diving7seas
What to do ashore
Yap is a destination for divers . That ‘ s why you come here – and you will be rewarded under water so to speak .
To put it bluntly : if you imagine hours of beach walks , you just will be as disappointed as those who want to plunge into the nightlife after every sunset . The real party is once a week in Colonia : it starts every Friday night ( and only that day ) in O ‘ Keefe ‘ s Bar across the street from the Manta Ray Bay Resort . At those evenings the local youth ( and some older ones who are young at heart ) meet for live music , beer and drinks and brisk dancing .
For all of you interested in the history of the island and the culture of its inhabitants there is yet waiting a lot . A few 100 yards away from the hotel you find one of the old stone paths , that the islanders used to get from village to village in ancient times .
Still today , one of those pathways starts behind the three small supermarkets close to the resort and leads to the hilltop where since 2018 , three wind turbines are standing .
It is largely unknown that the Caroline Islands and thus also Yap were one of the German colonies for about 15 years until the end of World War One . The name of Yap ‘ s capital , Colonia , also is the first original name of the German city of Cologne as it is an ancient roman founding : the romans abroad Rome used to call there important newly built cities with a wall with the first name of Colonia . Today , only the remains of a concrete anchor for an overseas cable and the head stone of Conrad Hofschneider in the old cemetery of the capital remind at this time . Born in 1861 in „ Weinsdorf bei Hanover “ in Germany , Hofschneider was the accountant of the colonial government and died in 1911 on the island .
Nowadays , it is the only German grave of that era . Not far from the hill with the small cemetery , a small open air museum village was built at the crossroads of Colonia . If you do not want to go on an excursion to the more distant traditional village or even to an original Men ‘ s House , you can see how places in Yap looked like before the US support after WW II .
Another interesting place is the old runway of the Japanese occupiers during World War II . The US Air Force bombarded the island with neat regularity and it also came to aerial combat . This is still witnessed after more than 70 years by some aircraft wrecks . In 2015 the local government started to set up some of the wrecks with information boards .
A unique destination in the world is the Stone Monex Band . The giant aragonite coins were brought to Yap by canoes from Palau some 240 miles away ( where the rock was excavated in caves ). The effort and the danger of transport made the stone money valuable . It was not until 1871 , when the Irish Captain David O ‘ Keefe „ discovered “ Yap ( indeed he was not the first foreigner to land here ), later founded a trading company there and took over the manufacture and transport of the stone money , so that it increasingly lost its old meaning , soon . Even today , however , the coins , some weighing tons , serve the tribes as means of payment for land and real estate . Incidentally , O ‘ Keefe also brought the alcohol to Yap ( so it is told ). Did the seabearer had some shots only on Fridays ? Hardly likely . Anyway O ‘ Keefe ‘ s Bar still operates like this .
The Manta Ray Bay Resort offers a range of hotel excursions that will take hotel guests wit a small pullman to one of the beaches on the west side of the island .
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