So today we rode a boat for an hour down to the lower end of the Palau archipelago where the best dive sites are. It was a lovely ride, passing scores of muffin-shaped rock islands.

Paradise. I'm finally in Palau. I've been looking at pictures of it and wanting to come here for twenty years. We went with this great dive operator called Sam’s Tours.

The first dive was so-so, Coral Garden with most of the coral dead from an El Ni�o a couple of years ago, the second was one of the best ever, as good as the Somosomo Strait in Fiji. It was called Turtle Dropoff or Big Dropoff, a spot where a three-foot deep reef suddenly drops down 2,000 feet into the abyss. The tide was running, which meant we just drifted along the wall, down at about 50 or 60 feet. Moving really fast, like almost at bicycling speed, the wall streaming past, covered with waving soft corals like casts of a person's lung passages, like prickly pears, like bushes and bowls and brambles. Schools of fish high above us, fish all over the wall, fish below us, and out in the deep water, over and over, five-foot-long reef sharks. They beat their tails in a rhythm that seems sullen, sulky, slow, skulking. Not really sneaky, though. Sharks don't have to sneak. Maybe the thing that differentiates their motions from that of other fish is that the sharks are the only guys who aren't worried about someone else eating them. They're not all twitchy and jittery and birdlike and abrupt. Nobody's gonna rush out and bite them. They can friggin' well relax, and never mind about the manners. You don't like it, whatchoo gonna do about it?

At one point I'd drifted out to the front end of our party of seven, and I saw a really big shark coming right along the wall, not more than twenty feet away, and now here come something else out of the deep, a hawksbill turtle three feet across, swimming dead-on straight for my head, I saw deep into his eyes. Swimming right below the turtle was something big and flat, at first I thought it was a ray, but it was a fish fully as big as the turtle, swimming on his side so as to take advantage of the turtle's wake — on the surface the guide told me, “That's a bat-fish. He eats the turtle's shit.”

The same bunch of divers went out together three days in a row, it was interesting getting to know them. There were two cute Chinese women, sisters from Shanghai, but one of them, call her Shirley, now lives in, natch, Santa Clara near my home San Jose, she owned a restaurant in Milpitas near all the high tech companies, but sold it. Shirley's younger sister, call her Min, lives in Macao (now spelled Macau), which they described as the Las Vegas of China, it has a reputation as a wide-open Sin City. Both were married, but their husbands weren't along.

At one point we saw a school of dolphins, swimming along at the prow of the boat.

click on this link to see a 5 Meg MPG: movie of the dolphins. (You can hear the Chinese women talking about them in the background.)

There was a guy called something like Bob on the boat, a Texan who's lived in Taiwan for quite a few years, making a living selling custom robots to chip fabs. Big talker, big Texas accent. He has a Taiwanese girlfriend, so has some expertise with Chinese women, and he was bragging to me about how he was going to try and get a date with Min, how Asians all have open marriages and it's not like the uptight USA. And then this morning he's saying something along these lines to Min's sister Shirley, about Asian sexual mores being different, and Shirley is like, “Who say? Why it different?” So much for that theory. And then Shirley tells me that Min's husband owns a casino and two hotels in Macao. To my mind, this calls up an image of a fairly tough character. A guy with an implacable security staff, a private army of martial arts warriors, right. So I'm thinking Bob's odds aren't too good.

Bob was always touching me and Embry when he talked to us, on the arm, on the back, patting and glad-handing, and we privily agreed spending that six hours a day in a small boat with Bob was getting to us. So I took Bob aside and asked him not to touch me anymore. I told him that my brother and I had grown up in the hills of Kentucky and that back there when you touched someone, it meant you were about to punch his nose, so it made me edgy to have him coming up and patting my back all the time, I wasn't sure how I might react. So he stopped doing it, which was a relief. Embry didn't hear me tell Bob this, and was of course delighted when I told him later. To get in on the fun, the next day Embry told Bob that he'd seen Min's husband on the dock, and he was a Chinese gangster in a Shantung silk suit, with two really big bodyguards. The Rucker brothers messing with Bob's head.

All this by-play if you just mix together a dozen people for three days. We're such social organisms. Like fish.

Anotehr time we did Turtle Cove, we went through a hole in a reef, came out on wall and drifted, passing quite a few turtles. Then we did another hole dive, Blue Hole, in which we floated down eighty feet through a vertical shaft in come coral and came out into this immense cathedral-like space. Not all that many fish in there, but the guide showed us a fire scallop, which he prefers to call a “disco clam.” This thing is a shell, which is open, and it has undulating lips with iridescent white lines flashing on and off along the lips, and some kind of protruding from the center is some gnarly soft grabbing device, waiting to snag curious fishies or shrimplets. Then we drifted along a wall towards Blue Corner, not quite getting there.

After one dive day, I felt like getting off on my own, so instead of getting a ride home with the dive charter guys, I walked to a bus-stop, looking around. Seemed kind of like I imagine Jamaica, colorful, lots of dark-skinned people (the Palauans), and reggae music seemingly playing everywhere. Bob Marley, “No Woman, No Cry,” I was remembering first hearing that when Sylvia and I were in some sense exiles from the US, ex-pats in any case, living in Heidelberg, and how strongly I shared Marley's images of the glory of the downtrodden.

I did yoga on a dock for half an hour, beat old boats around, sun going down, very mellow, listened to a whole side of Marley from a nearby bar as I did it. Nobody bothered me. When I walked up by the bar, really a patio, I stopped to study a trail of ants. In the setting sun, they had shadows a quarter of an inch long, magnifying their motions wonderfully. I could hear a guy talking in the bar, a young heavyset guy with a shaved head, a face like a white marshmallow with a few holes in it, like the Pillsbury dough-boy, he has a very heavy-duty underwater camera on the table behind him, he's pitching, “Bottom line, bottom line, I get that slide up, I'm sellin' Palau.”

On my last Palau diving day, we did the classic Palau dive, Blue Corner, where the Philippine Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. We went down a wall covered with hard and soft coral and drifted with the current. Out in the open sea were big sharks, considerably larger than me, some of them. Not all that far away. We were at about 70 feet. There was a swirling whirlpool of big-eyed trevalleys, each of them trying not to be out on the edge where the sharks were. Like a slow cyclone, making a shape like a nest, with every now and then a bright flash as one of the fish turned onto his side to wriggle deeper into the core. These were big fish. Clouds of little butterfly-looking fish, yellow and white like confetti. Up above a school of several hundred barracuda. Then a turtle paddles off the lip of the reef sixty feet above us. And then an eagle ray with a fifteen-foot wingspan flaps by.

The greatest dive of my life.

It's a 30-40 minute drive from the Palau airport, across two or three bridges to our hotel. On the way we go through downtown Koror, the capital of Palau, so far it seems like a crumbly third-world shopping strip, stores, hotels, restaurants, steady traffic on the two-lane road. We pass a local baseball game. Our hotel is out at the end of another island. In the evening we take a free bus into Koror and walk around, it's exciting, so alien. Unlike Yap, there's no one main race here, it's just totally polyglot: Indonesians, Chinese, Japanese, Palauans, Koreans.

We went into a market to look for film, it was wonderfully bizarre. The only newspaper for sale was the Weekly World News of January 31, 2005. Headline: “UFO Washed Ashore By Tsunami.” With a large black and white photo of a pie-pan UFO superimposed upon the wreckage of Phuket.

Somehow I'm reminded of the Interzone, the hallucinatory city in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Not that I'm seeing people doing anything particularly louche, but it feels utterly outside normal reality in that same way. For maybe the five hundredth time in my life I think of this line from, I think, The Soft Machine, and chuckle. “You win something like jellyfish, meester. Or it win you.”

Walking into his hotel room, Bradley saw something high in one corner of the ceiling, a gauzy veil, like the mucus casing that a parrot fish exudes to cocoon itself in when sleeping. The shape fell down upon Bradley faster than he could form a complete thought; it slid inside his shirt collar, down inside the band of his trousers and underwear, down his legs and inside his sandals. He felt a sexual burning in every nerve. The boy who'd spoken to him in the street, appeared in his doorway, his lips as bright red with betel nut as if he were a vampire.

“Skin like that very hot for two three weeks,” said the boy. “Then wearing the Happy Cloak.”

We took a gypsy cab from the airport to the hotel, driven by a betel-chewing guy called Ted. I forgot my knapsack with my prescription diving mask and my laptop computer in the back seat, realized this only in my room. But Koror is small enough that the bellman knew exactly who'd driven us, and when he couldn't raise him on the phone, sent a guy into town to find him. Half an hour later I had my bag back, and showered large tips on all parties concerned. I have been backing up my diary and novel onto my minidrive, so it wouldn't have been a total disaster. But I'm so glad to still have my little thinking aid. My axe. My memory seems a notch worse than it was the last time I traveled. Sometimes it feels like I'm traveling in a Heisenbergian haze, with all my possessions smeared out in probability space around me, at any time apt to quantum-jump out of my ken.

The hotel is very comfortable, but in some ways a let-down after Yap. Very corporate, polished, mega. Right on a nice beach, but they have such an immense ventilation system over the kitchen that the entire beach is flooded with the roar of fan. Additional machines are all over the place, and when we checked in they were actually, *sob*, leaf-blowing the driveway, which is something I definitely hear enough in California. But, again, the room is super-comfortable, solid, clean. And, really, how dare I complain at this point.

This morning I took a walk in a jungle beside the hotel, and heard an amazing bird song, three tones like a squeaky door, do-mi-(ti below do). And another bird doing a rising coo-coo-coo-coo call, though without ever breaking into the frantic squawk one expects.

The beach has a lot of coral, starting about twenty feet out, at depths ranging from four to eight feet. I went in snorkeling right away with Embry, saw scads of tropical fish, most notably a slowly whirling school of parrot fish — these guys gnaw on the coral, they have a very strong beak-like mouth, and they're shaded in lovely blues and greens. They have this cute tiny chartreuse (brilliant yellowish light green) fins like bird wings.

And best of all, the beach is loaded with giant clams, I saw one little “garden” of ten of them, each shell easily three feet across. Big crenellated shells, cracked open about a foot, and stretching across the opening is the clam's mantle(?) with two holes in it, a dot and a slit. The mantles are patterned in the most elaborate and psychedelic fashion, a bit like marbled endpapers, a bit like tie-dye. No two of them seem to be the same, even regarding palette of colors. I already wrote them into my novel-in-progress, where I describe a futuristic computing device that has this exact appearance, to wit:

“The skin was undulating, with slight ripples moving back and forth across it, interacting to form delicate filigrees and fleeting moir�s, like a living piece of watered silk. The skin was spotted and striped with blues, greens, aquas, yellows, and purples — like a cellular automaton, like an old book's marbled endpapers, like the mantle of a giant South Pacific clam.”

Some guys similar to the clams, a type of scallop with the same brightly colored mantle and lips, wedge themselves into holes in the coral heads, so that, in the middle of the a large maze-patterned brain-like coral orb you'll see a pair of iridescent blue or green lips, leopard-spotted with black or brown dots, as intricately detailed as the borders of the Mandelbrot set. [Actually the latter three of the pictures here are of those scallops, I only got the one good picture of the giant clams, although later we met a diver whose hobby is photographing giant clams, so eventually I may get a link to her site.] Turning on the SF reality-warper, I can readily visualize the people of 2100 instilling cultures of algae or Pacific giant clam cells into their lips or private parts so as to achieve some startling and magnificently iridescent effects. Is this really so inconceivable in our present world of Botox and silicone? Mightn't the 2100 Superbowel Halftime Show involve, let us say, a fading star's “accidental” display of her really quite stunning new biocosmetics?

One touching tale. In the local paper, the Yap Networker, I saw a front page story about a Yapese man aged 42 having been killed in Iraq, his name was Steven G. Bayow. Yapese can join the US army, as Micronesia has a loose association with the US. And our last morning we were having breakfast on this floating wooden Indonesian bark that's the restaurant of the Manta Bay Inn, and there were some US soldiers there. Embry said Hi to one of them, and found out they were there from Guam as the honor guard for the fallen Yapese soldier's funeral. It gave me such a turn, to see the winds of global war spinning a little eddy all the way down here to Yap like this. Reminded me of Bruce Sterling's SF novels, with the workings of distant governments filtering into the furthest backwaters, and I had a kind of chill or shock of recognition, thinking that it's actually 2005, and I'm in Yap, and that my life really is science fiction.

We were staying at the Palauan-owned and Yapese-run Hotel ESA (the monogram of a family name), very clean and cheap and pleasant — initially we'd thought it wasn't quaint enough, but after the Pathways we were glad to get back there. In the afternoon I saw a man walking into the restaurant there carrying a huge fresh tuna, its skin peeled away to reveal its luscious-looking purplish flesh. “Is that going to be on the menu?” I asked, and the man and one of the Yapese women working at ESA just kind of waved me off, like “This is for something else.”

And that night as Embry went out to dinner we passed the ESA restaurant, and inside was a long table with the soldiers and some Yapese, two of them near the head, a woman and a man, the man who'd been carrying the fish. And I realized he was the father of the dead Yapese soldier, Steven Bayow. His expression looked so — gently baffled. Nothing makes sense anymore when your son is killed. My heart went out to him and his wife. I wanted to go in and say, “As an American I wanted to say that I really appreciate and honor the sacrifice that your son has made.” I was too shy to say it in person, but now I write this here.

Right before bed I took a last walk down the street near our hotel. One the left was a thin little bay, on the right some shacks, the decaying Pathways hotel compound (7 huts), a store. Then, on both sides some warehouses made out of shipping containers, used for building materials. The stars overhead, brilliant among the scudding clouds, the air moist and palpable. I heard a radio voice coming from a parked car, someone listening to a preacher, who was working to stir up the fear of death in his flock. “Think of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King gunned down in their prime, think of coronary heart attacks, think of cancer, of plague, of terrorism, of death in car accidents, etc.” So odd to here this demented negatory ranting in Eden. The voice of the Serpent. Resist him, oh dear Yap!

I dove Yap Caverns at the southern tip of Yap, rifts and boulders with huge bumphead parrot fish. Looking up through the rocks at cathedral shafts of light, great fish above me. Saw a memorable nudibranch, a flat sea slug the length of my thumb, iridescent creamy white, with an orange band around his undulating edge. No eyes, instead two white antenna in front, and a bizarre mini-grove of tree-branched antennae in back. These are his gills.

A good model for an alien, as I explained to my two guffawing Yapese guides Gordon and Kintu, having told them that I'm a science fiction writer. [The photo above actually shows two other guys, on the island Pohnpei.] Kintu was sweet, a bit shy, he's from an “out island” called Satawal, at the far east end of the Yapese archipelago, population 500, no airstrip and it takes three days to a week to get there by ship from Yap, depending how many stops the ship makes. Gordon fat and talkative. Gordon wanted to know if UFOs were real or not; he'd seen a couple of episodes of X Files. We agreed that diving is as alien and spacy an experience as one could as for. I saw great clouds of orange fish on the dive, schools of jacks the size of my arm, a shark the size of my daughter, a giant turtle, a carpet-like sea anemone with a father clown fish guarding baby clown fish like tiny specks. The others had all gone to try (successfully) to see the manta again, and the only divers on this southern-most tip of the Yap reef were me, Gordon and Kintu.

The last day, Embry and I rented a car and drove around the island. We went first to the village of Kaday, a bit hard to find our way, as there are so few road markings, the guide book directions were a bit out of date, and only the vaguest maps are available in Yap. But we did find it, and walked into the village along one of the ancient Yapese raised stone paths. Slippery hard rock, wending among patches of taro, palm trees, cassava, bananas, creeks and ponds. The food crops weren't in tidy rows or anything, just patches of them mixed in with the jungle plants. We saw lizards, frogs, land crabs, a bird with a red back, butterflies, a yellow-and-green grasshopper the size of my middle finger, and a black-white-black striped boar with tusks and a long long snout, tied up by a rag knotted around one foot, poor thing. He looked so intelligent and so doomed. The taste of wub.

The dwellings were shacks of corrugated iron, many of them open on two or three or four sides, like pavilions, primarily for keeping off the rain. The temperature is always eighty degrees. In a city we're so hard and pulled-together, in these villages the dwellings seem just on the point of deliquescing back into organic natural life. The path through the village was covered with ground-hugging grass like you see on golf courses. A row of stone money beneath swaying betel nut trees. For some reason the village was deserted.

Embry and I walked to a river and sat there, wondering at the silence, the beauty. Then one of those brief showers of rain struck and we took shelter under the eaves of the men's house, a thatched hut at the middle of the village. There some betel nut fronds on the ground, with all but the tougher, larger nuts gone. The ancient rounds of stone money in front of us. A shared moment to remember, which is, after all, in large measure what we're questing for in this trip, my brother and I.

Later we were looking for the wreck of a WWII Japanese bomber supposedly near the airstrip, and asked some guys doing road construction, and they said, “We don't know, we are out islanders.” There's a real class distinction between the Yapese from the main island group of Wa'ab (pronounced simply “Wob”), and the out islanders. Funny to us mainlanders, who'd already think of Yap as being about as out-of-the-loop as you could get, that there are people even more out of it than the Wa'ab Yapese.

A couple of times we saw older women walking around bare breasted in grass skirts, as casually as bare-chested men in shorts. And everyone carries a little pandanus (a tree with a palmy kind of leaf that grows a hard pineapple-looking fruit that only the fruit bats eat) purse shaped like a miniature Macy's or Bloomingdale's shopping bag, with their stash of betel nut, lime, and cigarettes in the purse. I miss Yap already. Such peace.