Scuba diving holidays in Palau

This month I could spend 2 beautiful weeks of scuba diving holidays in Palau. Here you find Palau on the map:

The islands of Palau look very particular and distinct:

Perfect for diving, but not too many beaches, as most of the islands have a steep cliff.

Papa, Tes and me, we stayed 4 days in a hotel on Palau, then 8 days on the Palau Siren for diving. This is Papa with the Palau Siren:

Here are some scuba pictures. Good that I just completed the NITROX dive course before, as we were all diving with NITROX exclusively.

This is me in front of the wreck of the Taisho Maru. The Taisho Maru was a Japanese ocean liner which was sunk by a US submarine torpedo on October 26, 1944 (the ship had been converted into a military transport ship during the war).

More pictures are available on my Picasa web album:
https://picasaweb.google.com/104727839447798652971/PalauJan2013?authuser=0&feat=directlink

Here are my dive profiles:

Sick at home

Currently I am staying sick at home. I have a nasty caugh that lasts already for about 3 weeks. Let's see what the chest x-ray will reveal. I am already on a antibiotic treatment.

As I have plenty of free time at home now, I can watch Youtube videos all day long. :-) Watch this video about the Tarsiers (as seen on Bohol, Philippines):

And one more about Sloths:

And about the Angler Fish:

Fairwell video for Christian

Christian from Avaloq Zurich stayed with us here in Manila for a couple of months. He helped us to streamline the interaction between Zurich an Manila, and helped us to improve our organization a lot.
The team made a great video for his fairwell:
http://vimeo.com/57844907
Thanks to everybody who has contributed to this nice video!

Subic Bay - but in small notes please

Subic Bay

In early December, we were in Subic Bay for 2 nights. Here is the link to the photo album:

https://picasaweb.google.com/104727839447798652971/SubicBayDec2012

We stayed at the Whiterock Beach Hotel which is also a waterpark.

I made 2 wreck dives. Check out their profiles:
http://www.movescount.com/moves/move9036000

http://www.movescount.com/moves/move9036004

The first one had very poor visibility due to the tide which made the current flowing out of the bay, stirring up all the dust in the water.

Cash - but in small notes please

Especially the notes on the left (!) side seem to have a very high value, so that nobody wants to give them out...

It was striking to realize a very similar phenomenon as I had observed in Egypt already. However in Egypt it was annoyingly bad, whereas in the Philippines it is just a hassle:
Many shops, restaurants, bars, taxi drivers seem to be unable (or unwilling) to render change to larger bills.  When we tried to pay our bill in a bar (1014 pesos) and payed with 2 thousand notes, they came back twice to ask for smaller notes. Finally they ended up in reducing our bill to 1000 pesos only instead of giving us the change of 986 pesos. And it could not be that they simply did NOT HAVE that much money in their cash register. The bar was full of guests and it was late already. They must have had a full cash register.
Does the Philippine National Bank print to little of the small notes...?!