By Michael Buckley

Lathered up with sunscreen, five people wave goodbye to the support boat and paddle into the Ulong Island chain on kayaks. They become castaways for a day—in the wake of Captain Henry Wilson

The sea lapping on limestone cliffs has a surreal calmness. This is like paddling into a postcard. The clarity is extraordinary: I can see coral shimmering in the shallows for some distance. And in this clarity, the senses seem somehow sharpened, more alert, more alive. Long-tailed tropic-birds glide past. Brown noddies skim the water for fish. And we hear other strange birds, but do not see them. Jayden, our Palauan guide, knows all the calls. “That was the call of the Fruit Dove,” he says. “Only found in Palau—and the national bird. Jayden has photos of the birds in a waterproof folder. Among them are a dozen endemic to Palau, like the Rusty-capped Kingfisher.

We cruise past some rock flowers, hanging low off the limestone cliffs. The island vegetation is striking because it somehow gains a foothold on the limestone. Jayden points out a tree with a small hard fruit, known as noni: this bitter fruit is used in traditional medicine by the Palauans.

Kayaking gives you access to nooks and crannies that are far too shallow for regular boats to approach. A ‘cranny’ sometimes means a space barely big enough to accommodate a human. We tie up the kayaks to a piece of limestone, then crawl on hands and knees through a tight cavern encrusted with barnacles. At the other side of the cavern is a tidal lagoon: we don masks and snorkel to observe the miniature world within. Palau is a magnet for divers, with barracudas, reef sharks, manta rays, Napoleon wrasses and hawksbill turtles patrolling the waters. You won’t see this kayaking, but instead get to see the lagoon hatcheries for these species, where they hide out from predators until they are big enough to fend for themselves.

Paddling along the coast is punctuated by stops to explore caves or snorkel shallow waters. Time becomes elastic: we have somehow drifted into the afternoon hours. We beach the kayaks for a late lunch. I wolf down sandwiches: you can build a healthy appetite when kayaking.

Marooned Among the Natives

At this beach, we have reached the rough spot where the good ship Antelope was smashed to smithereens. There’s a brass plaque on a plinth near the beach commemorating the events of 1783. Not the original plaque—that’s long gone—but a plaque set in place in 1985. The saga from 1783 has directed this kayak trip, which I requested after reading about the Antelope from the 1783 account of what happened. Not the original hefty folio volume that must weigh several kilos, but a modern retelling of the story in a slim paperback that I picked up at Koror museum.

In 1788, an illustrated book titled An Account of the Natives of the Pelew Islands became a bestseller in England. Based on the journals of Captain Henry Wilson of the British East India Company, the book recounts the adventures of sailors shipwrecked at Ulong and their interaction with Palauans. The Antelope hit a reef in a storm. The marooned crew camped on the beach at Ulong and set about building a small schooner, enlisting the help and protection of Koror Palauan natives in this endeavor. After three months, the schooner was completed—and the crew sailed back to Macau.

More than two hundred years later, Palau’s main draw lies in its reefs and its remoteness, for very different reasons. Adventurers come here with the intention of getting marooned in a different way: getting lost in the beauty of Palau, far from the crowds. Palau is still a bestseller in the castaway sweepstakes, but via a different medium. The islands have been featured in a number of survivor reality series, shot on location.

We’re the only ones on this expanse of white sand at Ulong. The island is uninhabited, but in the days when Captain Wilson crash-landed, Palauans lived here, up in the hills. Why not near the beach? Jayden explains why as we hike high into the tropical rainforest. He picks up shards of pottery from an old settlement. The inhabitants lived up in the heights to better defend themselves from attackers. High chief Ibedul, the crafty leader of Koror Palauans, struck a deal with the marooned British in 1783. In return for helping them build a new vessel, he wanted to use their firepower to vanquish his enemies on a nearby island. Captain Wilson obliged, supplying ten men with muskets. The gunners took aim from canoes to bring down enemy fighters—who were mystified how their men could drop dead without any weapons in sight, and promptly turned tail and fled.

Continue to Page 2 of Kayaking Palau

In the continuing search for carry-on packing tips and items that will get me around liquids restrictions, may I present….solid perfume.  This is the solid version of Miller Harris Geranium Bourbon and yes, I confess the name almost compelled me to buy it (but it smells good, too.)

I first found Miller-Harris fragrances in the famous Liberty of London store a few years ago, and heaven knows what I really paid for some small bottles, given the exchange rate.  You can find them now in the US at upscale stores like Neiman-Marcus – they are not cheap, but the unusual scent combinations are irresistible. When I found some solid perfume versions of their products, I knew they’d be perfect for travel.

The Karma solid perfume from LUSH is one of my favorites, too, but it is pretty distinctive so people either love it or, well, they hold their nose around you.

There are many alternatives to liquid toiletries, so don’t feel that you have to give up those little pleasant luxuries. Solid perfume lets you have your fragrance while making more room for, um, toothpaste.

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The actual title of Kathleen Peddicord’s book is How to Retire Overseas, but even if you are decades away from thinking of retiring, it is a useful read. Peddicord herself has moved her young family from the United States to Ireland, France, and her current home in Panama over the years, so she brings perspectives from her own experience as well as from research and interviews with others who’ve lived overseas long term, in retirement and for other reasons.

The first chapter is the most important, really: Peddicord advises that the basic step to planning a long term move outside your home country is to get to know yourself, both in practical matters and in less tangible ways. You need to think about what you know about yourself, how you like to live, what your resources are, and what your priorities are. It’s not just a matter of what languages you know and how well you know them, she points out,, but how you might feel living in a community where there are no other English speakers. That might be just what you are looking for — or not. It’s not just a matter of what your health is like, but how near you’d need to be to what sort of health care and what your peace of mind would be about that. Will you be traveling back to the US often once you move? How easy will that be to organize from your chosen location? Would you enjoy living in a community of expats, or not? These are the sorts of questions Peddicord advises you to consider at the outset, and she gives you lists of them to think over.

Know Yourself is the first part of a section called Ten Steps You Can Do Before Leaving Home, which includes chapters on brainstorming about where you might like to live (take out a map, that’s called), sorting out money issues, health, and real estate and renting areas you can consider and research, and figuring out to what to do with all your stuff.

There’s a section called Looking for something specific? which offers short introductions to places arranged by topic, so to speak: best places for mountains, seaside, good schools, language issues, health care, and the like, with two or three destinations considered in each section with both good and bad points noted.

Peddicord has fourteen places she considers retirement destinations, which she writes about in a bit more depth in a section arranged by country. These include Croatia, Panama, Ireland, France, Thailand, Ecuador, Malaysia, Italy, and Argentina. One point she makes that’s well worth noting when reading these: you move to a place, not a country. Locations within even small countries vary widely as to costs, landscapes, day to day life. Think about your own country, and you’ll know that is true

The last three sections of the book offer practical advice through stories of the successes (and mistakes) Peddicord, her family members, and others have had in building lives in countries not their own. You may not find the exact circumstances Peddicord faced when looking for a plumber in Ireland or furniture in Panama, but you’ll get the idea of what sort of things might arise and have the chance to think about how you’d handle them. Those stories come up in a section called Settling In, which among other things has a short but important story about making friends in a new country.

The section on overcoming challenges is told through stories too, with expats dealing with varying degrees of knowing a language to coping with the hassle factors of being in a different culture to managing expectations for living in one. In addition to several cost of living tables and a section called frequently asked and not so crazy questions, Peddicord concludes with a short chapter on the two most valuable things she’s learned about living overseas.

One of them is, not so surprisingly, to go ahead and take the leap. Should you be considering that, How to Retire Overseas is a resource that both provides practical information and asks good questions to help with your thinking.

I’m trying to decide why “Cambodian Grrrl” is the best travel book I’ve read this year.

Part memoir, part travelogue, with a dash of manifesto here and there, “Cambodian Grrrl” is the story of Anne Elizabeth Moore’s experiences living in a women’s dorm in  Phnom Pehn, where she’d come, at the age of 37,  to teach young women how to self-publish zines.

It’s a  giant challenge, not just because of the expected language barriers, but because of  cultural and governmental controls on free expression, and restricted access to information  — for example, many of the young women did not know very much about the genocide that had affected their own parent’s generation; Moore finds herself in the awkward position of telling them about it.

When I first opened the book, I was on the lookout for the pitfalls that often plague this genre:

1. One: The self-righteous narrator: watch as the crusading Westerner swoop in on the downtrodden folk and save the day!
2. Two: The paean to the Noble Savage — why life is so much better when you are freed from Western comforts!
3. Three: Policy wonkage — a slight story wrapped around a policy white paper.

“Cambodian Grrl” avoids all of these. Moore hits the right self-deprecating notes necessary to avoid the first problem, and is clear-eyed enough to avoid the second. (For example, she handles both of these at once in a deft set piece on washing her own dirty underwear by hand.) And while she does get in an enormous amount of information about the political, historical, and economic situation in Cambodia, it’s slid in the context of her own adventures and misadventures, and through the words of Cambodians. There are a couple of places where she directly discusses her own politics and philosophy, but she swerves away from the shrill, and everything is leavened with a great deal of humor

From a travelogue perspective, Moore does a great job of sketching the confusion of getting around town in a place where streets and buildings are numbered auspiciously, rather than…well, numerically.  She discusses shopping in the markets, the widespread advice to tourists to bargain and how bizarre it seems to haggle over such a small amounts with people who comparatively have so little.  And she also points out one of the weirder facets of dark tourism, or tourism based on human tragedy. Tour guides standing around, for instance, brightly offering tours of the Killing Fields.  I’ve not been to Cambodia, but I have traveled in Poland, and have seen the same bizarre brightness applied to tours of Auschwitz. (And posters and other souvenirs…not sure what anyone really does with those.)

There’s also the opportunism that comes with this, for example, a boy standing outside Tuoul Sleng, a torture center, begging for money, is asked his age, which he says his 12.

“Where are your parents?”

“We don’t have,” he said, gesturing to a shorter kid a few meters away.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“Killed by Pol Pot.”

 

He was too young for that to be true, but the women next to me mumbled with concern and handed him a dollar. He has benefited from her lack of knowledge.

Of course, this is also a story about how young Cambodian women began to make and distribute zines.  I found this part equally absorbing, and moving– the essential aspect of communication (and communication freed from commerce, imagine!)  a freedom of expression that is still so rarely used in these United States, even though we seem to communicate an awful lot about things that don’t matter that much.  It struck me that even as a person who has been involved in commercial publishing for her entire adult life, I’d never heard the sentence that Moore tells her students: “if you want to, you can start to change what people know.”

The one thing I really wanted, after I’d finished this slim book’s 95 pages, was to see the zines that Moore’s students made. I checked out Moore’s blog, clicked through a few pages of older posts, and didn’t see any. Perhaps some examples will be available soon. (Updated: there are a couple of older posts with images of the zines here and here, with others on the way. More as it happens.)

Stay at Loews Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego and you could take advantage of their one night surfing package that includes not only surfing lessons but also a how-to book on surfing, board shorts, and a surf ‘n’ turf supper.

There’s only one catch – this package is only for dogs.

Although I’m sure, if asked, the resort would be able to cater for two-legged traveling companions as well.

This is just one of the many deals highlighted in The Privileged Pooch, a specialized travel guide to pet-friendly places in Southern California. Written by travel journalist (and dog owner) Maggie Espinosa, this book offers a fascinating look at luxury hotels, eateries, and shops that cater for the four-legged travel companion.

After reading The Privileged Pooch, it’s clear that many hotels are not simply providing a convenient service to entice clients. They are actually whole-heartedly embracing their canine guests, offering everything from in-room massages, a canine room service menu, and even four legged yoga classes.

Covering San Diego (voted ‘America’s Best City for Dogs’ by Dog Fancy magazine), Palm Springs, Orange County, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara, the book provides in-depth information on 69 hotels and almost as many bistros, activities, and shops that are seriously dog friendly.

Even if you’re not planning on traveling with a dog, this book is well a read, especially if you have an interest in the history behind many of the luxury hotels in Southern California. Plus, there’s the added bonus of discovering new and interesting eateries and shops that you might otherwise never have learned about.

(Disclaimer: I was provided with a complimentary review copy of The Privileged Pooch to read and review)