This Pacific Ocean country is one of Earth’s most biodiverse places
This Pacific Ocean hideaway offers incredible sea life in brilliant luxury
Anyone for fruit bat stew? “It’s delicious!” the museum guide assured me. “You cook the bat whole and serve it up in a soup, so it gazes up at you from the bowl. And you eat the entire bat. Because its diet is fruit, the meat has a very sweet flavour”.
I was in the tiny National Museum of Palau, based in Koror, learning about the 4,000-year history and culture of this matriarchal and matrilineal island nation which very few people have heard of. Palau is an independent republic in Micronesia, composed of about 400 islands, but only six are inhabited. Some might have heard of the islands as the scene of some of the bloodiest battles in the Second World War; the ocean wrecks are now on visiting divers’ itineraries. But Palau is primarily famed for some of the best natural dive sites in the world.
Last year, Palau, which has a population of 20,000, received just 50,500 visitors. It’s so little known in the west due to its lack of infrastructure, and the sheer awkwardness of getting there. The island is between the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, and there are no direct flights from the UK, so I opted for a roundabout route on Cathay Pacific via Hong Kong and Manila. Some 24 hours after leaving Heathrow I arrived in Koror, the capital of Palau, to be swept up in a limo by the delicious Dee-Light (yes, her real name!), a Palauan graduate of the Four Seasons Resorts training course.
The Pacific Ocean country with incredible aquamarine life
Not that Four Seasons has a hotel in Palau as yet (they are planning to open one in 2027 and will be the first international hotel brand in the country), but their catamaran – which, along with the crew, was formerly based in the Maldives, has been operating in these waters. I had come to spend a week on board and was due to see some pretty amazing scenery, because the National Marine Sanctuary covers 80% of Palau’s waters.
I was welcomed aboard by the crew to a fanfare of Pacific Ocean conch shells (you can play them if you blow into them) then shown to my cabin, one of eleven comfortable bedrooms with seating adjoined areas. My room was decorated in cool greys and sea blues.
The Four Seasons Explorer has been fully refitted and is equipped with all one needs: at 39 metres long, there’s a full dive centre on the lower deck, where guest cabins are also found; a lovely bar, sitting room and indoor/outdoor dining space on the main deck; and further outdoor seating and a spa on the upper deck.
But the real star of this show was the surrounding scenery. We were sailing through a 1,000-square-kilometre UNESCO-listed area known as The Rock Islands of the Southern Lagoon, the colours of the ocean so vivid in its jewel hues of turquoise, emerald and sapphire, the sun so bright, the air so clean. Hundreds of mushroom-like limestone rocks jutting out of the sea, eroded at their base and cloaked in thick jungle greens, seemed to hover above the ocean like ghostly apparitions. It was a landscape like no other.
Over lunch, I meet my fellow-guests: two couples and a family of four: Americans, Russians, and Chinese. We were united by a passion for what lay beneath the diamond-spangled waters: an underworld teeming with fish, mammals, invertebrates, reptiles, and corals.
Days began with an early breakfast, followed by a couple of dives (or snorkelling and a deserted beach for non-divers). After a three-course lunch on board, there would be a short lecture from Oscar, our resident marine biologist, then an afternoon dive. A four-course dinner featuring inventive cuisines from around the world would be followed by a playback of the day’s adventures, filmed by our ubiquitous videographer Ikleel. By 10pm we were tucked up in our crisp linen sheets.
You could book as part of a group, or individually. As the least confident participant, and not keen to squeeze into caves or become acquainted with a tiger shark (unlike some of our number), I was accompanied by my own dive master, Adri. This personal touch is why I’d booked with Reefscape Travel. They create tailor-made scuba diving, snorkelling and adventure holidays and their founders have over 40 years of combined diving experience across the globe, and I knew someone would be online 24/7 to answer any questions or calm me if I had any wobbles pre-dive.
But it was magnificent. The waters were warm (28°C) and crystal clear, the colours kaleidoscopic.
There were clouds of electric blue damsel fish, pastel-coloured parrot fish chomping away at corals, adorable clown fish caressed by wispy anemones, schools of flinty barracudas, gimlet-eyed eels mouthing sweet nothings, huge Napoleon wrasse, grumpy groupers, painterly Picasso triggerfish, disco-clams that danced to our torchlight, and my favourites: oriental sweetlips, their fins floaty as a flamenco dancer’s skirt. We saw a manta ray, hawksbill turtles that tolerated my curiosity, and sharks. Lots of sharks: in 2009, Palau created the world’s first shark sanctuary, and banned all forms of commercial shark fishing. Mostly, they are harmless grey, blacktip and whitetip reef sharks, so for anyone scared of these creatures, diving here is an excellent form of aversion therapy.
Explorer has two smaller boats, Surech and Tulel, named after a local legend, which were on hand to whizz us around to dive sites, to help us disembark to see caves perched high on rock covered with prehistoric art, and to go on birdwatching expeditions. Aerial life in Palau is every bit as intoxicating as marine life, with sulphur cockatoos, parrots, and the national bird, the endemic Palau fruit dove, among the most colourful. But it is the songbirds, largely invisible in the dense foliage, that lend the place its magic.
Palau in the Pacific Ocean is one of the most peaceful and biodiverse places on the planet. Home to some of the strictest environmental laws of any country in the world, the Government plans to keep it that way. One of my most memorably intense experiences with nature was a visit to the island of Eil Malk.
We climbed through the jungle and down to a lake, one of 52 in Palau, connected to the ocean through fissures and tunnels in the limestone and ringed entirely by forest. It is a place of eerie beauty: these opaque jade waters become toxic at 15 metres’ depth. But the upper layer is home to thousands of non-stinging jellyfish: both the ethereal moon types that look like large Lalique bowls, and the chubby-tentacled golden jellyfish.
We swam surrounded by these animals with the low-pitched whistle of the Palau bush warblers above us in the sky, echoing like some distant flute.
Visit the Pacific Ocean
Reefscape Travel (reefscapetravel.com, info@reefscapetravel.com, 0203 307 8676) is offering a seven-night stay onboard the Four Seasons Explorer Palau from £13,950 per person. This includes accommodation onboard the Four Seasons Explorer for seven nights for two people sharing on a Full Board basis, including up three dives per day, snorkelling excursions, and return flights with Cathay Pacific from Heathrow to Manila and Manila to Koror.
Read more: A spoiled travel editor’s guide to luxury hotels
Read more: Is Atlantis The Royal ‘The most ultra-luxury resort in the world’?