Trip to Palau and Peleliu

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Back in January of this year my wife Kim and I traveled to the Palau Island group. The main reason for the trip was a week long stay on the Rock Islands Aggressor doing a lot of diving. We decided to fly in 4 days early in case of flight delays so to NOT miss the boat departure.

As you all know, Palau saw a lot of WW II. The Americans invaded Peleiu and Angaur(now Ngeaur Island) and heavily bombed the other islands of Palau where the Japanese had facilities. So, before our dive trip we will be looking for the remnants of war.

Some 12 years ago we visited Guadalcanal for 4 days, this Palau thread will be similar, check it out at...tm.asp?m=902875&mpage=1&key=&#902875

So we fly into Palau International via China Air from Taipei landing well after dark. On the way in I notice a very nice setting sun, almost looks like a rising sun.

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First stop the next morning is the Japanese communication center. First thing we realized … the roads on Palau are not named. Not the smallest street. So, directions were interesting. We relied a lot on maps we had printed from internet sites while doing research. We crossed the big bridge onto the island of Babeldaob. After only a few wrong turns, we found the communication center, called Kaigun Sho.

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Big sign out front… you must pay a visitor’s fee (someplace else that we didn’t recognize) or risk being fined if we explored the site. We decided to take the risk.

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here was lots of evidence of heavy air attack by the Americans.

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Lots of bullet-splattered walls and caved-in walls.

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There’s some kind of Japanese armored vehicle and anti-aircraft guns, some of which were brought to this site specifically for the filming of a 1968 movie “Hell in the Pacific.”

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What is this?

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Looks more like construction equipment?

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Somebody did not have a good day.

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Damn, that looks EXACTLY like it does in The Pacific. I am more than a little jealous [8D]

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Forgot to mention that a dive friend, Suzanne, was exploring with us. Back on the road we were seeing absolutely no traffic. We decided to stop in at the Capitol building on the very day of the inauguration of President Tommy Remengesau…(one day before the inauguration of President Trump) and we found the traffic. Here we are at the capital building of Palau and there is no security to shoo us off.

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It was a rather cool experience to walk onto the grounds of the capitol and not encounter any security detail along the way. It was a national holiday, so there were lots of families and children there to witness the fun. The design of the Capitol is very much like our US Capitol, except the texture of the material used to make it is rather strange. The walls feel like Styrofoam. We wandered around the fringe of the audience which was waiting for the President to make his appearance. The view of the water was fantastic… we got used to fantastic ocean views on Palau. Somebody was cooking up Inauguration barbeque and it smelled wonderful.

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ORIGINAL: Mark VII

What is this?

That's a U.S. Marine amphib tank. I think it's a LTVA4, or a LTVA5.

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Onto the Badrulchau stone monoliths at the northern end of Babeldaob, in the Ngarchelong State. As I put it, “No one knows exactly what these are, but they charge five dollars a head to come to see them.” They are very cool, but they’re not Easter Island.

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The most likely theory is that they were built around 150 AD and formed the base of a large structure… presumably a bai, a meeting house. The grooves in the stones are believed to be a method of supporting large beams. There are approximately 37 of them, some weighing as much as 5 tons. According to some stories, the stones are not from Palau, but were imported from somewhere else. You can sort of make out some carved faces on some of the stones.

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From there we went to far north end of Babeldaob to the site of the Japanese lighthouse that we had found via a Google map search.

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Great view.

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Also heavily strafed and bombed.