Palau 2009 - Day1

We landed in The Republic of Belau, the official name of Palau at 9:45pm. Even though we had about 24 hours of travel and room organization, there were no problems with the travel. The flight from LAX to Honolulu was full, but our next flight the longer one (7 hours) was only about half full. I decided to see if we could change our seats to window and closer to the nose of the plane. It was no problem and I am glad we did it. One, Liz was happy to be by the window, and two, because of the time we were landing in Guam, we still had some daylight and we could see the island. The other two times I had landed in Guam (in January) it was dark all and the only thing I could see were lights, so it was nice change to be able to check out the island in the daylight. The last part of the flight was again entertaining. Yap for some reason has to do a security check of the plane. When they do this they usually have either the right or left side of the plane disembark with their hand carried bags. Then they clean and inspect all the seats from the side that was cleared. Once they finish that they have the remaining people (those still on the plane) grab their items and move over to the side just checked. Then the Yapese complete the check on the non-cleared side. Once this is done they have the passengers that disembarked board the plane. The only difference this time around was they did not have us get off the plane because there were not very many people on the flight. So we all got to stay on the plane and watch them do their security check.

After landing in Palau we went through immigration for the all important Palau entry stamp then headed to get our bags which were waiting for us. Customs was a breeze they took the paper work we had to fill out and asked us if we have been here before. Liz said no this was her first time here and his response was welcome to Palau I hope you have a good time. I told him I enjoy the Islands and that this was my third trip here, he said, welcome back. We were now off on our way. Burt from NECO Marine, our boat charter company, was waiting for us. After we all got together they took our gear loaded us onto a minibus, then drove us to the magnificent Palau Pacific resort on the Island of Arkebsang. Getting there we crossed two bridges connecting the larger island (the one with the airport and the capitol) Babeldaob to the island of Koror and finally to our island with the hotel. It was late at the resort, but the staff greeted us with fruit drinks and smiles. They helped us with our bags and made sure the checking in was smooth and painless knowing we all wanted to get to some sleep after a long day of travel.