Alii, hello, welcome

The way to say hello or welcome in Palauan is Alii. ( a lee:  a quick short a sound and emphasis on the lee )

I'll try to bring my blog up to date. Last week I tried to add a post to the pictures E put up... but it didn't work out...* long story here, won't go into it*... then blogger was down for a day of maintenance. The internet comes and goes here without warning. Without a competing provider, there is no incentive for them to provide better service. Sometimes there are a lot of users and it is incredibly slow.  Haven't been able to see any you tube, and with all the ads on yahoo, it takes forever to load a page.

Went out on boats twice since I last posted.  E put up pictures for our day going to Carp island. a brief synopsis:

snorkeled at the "Big Drop Off" This was the second time to that spot. The current moves you along, and you take in everything as you go... no chance to hover over anything and study it, but many fish and shapes of coral, sea fans and some bigger fish in the drop off/ deeper water areas. The divers below always report seeing sharks and turtles, but it's hard to see too far into the deep water they're in below us.

On the way out to Carp Island, it was high tide and we passed an area known as "long beach" (which was short beach at the time)  So what you have at high tide is about 200 ft. of beach sticking up out of the ocean. At low tide, the beach goes from out in the ocean all the way to one of the islands.  It was a part of the "tour" and so the captain dropped anchor and we spent time there. It was interesting, but I would have rather had that time somewhere else...  then on to Carp Island.

There is a "resort/camp" for divers there and we had a cooked lunch there.  E. wanted to go there to see an archeological site. The site is where the people from the island of Yap would come to quarry giant stone disks, up to 12 ft. diameter, which they spent half a year working/shaping them and then moved them to the shoreline and transported them in canoes through open ocean to their island. Lives were lost in the process. The whole story of each stone was incorporated into the value of it- the more lives lost, the more value it had.

E. had read about the "stone money" as a child in a  Ripley's Believe-it- or -Not column. The piece of stone money on Carp Island is from more the 500 years ago. It was abandoned because it fractured and broke when it was being moved from where it was quarried inland.

Because it was a mile hike uphill at a brisk pace, I opted out and sat at the shallow shoreline instead. 

Sitting on the shoreline, facing out, the sky was blue...  but behind us, there was some weather brewing... 

as we walked out to board the boat, there was a large dark cumulonimbus cloud in the sky off in the distance... and the race was on... 

on the way back to Koror, we watched as off in the distance, two waterspouts (ocean tornados) formed. The sky was very dramatic.  In general, the clouds here seem very close to the ocean anyway, unlike in Arizona where they are so high up in the sky.   We could see the rain falling in areas, dark and heavy, but we didn't catch any of it.