A Japanese travel group, all tethered together and holding onto swimming boards, enter the dark-blue Pacific waters and drift along, bobbing along like so many corks. Another 50 meters away, a young Palau diving guide from Sam’s Tours observes unamused. He is not a fan of curbing peoples’ freedom like this.
“Everyone in the water,” he commands his group, who then jump overboard from the boat even though none of them has any experience in snorkelling. “Just drift with the current,” he tells the group while following behind in his boat. Anyone who gets tired should simply wave to him.
Reaching the outer reef of the Palau archipelago, located 800 km east of the Philippines, the group wastes no more time thinking about the unaccustomed use of flippers and diving masks while moving through the waters. The underwater panorama is breathtakingly beautiful—corals and fish of all colours and sizes, and in such incredible numbers as if it is rush hour. And suddenly, gliding smoothly just below the group, two torpedo-shaped fish—each about a metre and a half long—with prominent dorsal fins. Even a beginner can identify these as sharks.
Only later does the guide explain that the two sharks are part of the grey reef shark family and that normally they are only out and about at night. A few divers are a bit shaken, but the guide reassures. No reason to panic: these sharks are more interested in morays and doctor fish than humans.
And, he adds, the chances of being attacked by a shark are lower than being struck by lightning. In fact, it’s the sharks whose existence is threatened by humans. Just think of shark fin soup.
Since 2009, sharks have been under strong protection in Palau, a creature regarded as a friend and helper in the environment. Palau thereby became the first, and still the largest, shark protection area on the planet. Those who go diving here must come to terms with them.
Besides the guide, there is Johanna, a young German woman who is a trained diving instructor and a world traveller. She has been on Palau for the past half year, arriving from Australia. “There is hardly a more beautiful area for scuba diving,” she says.
Amid Palau’s 356 islands—most of them just the size of a city square and with a few palm trees rising from them—there are more than 60 registered diving areas. The water is clear, and at 31°C, as warm as bathwater.
Besides Sam’s Tours, there are a good half-dozen other scuba diving and snorkelling outfits offering day-long excursions. Most of them are so-called drift snorkelling forays that are very relaxing—simply drifting with the current while looking at the fascinating underwater sea life. And then being picked up by the boat a few hundred metres further along.
The remote location of Palau did not prevent the Japanese and Americans from engaging in bitter fighting during World War II. To this day, sunken airplane wreckage and old artillery pieces in the caves are testimony to the fighting. But what many people don’t know is that for 15 years, Palau was also a German colony. Berlin bought it from Spain in 1899, only to have to turn it over to the Japanese in 1914. Little evidence of this brief German chapter remains on Palau, although there is an honorary consul in Koror, who is there to provide help, if needed, to the some 1,200 German vacationers who come each year.
Many of them will be found snorkelling in a dark lake on the island of Eil Malk. To reach it, people when they disembark from their boat have to take off their shoes and socks, then wash their feet in disinfectant before walking over a small hill. Behind it is a tropical forest with a lake of brackish-looking water, appearing about as exciting as somebody’s backyard pond.
But appearances are deceiving. Beneath the surface are a million apple-sized mastigia jelly fish. Pulsating, the multi-coloured creatures float through the dark water. Divers swim right through them, as if through some bizarre lamp store. For a few in the group, this requires some courage, remembering their childhood and being stung by jelly fish on vacation in the North Sea or Atlantic.
But the mastigia are harmless and more vulnerable than humans, the reason why the visitors’ feet were disinfected before entering the lake. Only snorkelling is allowed here, no diving with oxygen tanks. Palau is a fragile treasure that requires careful protection.