5-Day Palau Rock Islands Tour with Peleliu and Babeldaob

Flights into Palau arrive from Manila, Taipei, Seoul, or Guam, most of them late in the evening or very early. Immigration stamps the Palau Pledge into your passport, a promise to the children of Palau to tread lightly that you are asked to sign on arrival, and our team meets you for the short transfer to Koror.

The rest of the day is deliberately light: visit the Etpison Museum, the best single introduction to Palauan money, canoes, storyboards, and the first-birth ceremony, and the Belau National Museum next to it. End the day with sunset over the lagoon from the hill above town.

This is the full day everyone comes for, on a private boat with a Palauan guide. The lagoon opens south of Koror into the Rock Islands, and the route is set on the morning by wind and tide.

Visit the chalk-white shallows of the Milky Way for the calcium mud, the arch at Ngermeaus, and snorkel the drop-off at German Channel, where mantas come in to be cleaned. Enjoy a beach lunch on an islet with no name you will remember and, permits allowing, walk over the ridge to Jellyfish Lake to swim among millions of stingless golden jellyfish.

Return to Koror in the late afternoon, sunburnt and quiet.

A morning boat runs an hour south through the lagoon to Peleliu, and the day is spent with a Peleliuan guide on an island that has never been tidied.

Visit Orange Beach, where the Marines landed on 15 September 1944 into the worst reception of the Pacific campaign; the Japanese command post, its concrete still shell-torn; the tanks and amtracs where they stopped; the Thousand Man Cave; and the climb up Bloody Nose Ridge on the Umurbrogol, where the fighting ground on for over two months and the view finally explains why.

Snorkel over a wartime wreck on the way back, then return to Koror by evening.

Spend the day on the big island, crossing the bridge and following the Compact Road. First, visit the traditional bai at Airai, the oldest meeting house still standing in Palau, its painted gables carrying the clan histories they were built to record.

Continue north to Ngardmau for the jungle walk down to the country's tallest waterfall, passing the ruins of the Japanese-era mining line, and enjoy a swim in the plunge pool.

In the far north, reach Badrulchau, where thirty-seven basalt monoliths stand in rows on a headland above the sea, carved around 150 AD and still unexplained. Return to Koror for a farewell dinner.

Palau's departures are mostly in the small hours, so the last day is shaped around your flight. If there is time, the morning goes to the Koror fish market and the storyboard carvers at the jail workshop, where the country's best-known carving tradition is still practised, before the transfer to Roman Tmetuchl airport.