From Taiwan, it was on to the next adventure! This was the beginning of a trip across the Pacific with Wander Expeditions. It took two flights for me to get to Taiwan and it would be 13 more before I made it back home. The first of the 13 was an easy four hour flight from Taipei to our first island destination, Palau.
Of all the places I visited on this trip, Palau is the one that impressed me the most! Going into this, I had the highest expectations for Taiwan and Fiji, both of which delivered, but I didn’t know what to expect for the rest. As best I can tell, 4 of them are in the bottom 15 countries in the world for tourist visits per year. It makes sense – they are far from pretty much everywhere, with infrequent and not always reliable flights. Palau, though, had quite a bit more tourist infrastructure than the rest and was absolutely stunning.
The first night, we had dinner and drinks at a local bar near our hotel. As the night got later, more and more locals showed up for karaoke, and they did a fantastic job. It was so fun watching them absolutely crush it at Elvis songs and serenade each other in duets. It definitely felt as though it was the place to be in Koror!
The next morning, we headed out for a scenic flight over Palau! I was so nervous that the weather was going to be bad and this would get cancelled. I had been in some absolutely pouring rain in Taiwan and this was really the only weather-dependent item on our itinerary. Luckily, though, the weather was perfect! It did get gloomy on us a little later in the day but that was fine.
It was such an incredible experience. I’ve never done a scenic flight like this. The smallest plane I was in before this one was a domestic flight in Costa Rica, and this was significantly smaller than that one. I guess the closest experience I’ve had to this was a hot air balloon in Cappadocia, but going by plane was drastically different from a hot air balloon. This covered a lot more ground and felt more exhilarating, whereas the hot air balloon was much more peaceful as we drifted through the landscape. It was a great way to see Palau, which is beautiful from both the land and sky!
One more thing from our scenic flight. If you’ve heard of Palau before, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it because of Jellyfish Lake. Those photos of swimming with the golden jellyfish went viral and drew in a lot of tourism to Palau. That said, as of this writing, the lake has gotten too hot for the jellyfish and you can’t really see or swim with them the same way that you used to. We did get to see the lake from the air, which is in that photo above! And we did swim with jellyfish while we were there, just with a different species and in a different lake.
Once we returned to the ground, we headed out for a boat tour! Our first stop was the Milky Way Lagoon. It is full of limestone mud, which the locals recommend you smear on your skin to make you appear younger. We swam in the lagoon as well, which was full of these translucent jellyfish. If you think it’s disconcerting having something brush up against your legs while you’re swimming, multiply that by having that something be both gelatinous and invisible!
We also went snorkeling. Throughout this trip, we saw some of the most incredible, vibrant reefs I’ve ever seen. To be honest, my GoPro is better at video than photos, so know that the images here are a pale imitation of how cool it actually was under water. While Micronesia was probably the best, Palau was also really good.
After all our snorkeling stops and sight-seeing around Palau, we headed back to Koror for a final dinner and then went straight to the airport! Our next flight was a red eye, or rather, a series of flights that started with a red eye. And while I can’t necessarily recommend taking a flight that leaves at 1:50 am, I can absolutely recommend Palau as a great Pacific destination.