A ruby sunriseand crowing roosters and twittering birds found my hotel, run by Filipinos, which was cheap, spartan, old but efficient—I was broke and alone, after all. It was on a secluded residential side street, ideally quiet and unassuming, which meant no screaming kids, no barking dogs, no loud juke boxes in a hotel bar, or bums, or hookers, or clanking dishes. Oh, but yes, there were birds and roosters and the irritatingly ancient air-conditioner, which made my throat sore, so I slept sticky and hot for the rest of the trip.
But none of this amounted to anything. I was the hotel's only guest, and its surroundings were the real draw: blue sky, warm sea, bananas, coconuts, betel nut, sago palms, fragrant flowers, ferns and vines. It seemed like it could be a touristy botanical garden in Singapore, or the atrium of a vogue Australian resort, or what you pay three hundred bucks a night for at Tavarua, but it wasn't. Of the Pacific islands, Palau immediately struck me as being of the most unique.
Which is not lost in the tourism office's glossy brochures or the smug grins of the local people, most of whom own cars. On my first morning I took a sweaty walk west of town and realized I was the only pedestrian—Koror is a settlement of the automobile. Everybody drives. It harked of Majuro, and several times I came very close to being roadkill. Motorists honked and swerved and the air was exhausty and the gutters were trashy; people smoked cigarettes and ate Cheetos and drank Coke and were obese and illiterate; the sun was out and Koror was hotter than hell. But what did I care? I was a grubby white guy visiting from the great land of SUVs and Wal-Mart, I was minding my own business, here to surf and to look around, and, no, I wasn't part of that damn "Survivor" cast.
Around three in the afternoon I rendezvoused with William at his moored boat, a twenty-foot fiberglass panga with canopy, in a private harbor beneath the Japan-Palau Friendship Bridge aside a rusting hulk of a half-sunken ship.
(This modern suspension bridge joins Koror to Babeldaob, which is the second largest island in Micronesia [Guam is the first], and was built by Japan in 2002 after the original Koror-Babeldaob Bridge collapsed in 1996, killing two people.)
"Before, the ship was valuable and people argued about who owned it," he said. "After it started to sink, everyone forgot about it."
An hour later, miles from land off the coast of Babeldaob Island, William looked toward Koror and said, “Sometimes I just don’t want to go back.”
“You don’t say.”
We'd skimmed for a half-hour through squalls across the lagoon after William bailed early from work. He is an attorney and was very busy, but the swell was on its last legs.
The wave we were surfing was a long and fun right-hander reminiscent of Cojo Point, but there weren't fifteen boats in the channel and forty people out hassling each other in the middle of nowhere, and it was much warmer.
"Two few days before you arrived," he said, "this spot was as good as it gets."

* * *

On my final night in Palau I ordered sushi in a restaurant called Mingles, but I did no mingling because the place was empty. So I ate in silence; the food was inexpensive and good.
Walking back to my hotel I came upon a gaunt, geriatric white man sitting in a folding chair on the corner of the road, in front of the Koror post office, smoking a cigar. He wore a blue floral shirt and beige shorts; his bare legs were skinny pale pins of veiny flesh, and his eyeglasses were a quarter-inch thick. Two pieces of luggage were at his side.
“Your cigar smells quite good,” I said.
“Want one?”
“Oh, no thank you. I don’t smoke.”
“Good for you. You don’t need it.”
He was an eighty-six-year-old World War II veteran named Cecil. He was sitting there waiting for his ride to the airport to fly back to his retirement home in Kansas, a tiresome red-eye route stopping in Guam, Honolulu, Houston, and finally Wichita.
“That seems like an awful lot of flying for a guy like you,” I said.
He scoffed. “I got here, didn’t I?”
“What brings you to Koror?”
“Peleliu.