One by land, one by sea. On last Sabbath and Sunday all of the new staff went on a quick trip. Sabbath’s trip was just a quick walk down to one end of Koror, the island we live on. Sunday’s trip was a half-day excursion by kayak, led by Nelson the native Palauan vice principal. Unfortunately, my camera battery died only part-way into that trip… so much of it will not be covered until later (hopefully later).
The walking…
We leave our apartment and see the elementary school.
That is the actual view from up at our apartment.
Ours is on the 2nd floor.
That is Hailey with Chelsea, who is one of the three girls that lives on the third floor.
Our apartment building from down next to the school building.
Several SMs sitting in the gym. (Chelsea, Tami, Carl, Jeanine, Chris, Austin)
The view of the left side of the church from inside the gym.
Eventually, we all showed up and were able to leave for the walk. I didn’t take pictures again until we made it to the park a mile or two down the road. (Ben & Austin)
Us.
This is the other married couple from the states. Jeff and Misty are planning on being in Palau for a year.
I took a group picture of all of us new staff that went on the walk. (Principal Flores, Jeff, Misty, Hailey, Victor, Austin, Kofi from Ghana for two years like us, Jeanine, Chelsea, Tami, Ben, Chris, Carl)
Principal Flores told me to get in the picture for this one.
We continued onward toward a spot that we heard was a little more beachy.
We actually crossed this little bridge off of Koror to Long Island.
The water was gorgeous pretty much everywhere you looked.
I think the overhanging trees like this are so cool.
I was surprised to find this cliff-face next to our final destination.
We had to walk around this bed of viney flowers to get to the water’s edge.
Where we ended up was not actually very beachy, still mostly rocky, broken-up coral.
Hailey (and the rest of us) still really enjoyed it.
The Kayaking…
So Nelson went around and borrowed and rented (but ended up not having to pay) sit-on-top kayaks for us all. He is a really cool guy and he came with us to serve as our guide.
Hailey and I had a two-seater.
There were several little islands like this one.
Hailey and I had bought masks and snorkles earlier that day.
She wanted to stay in the boat at first so she lent her mask to Victor.
We thought they matched his pink kayak pretty well.
Jeff and Misty also had a two-seater.
Check out what Austin told us is called a sea dragon. It looks like some type of sea horse to me. It was only like 6 inches long.
This anemone was about the size of a volleyball.
We stopped for a minute in this really cool shaded cove with several little caves like this one surrounding it. It looked like something straight out of Robinson Crusoe. I said I would definitely go camping there if I could. And then the battery on my camera died, so I was not able to take pictures of our ultimate destination of a big cove with a big cave that we could paddle the kayaks into. We were there swimming around both inside and outside the cave for well over an hour. Then we headed back to the nearest dock. Hopefully, I can get the pictures from at the cave from some of the others. All in all it was a very good first weekend in Palau.
Jesse
Like a hart thirsts for cool water, our hearts thirst for life. 