Yap has quite a history and it's not just from WWII. This island group located in the Western Pacific is also know for its stone money, most of which came from Palau, which is almost 300 miles away with no landmarks. Indigenous people took on this treacherous journey on canoes and brought over those carved disks of stone The local traditions are strong compared to other states in Micronesia.
For an entire week we stayed at the Traders Ridge Resort and we were the only guests. The staff was absolutely phenomenal and they told us that most of the local builders were actually still working here in an obviously different capacity.
One day, the dive master asked us if we were up to a night dive to check out Mandarin fish. We missed them on our trip to Palau and we excitedly got ready. We took the boat to a shallow reef with mostly staghorn coral still within sight of the shoreline. It turns out that the Mandarin fish were mating at dusk and we were invited to witness this extraordinary "ceremony".
It was not easy to take pictures since there finger-sized fish were moving from one branch to another and were never still. The colors were so bright that it almost looks unreal.
To explore the culture and sites above water, we hooked up with a local tour guide, who was familiar with local customs, e.g. that you need to carry a branch when walking from one village to another as a sign of peace. He organized for us a visit to a men's house.
In another village the chief and his son (who had a cell phone) showed us how they build a canoe. The son payed a lot of attention to what his father had to say about his culture. This is the only way customs will survive from one to the next generation. The chief allowed us the get a citrus fruit from a tree Ging-Gong. This was the perfect opportunity to part from my original Swiss Army knife that I handed over to a stunned chief.
