Monday, June 1, 2009

Touring Babeldaob

In April, when we were in Koror, our incredible friends, Ty & Kelly, not only hosted us, but took us on a great tour of Babeldaob - Palua's largest island which is connected to Koror via bridge. Babeldaob is the 2nd largest island in all of Micronesia (Guam is the largest). It was really fun to see some of the sights ... even just to see a few hills was really nice!

This is one of the resorts in Koror that we stopped at before we left.



















































The view just before we leave Koror and head to Babeldaob.




















This is another traditional Bai, located in Aimelik state. You can see how it is sitting on piles of different sized rocks, a pretty crazy kind construction. Both the inside & outside has many traditional symbols, stories & legends painted on it.


















































This is Malsol's tomb ... the legend is quite interesting ... basically the village women stoned him to death and the stones that you see here are supposedly the actual stones used and can be traced back to the individual women who threw them.


































Road to the beautiful North Beach Cottages Resort at the very northern tip of Babeldaob.







































I'm trying to look relaxed & comfortable in one of the hammocks that lined this beautiful beach, but it was soaking from an earlier rain ... so not the most relaxing :)




















































These are Palau's stone monoliths.  You can see the black stones in the cleared area here, but apparently the cover quite a large area in this region.  No real ideas on how they came to be here, but the local legend is that the gods wanted to build a giant Bai, but didn't want anyone to know, so were building it during the night.  When a rooster crowed, they didn't know what it was, got scared and ran away.  Later, when they realized that the sound had only been a rooster, they were too embarrassed to return.  And so Palau was left with these stones.
















































































Me, standing next to a monolith ... and Jason standing next to the same one! (well, perhaps not really, but we thought we'd try a bit of fun)





























This is an ancient casket...











































One of my favorite photos of the day ...









Does this building look vaguely familar? Sort off scarily out of place in this environment.














Some of the gorgeous scenary on our way back to Angaur. I never get tired of this.











1 comment:

Molly W. said...

you two are funny! love the stone shots. :)