Kevin Davidson

Easy in the Rock Islands: submerged at the Iro wreck

If you're interested in diving, your first order of business should be to make contact with Sam's Tours (preferably by phone a month before you arrive), the most knowledgeable English-speaking outfitter. Owned by Sam Scott, a 37-year-old native of Washington State, the operation has become the local hub for most Western travelers. (The majority of other tour operators cater to Japanese and Taiwanese visitors, who make up about 50 percent of Palau's tourists.) Scott, whose Palauan stepfather inherited the title of high chief of Koror in the mid-1970s, headed to the islands after high school and started ferrying around the hard-core divers who showed up with their own equipment, ready to dive unguided. Today, his 25 staffers guide up to 80 divers a day during the November-to-May high season, as well as one- to ten-day island-hopper trips via sea kayak.

Like many dive sites across the Western Pacific, Indonesia, and the Great Barrier Reef, Palau suffered fairly extensive coral bleaching in late 1998, when El Niño simmered the seas at 95 degrees for weeks, causing hard corals to expel the symbiotic algae that give them both their color and nutrients. "One day while we were diving, the water suddenly turned pea-green," a bleach-blond dive master named Scott told our group over lunch one day. "It was like the coral all gave up at once." A gradual recovery has begun, but according to Noah Idechong, full recuperation may take 20 years.

The fish, however, are still out in force. At legendary Koror-area dive sites Ulong Channel, The Blue Holes, and New Dropoff, I spotted reef sharks, sea turtles, and life-list additions such as violet- and turquoise-mantled giant clams, sofa-size Napoleon wrasses, and venomous banded sea krates. German Channel's nonstop fish frenzy had me struggling to keep tabs on all the different species—I lost track after 30. A warning: The most popular dive sites like Blue Corner, about 20 miles southwest of Koror, can get a bit crowded by Palau standards, with bubble-spewers nearly outnumbering sea creatures. During one such dive, 15 of us bobbed like helium balloons on the ends of our reef hooks, flashbulbs popping as we surrounded a 12-foot-wide manta ray being groomed by tiny cleaner wrasse. It was worth feeling collectively ridiculous, though, to look into the ray's wide-spaced black eyes and watch as it gracefully furled and unfurled its two antenna-like horns.

If you're not careful, diving can become an all-consuming routine: wake, eat, head out on the water till 3 p.m., nap, go for happy hour, eat more, sleep, wake up and do it all again. At first glance, this would seem to constitute the ideal vacation. But after several back-to-back days, I began to hallucinate a bit. Human behavior became uncannily fishlike: The slow swivel of a companion's head mimicked the suave muscular locomotion of a circling shark; the nervous gestures of a sushi bar patron seemed to indicate she'd been separated at birth from her piscine twin, a skittish parrot fish. Finally, I got the message: It was time to dry out and start paddling.