Cairns

For the following two days I was in Cairns and didn’t do much. The pop up was at the campground.

Yap - last day

We arrived in Yap, and left the ship by 9:30am. To go on another tour of parts of the island. The highlight for me was visiting a different money bank to the one on the first day, and having the village chief explain about Yap money.

There was an outside meeting area next to the community meeting house, where rocks were planted in the ground as backrests.

We went to another village for lunch, and were then taken to the airport to catch our charter flight to Cairns.

Sorol

Sorol is an uninhabited atoll in this region. It was recently still inhabited, so, if you look, you can still see the platforms they had for their buildings. There were two islands close together where we landed on the beach, and went to look at the birds and turtle tracks. However, the two of us walked along the beach to the other end, and snorkelled back.

In the afternoon we snorkelled from the tenders. My camera ran out of battery power, and the big ones definitely escaped being photographed - a turtle and an enormous grey reef shark that zoomed past us. 

We thoroughly enjoyed our last snorkel.

Mog Mog

Mog Mog is on an atoll in the Federated States of Micronesia that is the home of about 100 people.

Micronesia is losing its young people, and it has about half the population it had only 15 years ago. It’s a patriarchal society, and for us to visit, our captain needed to meet the chief.

We were then allowed to come ashore and be introduced to him. He invited us to tour the village with guides. We went to the school,

the backstrap weaving display, 

the solar array and generator (the island doesn’t use much electricity), the cemetery (the covered graves at the back are older), 

the end of the island, 

and the church.

the communal kitchen 

I went back to the weavers and asked them about the lava lava cloth they used to weave from banana fibre (they were weaving with cotton). They told me it wasn’t for sale, but as I just wanted to look, they found some, and brought it out. They explained that this was a mixture of cotton and banana fibre, and would be places in the mother’s coffin to show she was an important person.

In the afternoon we snorkelled at a spot the chief had allowed us to use.

Yap

        Today we had a choice between snorkelling and touring Yap in both the morning and afternoon. Initially, I chose to spend bot times snorkelling, but the are we snorkelled in was fairly poor, so I went on the tour in the afternoon. The guides did point out an area with pipefish, and I really enjoyed watching their antics.

The afternoon tour started by going to a village and seeing some traditional dancing. This was fabulous.

However, we stayed so long at the village that the rest of our tour was rushed, particularly the visit to the stone money bank, where there was only time to photograph it.

At Sea

We spent the whole day at see sailing toward Yap.

Full day at Palau

This morning, we went on a snorkelling tour, going through the karst islands for an hour to reach our first snorkelling spot, where there were supposed to be black tipped reef shark, although no one saw any in the limited area we were allowed to snorkel. However there were scattered schools of fish.

We then visited a natural arch.

There was a wreck at out next snorkel spot, and there was some good coral as well.

Our final snorkel for the morning wasn’t particularly good but there were different fish in one spot. 

And there was a beach.

After lunch, my snorkelling buddy and I decided there was enough time before the afternoon activities to have a snorkel from the beach at the resort. We were able to snorkel for three times as long as we had in the tour, and although the water was murky at first, it was about as good as the earlier ones.

We almost missed the start of the Nikko Bay panorama cruise. This was a highlight, as we chugged through clear waters viewing wonderful corals.

We also saw some railways coming out of the jungle that the Japanese had put all around Palau so they could slide out hidden anti aircraft guns quickly.