Upon returning from Palau the real work began. Logging 20 hours of footage takes significantly longer than 20 hours. Whittling it all down to four minutes for a "trailer", now that is a job. This task fell mostly to Dan. Seems only fair that the person who didn't get to go on the adventure should be tortured by having to watch every second of the footage repeatedly.

Dan, being the fiscally responsible half of PostStar Productions LLC, stayed in California to see that there was a steady flow of cash to Palau. You have heard the Warren Zevon line "Send lawyers guns and money", guns and lawyers were unnecessary. Palau is seven degrees above the equator, 1,000 miles Southwest of Guam and everything, EVERYTHING must be shipped in especially money.

There are two things Palau has in overabundance, beetlenut and beauty. Everyone everywhere is either chewing or preparing to chew beetlenut. In all it takes about 8 minutes to prepare and chew and most of that time is in the preparation the buzz must be either really good or really addictive. And no I didn't try it. Something about Tom threatening to never kiss me again. Back to the beauty, breathtaking is a somewhat overused term but to crest a hill and suddenly see the ocean at her bluest butted up against a lush green hill.... Maybe striking is the term. Turn your head a bit and you will notice the wreckage of a Japanese aircraft. Zero or Tony is currently under debate but Japanese none-the-less. She seems to have glided to a rest in a dead-stick landing. The legend is that even for the effort of what appears to be a rather gentle touchdown, the pilot died. Local Palauans buried the man and they identify him as having papers in English and wearing an american belt-buckle. Even when the wrecks are found not even half of the mystery is solved. What is the airplane and who was flying remain to be searched out through other means. Contemplate these questions looking out over the wreckage of this aircraft on a pristine hillside with a multi million dollar ocean view.

It's the dichotomy that's so hard to reconcile, the stark contrast of a wreckage sitting amongst such pristine beauty. But this is for philosophers and poets to wrestle with. What I am sure you are truly interested in is the Bat Soup!

A very large part of any journey is the food. There was the night of the fishing derby, we feasted on the second place jack. After meeting with the Chief's we had cheeseburgers, but neither sashimi nor cheeseburgers are strictly indigenous of Palau. What I really wanted was some Palauan culinary specialty. The one I kept hearing about was of course Bat Soup. It seemed to be something tougher to get than Dengue fever. A woman at our hotel came down with Dengue, we redoubled our applications of deet and still I didn't see Bat Soup on any menu. That is until Joe chose the restaurant for our last meal in Palau, Carp. And so a bat was served up in a bowl of white broth. Trussed up, wings tied together and tongue sticking out of mouth a whole entire BAT in the soup! Now I am not going to say it was better than the silk worms shared with Kate in the middle of a street in Bangkok but I will say I tried it :-) What was spectacular that evening was the conversation. We dined with Joe and his vivacious wife Ester. The fine art of story telling is alive and well in Palau, Ester and Joe proved such that evening. It seemed story after story was a lead to a wreck. Pat gently asked what it was that had happened that suddenly everyone on Palau was eager to give him new leads. Ester answered equally gently "We know now that you aren't coming here on vacation". They know now that Pat is seriously searching. It only took nine years and eight trips to convince the Palauans.

We boarded the 737 for a take-off from that too short runway with full tummies (though Joe finished the soup for us) and with more than one dozen new leads for the return trip. It has been my goal in life it seems to devour one adventure and move on to the next, not terribly interested in revisiting.... The plans for the return trip to Palau were underway even before we returned home.

We return to Palau in April and if you want to know more, you'll have to wait for the documentary!