March 25: Palau Day 4

Last night, after we had finished with everything Josh Masillamoni and I went up to the top floor balcony to try and take some night pictures of the stars. While we were up there the owner saw us and let us up onto the roof so we spent some time taking some night pictures.

Orion

We woke up this morning and headed off to clinic after breakfast. Before we started Nate gave the morning worship, which had to have been a first for him. He kept it short and sweet.

I forgot to bring the battery for my light so I wasn’t able to do too much dentistry today, but I assisted quite a bit and help sterilize. I helped one of the D2’s, Sally, with 8 extractions on one patient, so that took a fair amount of time. Half of us broke for lunch around 11:30 or noon and we went to the Rock Island Café because they are giving us half off for the week. The afternoon session went by pretty quickly too, because it was pretty busy. I did a lot of sterilization and running of supplies to the different chairs. After we finished with the patients we headed over to the SDA church for dinner, where some of the aunties are cooking for us the whole week. Tonight they made us some vegetarian Palauan specialties. We had demok (taro leaf soup), purple taro dumplings, yellow taro dumplings with coconut, green papaya salad, stewed pumpkin with coconut milk, aho (Palauan coconut pudding) and soursop juice to wash it all down. The demok was more savory than the soup at the Penthouse restaurant and it had more ginger in it. Both were good and I think I would go back and forth between which I liked better depending on what mood I was in. The aho was really good and I think Dad could have eaten a whole pot full of it. It had a really interesting texture that was kind of like a soupy softer version of the soft flesh of lychee.

After dinner we headed over to the Queen of Palau’s house to say hello and send our condolences because her husband had just died four days previously. Her house was full of all kinds of Palauan knick-knacks, understandably. She had some really ornate storyboards, lots of fans of coral, and a lot of sea turtle shells.

Napoleon Wrasse Storyboard

After the Queen’s house we headed back to the hotel and some of us played Mafia in Jeremy and my room and then we went to bed.

 

March 23: Palau Day 2

We woke up to a beautiful morning just outside our hotel room.

After we had some breakfast we loaded up, headed over to the dive shop to rent our scuba gear and headed over to the dock for our boat. Once we got all the gear loaded up and set up for our first dive we had to wait for one of the boats to fill up on gas so we snorkeled around the dock.

Just in the small area that we snorkeled we saw some pretty cool marine life. There were quite a few giant clams, but only a few of them had grown to be medium to large size.  We also saw a banded sea snake hanging around some rocks.

Once the boat came back from the gas station we figured out that we all needed to get permits to dive and snorkel in Palau so we had to wait while Dr. Chang went to get that. By the time we finally left the dock in was probably close to noon.

It took us about 45 minutes to get to the dive site, which was Blue Hole. Blue Hole is one of the most famous dives in Palau and it lived up to the reputation. Unfortunately, when we went down my phone died on me, so I wasn’t able to get any pictures. The dive itself started out as a wall dive and then dipped down to the floor at about 100 feet where we went into a kind of cavern. When you looked up you could see three big holes that were open to the surface, hence the name Blue Hole.

Blue Hole

We saw a wide variety of marine life from pelagic fish like Ulu and black tip reef sharks to reef fish like clown trigger fish to brightly colored soft corals and anemones. Unfortunately the whole afternoon was overcast so the lighting wasn’t too good and the dive wasn’t as spectacular as it could have been, but it was still pretty epic.

When we finished with the first dive we came up and had a good Adventist lunch of Big Franks and after we finished some of us snorkeled while we waited to head to the next dive. The second dive was only about a 2 minute drive from Blue Hole in the opposite direction from Blue Corner (another famous dive site). Before we got in it started to rain on us, so this dive did not have the best lighting either. When we first went down I looked inside a little head of coral and saw a small crab just looking up at me. He was white on the belly and as you moved up his body it faded to a bright orange and then a dark orange and he had lots of tiny purple dots all over him. I was pretty annoyed at that point that my camera phone had stopped working.  This dive was a pure drift/wall dive and we saw a similar range of sea life as the first dive, but it seemed like there was almost more of it this dive. There was a large purple anemone that had some Clark’s anemone fish swimming around inside of it that was pretty cool. We also saw a larger banded sea snake in the very beginning of the dive and a fair sized school of bonito swam by us in the middle of the dive. About halfway into the dive a couple of reef sharks showed up and kinda swam around us for about 10-15 minutes. Our guide took us up above the wall and sat our whole group down. Once we sat down quite a few fish started coming up and swimming around us. After about a minute a huge Napolean wrasse started swimming around us and apparently once people sit somewhat still around that area the fish come close because they think they are going to be fed. We spent several minutes hanging around and then we made out way up for the safety stops and back on to the boat.

The boat ride back to the dock was a pretty rainy one and most of the people were getting a bit cold. Once we got back we unloaded everything and took it back to the dive shop and then went back to the hotel to shower up. After we cleaned up we headed into town for dinner. We ended up going to a restaurant that one of our guides, Tristan, had recommended to us as having good Palauan food. It was called The Penthouse Restaurant and it was inside of the Penthouse Hotel. I started with demok, which is a taro leaf soup with coconut milk and then I had a mangrove crab in a spicy sauce. Unfortunately coconut crabs are out of season, but the mangrove crab was really good and it was really meaty.

Demok

The spicy sauce on it was kind of sweet and not too spicy and it tasted really good with rice. When we finished dinner we came back to the hotel and crashed.

Mangrove Crab

  

March 21-22: LAX to Palau

So we started the day at 5:30 and took a shuttle to LAX. Once we got there we tried to check in, but Nate’s passport was not valid for a long enough period of time so he couldn’t get checked in. Palau requires that our passports be valid for at least 6 months after our return date and Nate’s was only valid for 4 months. Unfortunately he had to drive all the way down to San Diego to get an extension on his passport and then catch the same itinerary the next day, so we had to leave him.

Guam Airport

After that whole debacle we were able to get going smoothly. Our flight to Hawaii ran a little late and we only had about 20 minutes for our connection, but luckily the gate was only 3 gates away. Somehow Jeremy and I both got booked for the middle seats on the entire trip, so we were both pretty pissed about that. Once we got to Guam we went to the food court in the airport and grabbed some udon and tried to charge our electronics.

Kitsune Udon

Once we landed in Palau and gathered our luggage a contingent from the Palau SDA Church picked us up and took us to our hotel. After we checked in we all passed out.

June 27: Taiwan Day 3

This morning we headed out around 8:30 am to tour around the northern coast of Taiwan. We took the same van that picked us up from the airport, but without all the luggage we had plenty of room. The first place we went to was a small mining town named Jingueshi. There was a waterfall that we stopped at where the rocks were stained orange from iron deposits I think.

After the falls we headed further into the town to go through the gold mining museum. It talked about the history of gold in the area and how it came to become an industrialized mine. There were also some amazing pieces of metalwork made from gold and a 20 kg gold brick that came about to be worth about 8.8 million US dollars.

After the gold mining museum we took a short drive to the town next door called Jioufen. We got dropped off next to a street market and we spent the next hour and a half to two hours walking through the street market looking for gifts, trying samples of food, and of course buying some food. One of the more interesting things we tried were these huge sea snails that were called Jade snails. Three grilled snails came to an order and they were cut up into four pieces each and each piece was a mouthful. The texture was a lot like a calamari steak or king trumpet mushrooms, which we also had grilled and fried, and the flavor of the snails was really subtle and mild. In addition to the snails and mushrooms we also got some fried chicken and a rice crepe that was stuffed with shaved candied peanuts, cilantro and vanilla ice cream.

When we finished with the market we walked around a little bit trying to figure out where to meet the van because the town was on a hillside and the streets were not real easy to navigate. Once we met up with the van we headed out to lunch in Keelung, which is a large port town, at a restaurant called Peng’s Agora Garden restaurant located inside of the Evergreen Laurel Hotel. Even though we were not very hungry we still ended up ordering a decent amount of food and of course we finished it all. We ended up having roast duck, 3 cup mushroom, General Tso’s chicken, stir-fried broccoli with gingko nuts, braised beef tendon with brown sauce, stir-fried eggplant with garlic and basil, sautéed Peng’s special bean curd, and steamed grouper. They were all really good, but I thought the best dish was the steamed grouper.

We rolled ourselves out of the restaurant and hotel and headed to the Yehliu Geopark, which has a lot of interesting stone formations that were carved out by the sea. Most of the rock formations looked like giant mushrooms coming up out of the ground, but some had an uncanny resemblance to other things. One of the most popular formations was the queen’s head rock that kind of reminded me of a picture I’ve seen of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

A few of my favorites were the candle rocks, Fairy’s shoe, and Earth rock. After taking a bunch of pictures of all the formations and walking around for a while we headed back to meet the van again.

Fairy's Shoe Rock & Earth Rock

From Yehliu we headed to the city of Tamsui and their new Fisherman’s Wharf. They built a tower there called the Lover’s tower and my parents bought Christal and me a ticket to ride up the rotating platform. When we rode up it was nice because there were no other people on it except us and the views from the top were pretty spectacular. After we finished the ride we walked around with everybody a little bit and took some pictures with the Lover’s Bridge in the background and then met back up with the bus.

The van took us into downtown Tamsui and dropped us off for the day. We headed down to the waterfront and walked along the bank of the river/ocean in the Tamsui Old Street Night Market. We got to taste a few more interesting things I hadn’t seen before. We had some Turkish ice cream, a huge green onion and 1,000 year old egg fried dumpling, taro soft serve, fried quail eggs, and lap chong sausage served inside a rice sausage with peanut powder, dried radish, pickled cabbage, gherkin, and ginger. The sausage inside a sausage was definitely a glutton’s paradise.

When we finished walking the night market and buying food and gifts we headed to the metro station to take the subway back to the hotel. After about a half hour in the hotel we met up and went downstairs for a late dinner in the restaurant. The restaurant was called La Brasserie, but they had some really good Asian food. Christal, Mom, Uncle Vic and Uncle Cliff ordered the beef noodle soup, Uncle Jim and I ordered the Hainanese chicken rice, Dad ordered the Singapore noodles and Auntie Shirley ordered angler fish with a cauliflower cream sauce.

After we finished Christal and I headed back to the room to pack up for the long trip back to Loma Linda.