When you imagine a tropical paradise, you’re imagining Micronesia. It had some of the most picture perfect beaches and reefs I’ve ever seen. After a red eye, a stop in Guam, and a second flight that was too short to properly nap, it was amazing to get to our beautiful hotel right next to the beach.
A quick note about the naming conventions – Micronesia can refer to either the country, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), as I’m doing here, or it can refer to one of the subregions of the Pacific islands. There are three main regions. (1) Melanesia, which includes Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji; (2) Micronesia, which includes Palau, the Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Nauru; and (3) Polynesia, which includes New Zealand, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Hawaii, and Easter Island. We were primarily in traveling across the region of Micronesia across this whole trip, but when I say Micronesia in this post, I am referring to the country and not the region.
I will say my first impression of Micronesia, from our drive from the airport to the hotel, was that there was less infrastructure than in Palau or Guam. The roads were in poorer condition and there were broken down cars all over the island. It’s the kind of place that has the natural beauty to be a top tier tourist destination but definitely not the development needed to support that at this time.
After lunch and a nap, I woke up in time to enjoy the afternoon and sunset on the beach with the group! The next morning, we headed out for a full day of snorkeling, exploring the reefs, and spending time on the beaches of Micronesia.
My GoPro is not as good at pictures as it is at video, so I’ve opted to just screenshot from the videos I got in an attempt to show how amazing the snorkeling was. I will also say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of my GoPro pictures and video! I was traveling with people who had much newer GoPros – I bought mine back when I went to Belize and the Galapagos, in 2021, and it had clearer video than some of the newer models.
Micronesia has some fantastic wreck dives, and there’s even a few wrecks you can see from snorkeling depth. In particular, we went to one that was a Japanese war plane that had crashed, which was really cool – it’s at such a shallow depth that you can see it clearly even from the surface.
We saw turtles and even a few sharks, although I didn’t get good videos of any of those on this particular trip. There was one area where they thought we might be able to see dolphins but unfortunately that didn’t pan out. That is one of the species that I haven’t managed to swim with yet!
After an amazing day on the boat, we had another nice sunset back at our hotel. We were lucky to have perfect weather during our time in Micronesia – it sounds like the Wander Expeditions group that went a few weeks before us ended up getting rain and grey skies, which didn’t give it the same “paradise” vibes that we got to enjoy.
All in all, I had great time in Micronesia. The remote nature of it and lack of tourist infrastructure makes sense for why it isn’t a huge destination for many travelers (outside of divers, who definitely have it on their radar), but I found it worth the trip.
The next day, we had our longest travel day of the whole trip! Outside of the two times I had to fly over the Pacific Ocean, that is. More on that next time.