The Palau Routine

There is an internet café in the city. Online time sells for five dollars every thirty minutes with an accompaniment of starbucks coffee. I do believe I can see the westernization. My skin has boiled and is the color of peach stained magenta iced tea.  It reminds me of how much an intruder I am in this landscape. There is a strange dichotomy here between the Palauan, the Japanese, and the Americans.  Europeans are scarcer, and I have observed, in my travels, that they tend to inhabit the past colonized islands of the Caribbean.  I first attributed the influx of Japanese to the close proximity to Japan, but later learned that Palau was first colonized by the Spanish, then the German, and then by the Japanese until 1944. The battle of Peleliu consisted of some 11,000 Japanese, and 2,000 Americans. We won.

A stranger told me today, that Palauans are endangered but it is far better to hang a native, then to spear an endangered tropical fish. The water here was not mean to be touched.

Of the time I have been here, half has been on land. The ocean is a cacophony of so many types of fish that one cannot draw distinction, predators living in perfect harmony with their prey. The ecology is composed of highways systems for seasnakes and nudibranch trees. Railroad crossings made of thick schools of fish, and schools of palm-sized damsel dancers, effervescent with streaks of electric hooker blue, behaving like chocolate addicts at Jacques Torres Factory. I have never felt so entirely small in comparison to the enormity of Open Ocean.

The islands float like toadstools a foot above eroded land. This comes as effect of carbonic acid and small hard-shelled organisms with iron teeth and a taste for limestone. 

I woke this morning, half awake and drinking coffee from my sheet corners. An hour later, beneath a layer of uneven waters and rain, I was on an underwater rollercoaster, complete with no railings, and current cut sand channels from the intersection of the Philippines Sea and the Pacific Ocean. I wonder how they decided the boundaries.

I came here to run away from routine, and I am perfectly settled and content in what routine has found place in my life here. Six o clock waking and coffee cup tipping lazily from my pinkie. Papaya for breakfast, and kiwi and lychee nuts. We leave every morning at 8:30 for Sam's, gather gear and dive until some 5 or so at night. Rainstorms have begun to trail us home, but I have learned to position myself on the bottom part of the boat back to the bow and curled into myself to avoid the sting of the raindrops. Our dive gear has taken of residence on shelf 16 of the locker. Coronas are passed out with thin cut limes and movie theatre popcorn on the pier. We wait till for beyond sunset to leave. As I said, the routine has begun. 

BY: Kegan Fisher

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