It was a rainy morning so we spent some time on the boat relaxing and organizing. I got our video footage from the dives we did a few days ago edited down to just the interesting footage (substantially less than the raw footage recorded). It made me appreciate the video pro at Sam's even more. He can just print his raw footage it is all so good. I hope to take a private lesson from him while we're here.

In the afternoon we grabbed a nice lunch at Sam's and then headed into town for a loosely organized independent tour. The key to our tour's success was Parker the cab driver (779-6174, islandtouragency@gmail.com). Parker is a great guy, has a nice car and charges very fair rates.

We picked up our yacht cruising permit to gunkhole around in the rock islands for $40. Then headed to the Mariculture Center. The MC is a place that was set up to study various important marine species. It is not the best organized place I have ever been but it is interesting to see and only costs $2 to visit. Other than knowing where things were our tour guide was pretty out of touch. Fortunatly Parker was there to fill in a bit. With Parker's help we figured out what was going on for the most part.

The MC has various fish and some baby turtles in the indoor tanks. The more interesting bit to us was the Giant Clam cultivation area. Giant Clams used to be very numerous on Palau. Now days they are hard to come by in shallow waters where they can be easily harvested. The MC grows various varieties of the giant clam and some go back to the reef, while others go to clam farms that the Palauans keep near the villages. Just off the quay you can see some huge calms in the coral beds as much as one meter across.

Our next stop was the National Museum. This was another nice stop with lots of detailed information about the history of Palau. There were separate exhibits for the Spanish, German, Japanese and US eras.

Our final stop was at the Palau Pacific Resort for Internet and dinner. As far as I have seen this is the nicest resort on Palau. We watched a beautiful sunset while blogging and dining.