Sam's Tours Palau
To do land based on Palau, my impression was that choices were limited. There're a few specially catered the Japanese speaking divers, and there's one who frequently by ones who don't adhere to rules of diving, such as no drinking and diving. So Sam's Tours was an obvious choice at that time.
I was impressed by the efficiency and friendliness of the staff at the office, the two Philippinos ladies knew me by my first name and dive preference. The dive operation was a lot busier than I's used to in Hawaii and Guam, and the mixture of divers on each dive boat was interesting, which added to the fun part of diving. My Palauan dive guides and boat captions were fun and extremely knowledgeable and helpful. On day 2 of diving, the divers on our boat splited up in 2 half after the first 2 dives, since 4 of us wanted to dive the German Channel again and the other four wanted to dive the Chandeliar cave. The staff really did a good job tried to cater our needs as best as they could.
We got a box lunch everyday, which included fish, some greens, and carb. It's fine, since you can't be too picky in the middle of the ocean, when the weather is about 80-90 degree. The scenery, dive sites, and people made up for everything that's lacking. At the end of the day, they brought all of your dive gears up to the washing area, and you were responsible to cleaning and storing everything in the dive lockers. There's never any problem with things getting stolen or missing at the dive lockers.
There's a photography section, although the knowledge and help there was very minimum. So Sam's tours was more like a causal diving place than doing or learning serious underwater photography.
One major drawback for me is the choice of dive sites, which is extremely limited. I traveled during the week of Thanksgiving, so they were pretty busy and full. I chose to dive 5 days 3-4 dives per day, since the dive sites were few, on my second to last day, I started diving the same site over again. I only wished they could go up further north for the divers who don't mind to pay extra gas fee. So maybe I need to do a liveaboard if I want to dive in Palau again.
