One Last Adventure

Because Palau always had more surprises. Today was our last day in Palau, and it was amazing. More than half the group has already left. But today a few of the remaining people went to an amazing waterfall on Babeldoab. It was a short hike to it, and then we crossed the water above the falls, hiked down next to it, and swam and played in the falls.

The Falls

We went behind the waterfall, which was amazing. It’s rained here a lot recently, so there was more water than usual. The force of all of the water was just incredible.

Me behind the falls

Mary and the falls

What a day!

So that made for a fun day. We went to Riptide for lunch and Drop Off for dinner to say goodbye to our favorite restaurants and all the friends we’ve met at them.  We’ve met so many people and had so many great conversations. When I think back and remember this trip, one of the biggest things I’ll remember is how much I’ve laughed.

We’re heading to the airport in half an hour, so this is my last post from Palau. There are 5 of us traveling together to Guam, then to Honolulu. Then one of the guys splits, and the remaining four of us go to DC. Then two of us are on the early flight to Raleigh, and the other two have a longer layover. It’ll be a lot of traveling, but I can’t wait to be home.

It’s been real. It’s been fun. It’s been real fun. Until next time, Palau!

Goodbye, Palau

Things are all wrapped up here. Thursday we finished sorting all of the material in lab. What a moment of celebration.

No more lab!

Thursday night the owners of the place where we stay made us a fantastic dinner of traditional Palauan food. It was amazing. Coconut crab, milkfish, beef, taro, salad, corn, rice, macaroni salad, and more. Plus the desserts were incredible. It was so generous of them to do. Living at LEHNs has been a great experience; they’re so hospitable and good to us. After the meal, the owner gave a speech on the history and politics of Palau. It was really meaningful.

LEHNS and our favorite vehicle, the Big Red Beast

Friday we worked to finish up other things in lab, mostly packing all of the material to be shipped back to the US. It’s a ridiculous amount of stuff. But it’s great—hopefully we’ll be able to learn a lot from the material we’ve collected. Sunday we took our final exam. Then we were done with program stuff.

This week we visited the Belau National Museum and the Etpison Museum. They were both really interesting and informative. I’ve learned so much about this small country.

Carved dugongs in the Etpison Museum

It really is a small world, and traveling all the way to Palau made me realize it even more. One of the guys on the trip and I were in the same Forensic Entomology class last semester, which we didn’t realize until we came on this trip. We also figured out that we lived in the same neighborhood in Charlotte, NC when we were born until early elementary school. So that was a little weird. But we met two Americans here in Palau, staying in the same apartment place as us. They’re here working on water conversation research, and one of them is a forensic entomologist. He’s from Ohio, but he worked with the grad student that taught my forensic entomology class at NC State last semester. Small world.

Unrelated picture of me diving. Thanks to Sean!

Our group has been leaving a few at a time. All of the flights leave out of Palau around 2am, so people have been leaving every night for the last few nights. I’m not ready to leave, but I am ready to be home. I’m heading out the Wednesday the 27^th at 2am (Palau time). I fly Palau to Guam, Guam to Hawaii, Hawaii to DC, then DC to Raleigh. It’ll be about 26 hours of traveling, so shorter than coming out here. I should be in Raleigh by 2pm on Wednesday.

This trip has been incredible. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I realize how fortunate I am to have been a part of it. So a big thanks to the amazing group here; it wouldn’t have been as fun with anyone else. And to the staff here, who did a wonderful job in the wake of unfortunate circumstances. And Calvin and Sunny, the Palauans we worked with. And to my family and friends and amazing boyfriend for putting up with me being gone for so long. And especially thanks to my parents for helping me fund this trip and for letting me go on crazy adventures on the other side of the world. It’s been a fantastic experience.

Love you guys!

Thanks for everything, Palau.

Farewell, Chelechol ra Orrak

I just can't believe how fast this has all gone by. I've been in Palau for almost five weeks now. It's been an incredible experience. Just indescribable. Things are wrapping up here. I was in lab Monday and Tuesday, but fortunate enough to go out to the site on Wednesday, our last day at the site. On our boat ride out to the site, we got caught in a terrible, crazy downpour. So everyone got absolutely soaked. Then I worked in the trench for a while, and when I got out, it was sunny and beautiful, and the water was absolutely stunningly gorgeous. It was by far the most incredible I had ever seen the site look. The last day, and after that massive rain.

The final boat ride to the site.
Before the rain hit.

Blue

So blue 

In the morning I worked to excavate a burial that had mostly been destroyed when a wall collapsed. So it was crushed and difficult, but we got parts of it out successfully. Then we backfilled the big trench. It was 3.5x2 meters and about 1.5 meters deep. And we had to haul sand from the beach to fill it. It was a tough job, but we had a great group and a rusty wheelbarrow, so we made it work.

All done!

We ended up finishing the backfill and had some time to spare, so I walked around and took pictures. Hundreds of pictures. It was just gorgeous.

Some Palauans were canoeing around Orrak

Goodbye, weird hanging plant

Goodbye, beach

We took two boat trips back because we had to bring all of our supplies and material. I went back on the second boat, so I was among the last to leave the site. It was tough to say goodbye. But as we left, we looked back at Orrak, and there was a perfect rainbow directly over it. I can’t even explain that moment.

Goodbye, Orrak. Thanks for everything

I can't believe the dig is over already. It was amazing.

Kayaking

We had a fun weekend here. It was the first weekend that we didn’t have a field trip, so Sunday a small group of us went kayaking. It was absolutely gorgeous and we had a blast. 

Kayaking!

Me!

We kayaked for a while, and then just docked our boats by an island so we could get out and snorkel. It was incredible. The reef was absolutely beautiful- possibly the best snorkeling I’ve done here. And we just happened to stop there.

Coral

Fish!

There were these creepy looking, polka dot fish with bright red eyes that I spent a while watching. At first they were down in the coral, but then they all came out of the coral and just floated right above it. They didn’t move, they just all stared in the same direction. It was a strange sight.

Zombie Fish

We saw these feather-looking things, that when you got close to them they’d hide in a little hole.

Feathery-thing

The colors were incredible. If I had to pick a favorite thing about Palau, it's the colors. Everything is so vibrant. Especially the blues. 

Colorful coral

More coral, more colors

Even more coral

Kayaking was amazing; I'm so glad I got the chance to do that here. The program is just going by so quickly, I'm just not ready to see it end!

Updates and Observations

Things are going well here. The dig is awesome. I spent Tuesday wet screening down at the beach. We were in the really shallow water, and then a squid came right up to us. It was adorable.

Wet Screening

Squid! 

The dig this week was fantastic. We hit the burial layer in all of our trenches, and there are so many burials. We spent the week excavating this one, gorgeous, rock lined burial. He was tall, but fit just perfectly in the units we excavated. I was lucky enough to work on it Thursday, and it was really amazing. Thursday we were lucky to go out to the site at all. It stormed all night Wednesday night, and a ton in the morning. It rains most days here, but these were severe thunderstorms. But we were lucky, and I had a fantastic day excavating.

Excavating!

Then Friday in lab, Kelsey and I were working to package up some of the bones so that they can be transported. And I had a temporal bone (side of the skull) and I noticed a small hole above the external auditory meatus (ear hole). And I saw something in it, so I turned it over, and out fell a malleus. One of the tiny, inner ear bones. A 3000 year old inner ear bone. It was incredible. 

So here are some of my observations here. Palau was under US control for a long time, and because of that, the US had a large impact on its infrastructure. So Palauans drive on the right side of the road, like in the US. However, cars are so much cheaper to bring over from Japan, that the majority of cars have steering wheels on the right. It was strange to get used to. The van we take out to the site is a stick shift. I’m glad the guy driving it is ambidextrous, since now he has to shift with his left hand instead of right. There aren’t traffic lights and there aren’t road names here in Palau. I’m guess it’s a small country, so people find their way around.

Rainbow over the staff's apartment

When you order tea at a restaurant here, they bring out a big glass of unsweetened tea, and a mini pitcher of a sweet sugar water/syrup thing to sweeten the tea yourself. Brilliant.

Palau is really loud. And the US is really loud, but it’s city noise- traffic, sirens, and talking-noise that I’ve been around my whole life, so it doesn’t bother me. The jungle here is incredibly loud- especially the insects, but also the geckos. There are a lot of stray dogs around Palau, but surprisingly they don’t bark much at all. It’s almost eerie. The roosters, however, are another story. There are tons of roosters and chicken and chicks running around. And they’re so loud. All day. Every day. Roosters crowing. But it's beautiful and amazing, and entirely worth it.

Peleliu and Diving

This weekend we took a field trip to Peleliu, a small island in Palau. The rock islands are so gorgeous; anytime we go through them I can’t help but take hundreds of pictures.

The Rock Islands

The Battle of Peleliu was one of the worst battles in the Pacific during WWII, but is not a particularly well known battle. The Japanese occupied Peleliu starting in 1914 and mined phosphate there. The other major advantage of the small island is that it is limestone and has hundreds of caves in it. There’s an airstrip on the island, so the US thought it was essential to capture during WWII. They expected the mission to last a few days, but it took two and a half months. 

We stopped the Peleliu World War II Memorial Museum. The museum is built inside a bombed out building, which is crazy. It was really touching. The numbers are stunning, over 11,000 Japanese soldiers killed and one of the highest US casualty rates in the Pacific. But reading all the personal stories, and seeing items from the battle itself makes it so much more real and so much more tragic. 

WWII Memorial Museum

Then we stopped at another bombed out building. They’re just so eerie, the way the plants grow through them and the doors leading to nowhere. But there’s still a lot of these buildings standing. The Japanese must have had some outstanding civil engineers for buildings to sustain that much damage, but still mostly survive. 

Doors to nowhere

We stopped at a cemetery for one of the US Marine Divisions. The human remains were actually removed in the 1960s and returned to Arlington and other US cemeteries. From there we walked to Orange Beach, where a Marine Division landed. Then we drove along the air strip to our next stop. It was strange, driving down it and just realizing that this small strip of land cost so many people their lives. 

The airstrip

We stopped at some caves where there was a Japanese gun, and we explored the caves for a while. We also saw some amphibious tanks, which were awesome. 

Boom

We hiked to the top of the ridge. The views were indescribable. Our last stop was a sinkhole, where we jumped in and swam. The sinkhole was really small, but it was about a ten foot drop down into it, so we had a lot of fun jumping, diving, and cannonballing in. After the hike up to the ridge, we needed it. 

The view! 

Another view!

Me!

On our way back from Peleliu we stopped at a beach in the rock islands for a few hours. It was stunning. Absolutely unbelievable, it was the most gorgeous beach I’ve ever seen. The sand was so fine, and the water was perfectly clear. We spent a long time snorkeling and just enjoying the day. It was perfect. 

Paradise

Our beach for the day!

Snorkeling with Michiel and the fish

Sunday I went diving in Palau! It was indescribable. Just absolutely amazing. Palau is one of the top diving destinations in the world, and I’m so lucky to be here and dive certified. The coral reef was so vibrant, and the fish were amazing. We did two dives- one at Coral Garden and the next at Short Drop Off. When we were on the boat between dives, a pod of dolphins starting playing with us. There were a few that were darting under the boat at the front, and jumping. The rest of the pod stayed close and jumped around our boat. We also saw some amazing flying fish. While the diving was incredible, I didn’t expect there to be that much excitement on the boat. This place never ceases to amaze me. 

Dolphins!

Thanks, Bobby, for being quick with the camera
to get these pictures! I was distracted watching the dolphins.

Extreme Tides

There was a full moon earlier this week. It was absolutely gorgeous here. But the downside of the full moon is that we had extreme tides this week. High tide was higher than usual, and low tide was very low. So our hours were crazier than normal, and unfortunately we couldn’t even make it out to the site on Thursday. Also, there was limited work to do at the site, so only a few students went out to the field each day, while the rest of the group stayed behind to work in the lab.

The moon was gorgeous. I wish I could have gotten a clearer shot of it

Tuesday I was one of the lucky 3 to go out to the field. We bracketed low tide. It was the first time I’d seen low tide out there, and it was incredible. I was just shocked to see how far out the tide went, and all the rocks and coral it exposed. When we dry screen, we usually have the screens on the beach and bring up buckets of water, but at low tide we were able to set up the screens out in the coral. We found a few starfish, sea cucumbers, and other aquatic life. It was a fun day.

A little dirty from digging

The dock at low tide

Low tide

I was also lucky enough to go out to the field again on Friday. That day we were out there at high tide, and it was usually high. It flooded our trenches a decent amount, so we couldn’t do too much excavating. But still, we worked on the profile of one of the trenches, and it was exciting. I learned a lot.

High tide!

Friday night we went to a dive shop and restaurant called Drop Off. It was right on the water and the view was gorgeous. And when it got dark, it was the first time I’d really taken the chance to notice the night sky, since most nights it’s cloudy or we aren’t out. But it was absolutely amazing. There are so many stars, and they’re so bright. So Liz and I stepped away to get a better look at the night sky, and in less than two minutes we saw a stunning shooting star. Incredible. There were lights shining into the ocean, and we watched a squid for a long time and saw a ton of fish. It made for a fun evening. Yes, things are going well!

Babeldoab

Babeldoab is the largest island of Palau, and the second largest of Micronesia, after Guam. Sunday we took a field trip and toured Babeldoab to see some of the major cultural sites and gorgeous views. Everywhere on Babeldoab is within 7 km of the coast, so at any higher elevation the sites are just gorgeous. 

Our first stop was a Palauan bai. Bais are traditional communal gathering huts and the most important buildings in Palauan villages. They’re very distinct, and just beautiful. The decoration and symbolism was amazing- every part of it was decorated, and every picture told a story. 

Traditional bai

Every line tells a story

Our next stop was a bombed out building that we actually drive past on our way to the dig site every day. It was the Japanese communication center during WWII, and is just absolutely destroyed. But now the plants have grown through it and it’s eerie. Outside of it they had two tanks, and various guns. Apparently the guns were confiscated when people tried to sneak them out of the country. Nice try.

Tanks 

Guns 

Our next stop was a park with a long pier. Unfortunately, it was pouring. It rains most days, but generally for a short amount of time, and then it clears off. All day Sunday was rainy with gray skies, which didn’t make for the best field trip weather. So sorry the pictures are dreary. But still, the park was pretty and the views were amazing. 

The pier and park

The long pier in the rain

Then we stop at Palau’s Capitol. The US influence was very apparent, with the large buildings and rotunda. There was the main legislative building, then the judiciary and executive buildings were next to it, surrounding a courtyard. Again, the symbols of the country were really interesting. 

The Capitol

Executive building

We stopped at a roadside market and picked up some traditional Palauan foods. I had ice candy, which was a hot pink slushy sort of drink. It was good- really sweet. It almost tasted like frosting.

Then we stopped at a park for lunch. It was high on a hillside and had gorgeous views.  The pictures don’t do it justice at all- it was amazing. The place was called Barulchau and has the largest collection of stone monoliths in Palau. Some of them were clearly the foundation for a bai, and others had faces carved into them. 

The view

Faces!

Likely Bai supports

Then we stopped at the ruins of a bombed out lighthouse. Once again, the views were just incredible. But there was also a lot of twisted metal and stone in the ruins. It was a strange juxtaposition, the destruction and the beauty. 

Another breathtaking view 

What's left of the lighthouse

The next place we stopped was an archaeological site called Ouballang ra Ngerkelalk. The site is terraced. It’s amazing to think about people moving this much land to create these terraces over 1000 years ago. There were also carnivorous plants called pitcher plants that were really cool! 

Terraces 

Pitcher plants

Our last stop was another bai. Apparently in the early 1900s there were over 100 bai, but now there are just three. So we were very lucky to see two of them today. This one we were actually allowed inside, which was awesome. Every crossbeam was decorated with a different story.

Palauan bai

Inside the bai

So it was a long day, but definitely worthwhile! I’m so lucky to be able to see so many of Palau’s wonders!