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that modern rarity of genuinely unspoilt
nature, says Rory Ross I
n American Caesar, his epic biography of General MacArthur, who commanded the USA’s Pacific campaign in the Second World War, William Man- chester points out that among many challenges that the US troops faced besides the enemy – earth-
quakes, typhoons, disease, sharks, New Guinea head-hunters and soaring temperatures – was geography. Few troops had a clue where they were, and those who thought they did soon found that in fact they didn’t, and that Island X was in fact Island Y. Little has changed, at least among Westerners. Take
Palau. One friend thought it was a kind of rice. On the map, Palau indeed resembles a scattered dish of pilau. A tiny 340-island archipelago in the west Pacific (population 17,000), it is located 1,600km east of the Philippines and 800km north of New Guinea. Its closest neighbours are the equally obscure Federated Islands of Micronesia: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae. ‘Remote’ hardly captures Palau’s exclusion and isolation. Such as it is, Palau is not the tourist hotspot that its nat-
ural charms might have allowed. It was welcoming just 150,000 visitors per year before the pandemic. Today the numbers are lower still: in 2024 just 65,000 showed up, of which just 7,000 were Westerners. (By comparison, the equivalent figure for Mauritius, which is roughly the same size, was 1.38 million.) But in this decline, Palau’s president Surangel Whipps
Jr (more on him later) and others have spied an opportu- nity to embrace a new model rooted in exclusivity, envi- ronmental stewardship and cultural authenticity. It must be said that it is starting from a low base. The only hotel of note, the Palau Pacific Resort, is, according to one lo- cal, ‘let down’ by its food and beverage. The government, therefore, is actively encouraging the type of high-end developments that have the potential to attract the affluent, responsible travellers who can help establish the Pacific nation as a torchbearer of luxury tourism that harmonises with nature. BS Ong, a Malaysian- Singaporean tycoon and hotel investor, is not only on
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