| P-MAN VIII Update #15 Today was an administrative day. We spent part of it trying to arrange a meeting with Governor Jackson of Peleliu, but that hasn't happened yet. We also tried to track down several of our other contacts, without success. The BIG treat came when we stopped by the PALARIS office (that stands for Palau Automated Land And Resource Information System, sort of like the Bureau of Land Management). They're the people who turned us on to OziExplorer a couple of years ago: mapping software that has completely revolutionized the way we're able to visualize our searches by superimposing our GPS waypoints on topographic maps and actual aerial photos of our search areas. We wanted to check on a Navy imaging system that we'd heard about last year, to see if any new imagery of Palau might be available (it wasn't). The other thing we needed to do was to meet and pay our respects to the new Program Manager of PALARIS who recently replaced the person we'd been dealing with for the past few years. We were pleased to learn that the new Program Manager, Vernice Stefano, knew of our work. But we were absolutely ecstatic to discover that only a couple of weeks ago, she had spent a week in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress, where she found a large collection of original Japanese maps of Palau from the time of WWII and before. Uh...we've been trying to track that stuff down for several years, but we've never been to the mapping section at LOC! We started jumping up and down and hovering around a set of copies that Vernice had made of a couple of large maps. She had photocopied larger maps in pieces, so we started laying out the pieces on her table and trying to reconstruct the original.
We wound up taking digital photos of the individual parts of larger maps, so we can try to stitch them together digitally, although if the PALARIS folks can scan them for us, they'll be much easier to assemble into their original maps. Thanks, Vernice, for making our day!
The big event for the evening was dinner at Joe and Esther's house, in honor of Don, Jane, and Sarah. Well, no, dinner doesn't quite get it - it was definitely a feast! There were many courses of Palauan delicacies, and excellent company. You may recall that Joe had a starring role in Survivor Palau, and that Sarah is a long-time Survivor fan. As if hanging out with celebrities weren't enough, Joe made Sarah's evening by presenting to her a Survivor Palau buff.
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