Ngardmau Falls
"I got to the tallest waterfall in Palau riding a hand-pushed cart on rusted mining rails. Nobody warned me how good that would feel."
Palau's tallest waterfall, reached by an old Japanese mining railway that's been reborn as the strangest, most fun jungle cart ride I've taken.
Babeldaob doesn’t get the attention Koror and the Rock Islands do, which is exactly why I liked driving up there for a day — Palau’s largest island, mostly rural, threaded by a single paved ring road completed only in the 2000s with Taiwanese development aid, dotted with small villages and the stone platforms of an older, pre-colonial Palau that most tourists never see. Ngardmau Falls sits in the island’s northwest, and getting to it is honestly half the reason to go.
The falls are reached along the route of an old Japanese-built railway, constructed in the 1930s to haul bauxite ore out of the interior for shipment. The trains are long gone, but the rails are mostly still there, overgrown and rust-orange, and a local operation has put small hand-push carts on them — you and a couple of other visitors stand on a wooden platform and pole yourselves along the track through dense jungle for about twenty minutes, ducking under low branches, sweating instantly in the heat, laughing at how absurd and enjoyable the whole contraption is. It’s not a ride built for tourists in a theme-park sense. It’s a genuinely improvised use of colonial-era infrastructure that somehow works better than it has any right to.
The falls themselves drop about 37 meters, the tallest in Palau, into a wide pool ringed by boulders where you can swim after the walk from the cart’s end point. I got there in the late morning and had the pool to myself for almost an hour, floating on my back watching the water break apart on rock ledges above me. My guide, a Babeldaob local named Renguul, told me his grandfather had worked on the original railway as a teenager under Japanese administration, hauling ore in far less pleasant conditions than the ones I’d just ridden through for fun. It’s the kind of detail that reframes the whole outing — a leisure activity built directly on top of a colonial labor history that most visitors, myself included until he mentioned it, wouldn’t think to ask about.
When to go: Dry season, December to April, keeps both the rail track and the trail from the cart drop-off less muddy. Combine it with a full day around Babeldaob — the falls alone don’t justify the drive from Koror, but the island does.