with my photos and music died as well. The drive will power up and spin, windows detects it but can't see any data. (Again i have backups but they are at home in Australia). So I've managed to download a freeware disk recover application called 'Recuva' as i expected all/most of the data is still there and i can restore it to another drive. Despite one place in town having reasonable enough local prices for portable hard drives i've bought one much cheaper on Amazon. Hopefully it arrives this week so i can get my data back. It seems life is trying to teach me to live without technology.

Ok what else has been happening? There is a really good group of Aussies and some Septic Tanks that hang out regularly, often having drinks, dinner or even going swimming together. (Unfortunately we are missing out on a diving trip with a group of friends right this very minute as we don't have our local cards yet). There are many more ex-pats here than I expected. We keep meeting Aussies and there are tonnes of Yanks, Taiwanese and various other randoms like Slovaks & even a Croat/Slovenian. We've met some awesome people here who we will no doubt spend a fair bit of time with. Unfortunately a couple of them are due to leave the island in coming months. I guess that's the issue these kind of placements. From talking to various ex-pats it's seems that while Palaun's are generally very friendly and happy to have you here you don't really get too involved in their social circles. From time to time you'll get invited to various special events but not many ex-pats end up regularly in a typical Palaun social group. I can somewhat understand this as we ex-pats swan in and out constantly, staying various lengths from 3 months to many years. Also while the volunteer wages seems very low to me, it is roughly double the average local wage (i seriously don't know how they do it). So by default a class system is in effect. Later today we are due at a belated American 4th of July party held under the large bridge that runs between Koror and Babeldoab. I believe the Yanks crashed the Australia Day party back in July so it's time to return the favour, AUSTRALIAN'S UNITE! ;)

Earlier this week I had one of my better experiences on island when I spent a few hours one afternoon back down in our local swimming hole, the very large Nikko Bay. (Have i mentioned this is a UNESCO world heritage site?). Anyway, our swimming in Nikko Bay has been very much in a smallish section following the corral wall from the boat ramp and jetty down to the south for a few hundred meters. I decided it was time to swim out to the middle of the bay to check out the action around a pontoon and a few rock islands. As soon as i reached the pontoon hundreds of small silver fish with yellow tails swam out to me. I had been told they are very inquisitive will swim around with you. They were very cute, hanging around with me for quite a while before I started venturing around to the far side of the first island. There are all sort of great corral and various small to medium reef fish all over the place. But it wasn't until i got about 3/4 of the way around that i saw one of my best sights so far. I was in about 2 meters of water, bright sunshine & good visibility, when about two meters ahead of me I saw a largish brown thing move. I had a brief 'what the fudge is that?!' moment before realising it was a sea turtle. After spotting me it dropped what it was doing and swam away a few meters, i slowly stayed with it for a few seconds before it got spooked and swam away. Unlike their land cousins they can seriously move fast. I spend about another hour frolicking around the shaded side of the rock island checking out barracuda, parrot fish, sweet lips etc etc. At some point I noticed something that didn't look quite right, i was looking at a squid camouflaged against the corral it was hovering over. The squid was by far the largest i've seen in the wild, about 3/4 the size of a rugby ball. I spent about 30 minutes following it around and diving down next to it. I was and am still astounded by how it could pulsate and change colour at a ridiculous speed. It's whole body could change from completely black to a creamy corral colour in a split second. It frequently changed to having stripes or dots just to blend in with whatever corral it was over. I hope this is not a one in a lifetime experience as I'm very much looking forward to following one around again. We seriously have to pony up and buy an underwater camera too! On my way back to the jetty I saw a couple of the little tiny sting-less jellyfish that are found in Jellyfish lake her. While packing my gear into the car thinking I'd seen plenty of awesome stuff today, i suddenly noticed this massive fish (at least one metre long) lauch itself around 2 meters horizontally out of the water. Not sure what type of fish it was nor why it was suddenly trying to fly, but it was truly an awesome sight. 

In lieu of the sea turtle from Nikko bay, here is one from the aquarium

Ok so one last thing to mention: A bunch of ex-pats have mentioned a crossfit/boot camp group that is run for free 4 times a week. With the gym closed i thought i'd give this a go on Thursday. It was basically circuit training with no equipment (push ups, squats, lunges, bear crawl, burpees etc). It's now saturday morning and i'm groaning every time i move, DOMS have hit big time. It was a painful reminder of how unfit i've become this year. I'll aim to head back for more early this week in the hope i get up to speed quickly.