Spread a map of the world across a table. Now, stick a finger on the Republic of Palau. (Hint: Look for whatever the hell Micronesia is.) In the Pacific. South of Tokyo. Dead east of Manila. Seven degrees north of the equator, right there above Papua New Guinea.
Only divers can pick it out instantly.
Why? Because a third of 1 per cent of Micronesia's total area is land -- and it's not the land they're pointing to. The Palau group is a sprawling, tropical smattering of terra firma that is all but superfluous to those who travel the region in search of the realm that exists beneath it.
Palau has been touted by diving magazines as the world's ultimate destination. Jacques Cousteau called its underwater walls the best anywhere. The words "dive" and "travel" are used interchangeably in the capital, Koror. It's a shrine, and a diver really isn't considered a diver until he or she has made the pilgrimage to its Blue Corner, Big Drop-off and Chandelier Cave.
I visited Palau not only as a non-diver, but also as one who had never attempted a dive and had no plans of ever doing so. Which made me the proverbial teetotaller on the Heineken tour, the lone celibate at the Nevada brothel, the prat who passes the spliff at a café in Amsterdam.
I went to Palau -- in the view of everyone else who goes to Palau -- with no possibility of consummating any genuine relationship with the destination. I could chat and flatter and accidentally cop random feels, but as a non-diving tourist, getting past first base on the tiny archipelago was, by definition, not possible.
And so I befriended Franz. Franz was a peculiar, highly charismatic thirtysomething from Newport, R.I. A former lobbyist and one-time press secretary to the governor of California, Franz had recently reinvented himself as a kind of laid-back playboy backpacker, funding his world tour with T-shirt sales from a wildly successful, though rather dubious, Web site.
Franz didn't dive either. Together, we chided the manic fuss they, the divers, all made about our reluctance to go down.
One afternoon, we met a gay (in the James Michener, ultragleeful Pacific-seeker sense of gay) German named Oliver. Oliver had scuttled all over the map in search of beauty and truth, most recently from Honduras to Mauritius, with a stint as a gardener in Tokyo, before temporarily settling down as a dive master in Palau. In the kingdom beneath the surface of its stunning turquoise lagoons, he had found nirvana.
Exploring and frolicking among its divine cracks, Oliver had unwittingly turned into something of a missionary. He could save people's souls, it seemed, if he could only get a mask, oxygen tank and buoyancy compensator device (BCD) on them. He performed this rite dozens of metres beneath the surface, as an instructor at a local dive shop called Fish 'n' Fins, converting rich, giggly Japanese girls, tanned Europeans and paunchy Americans. He was genuine, subtle and, at all times, two steps ahead of his prey. All the qualities missing in your typical missionary.
The happy German was perplexed by the fact that we had no plans to dive, but unlike every other diver we had encountered, left it at that. He took us paddling one morning in an outrigger canoe. We navigated mangroves, deserted coves and perfectly strewn mazes of densely vegetated, soft limestone islands, many of which were shaped like toadstools, their tops wider than their bases. (Of the 343 islands that make up Palau, eight are inhabited, with a human population totalling 18,500.) We found bat-filled caves, scattered bits of war wreckage and hidden white beaches. Who says, we asked, that only divers can know this place intimately?
While chatting about this on just one of those beaches, Oliver nonchalantly pulled some masks and snorkels from his pack. "Go ahead," he coaxed gently, the corners of his mouth curled in an impish grin that the Falwells and Franklin Grahams of evangelism just aren't capable of perfecting. "You won't really get the 'flying' feel, but you'll get an idea of what's down there."
He showed us how to use spit to rinse the lenses so they wouldn't fog; how to release pressure from our ears if we wanted to dive beneath the surface; how to avoid stepping on fragile beds of coral. As I bit the snorkel and looked underwater for the first time, I was struck by an almost atavistic spasm -- like the one that comes when dad gives you the keys to his car for the first time.
Which was a bad sign for the stubborn anti-underwaterist. Despite my reluctance, I immediately became enamoured with a haphazard collage of yellow cactus-shaped coral (in a shade of yellow I'd never even imagined) -- even more so than with the schools of colourful fish, which move in synchronization like one big seething creature.
I held my breath and swam down toward huge clams. (Giant tridacna clams reach 453 kilograms in certain parts of the lagoon.) I psyched out and teased open weird things that opened and closed, finding perverse satisfaction in outsmarting glorified plants. (I later learned that this was considered irresponsible diving behaviour.)
That night at the Dragon Tei, a dark, gnarly sushi restuarant in Koror (the city was occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War and still retains a pervading, if decaying, Asian feel), Franz and I still felt like outsiders as the divers went on about their day's conquests. They burbled about how many minutes they had stayed under, how many metres they had gone down.
Our day of paddling and exploration and snorkelling ("snorkelling . . . how cute") didn't hold sway with the eagle rays, grey reef sharks, nudibranchs and giant Napoleon wrasse that the serious divers had all managed to check off their little lists.
The more they raved and the more people told me I had to dive, the more childishly defiant I became that I wouldn't. When we next saw Oliver, however, we couldn't help gushing about our quick little snorkelling jaunt. With a knowing smile, he casually mentioned that he had the next morning off. He could get a couple of tanks and some equipment and we could bum a ride out to one of the walls. "You know, if that's something you'd be interested in . . ."
"Well, you know, if you've got nothing else to . . ." I tried to answer.
Like a great fisherman angling a Marlin that once, too, thought it was great, he had us. "Come by later in the afternoon to go over the basics."
As we watched a Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) video, learned about BCDs, regulators, breathing techniques and simple hand signals, a monkey tied to a poll swung around madly outside his office, and Oliver genuinely seemed to enjoy every minute of it; the review session afterward, the quiz at the end.
He taught us that the shape of the reef and clarity of water is what make Palau such a diving hotbed. The islands are, in essence, southern peaks on a submerged mountain range that plunges 8,229 metres to the ocean floor. Not only that, it's the convergence point of three separate nutrient-rich ocean currents, which is why it supports about 1,500 species of fish and 700 types of coral and anemone. On top of that, the interior lagoons are crammed with eerie corpses of American and Japanese subs, planes and tanks, the corollary to some of the bloodiest Second World War battles ever fought.
Treading near the surface above Big Drop-off the next morning, where the water was a balmy 28 C, we experimented briefly with the gear before submerging through a narrow sapphire channel to the drop. Then slowly, diagonally, down it. We zigzagged past spongy creatures and soft, wavy corals, corkscrewing through the quiet and calm into schools of exotic, oddly shaped butterfly fish. (Oliver never knew the names to anything, describing them only as "blue" or "green" or "striped" or "weird.")
We followed a giant green turtle, fled from an ugly eel with an alarming jaw, looked down upon a reef shark. The simple act of breathing so far beneath the surface was euphoric. We didn't swim so much as fly alongside the sheer, ethereal wall. That's how it felt, at least, as our regulators became like wireless umbilical cords. "Underwater," Jacques Cousteau once remarked, "man becomes an archangel."
Most divers get their virgin attempts out of the way in bleak, suburban indoor pools. Indeed, as Franz excitedly put it afterward, we'd at least "lost our virginity to Cindy Crawford." Oliver grinned smugly at our glee. I hadn't wanted to so openly acknowledge that he had been right. But then he had promised heaven, and, in a manner of speaking, he had delivered.
Continental Micronesia has a monopoly on the region's underserviced routes. It flies from Houston and Los Angeles through Honolulu and Guam to Palau. Information: Fish 'n' Fins (680) 488-2637, , . Other links: .