A Finely Timed Swing

Some of the world's best scuba diving has long been the stock-in-trade for Palau tourism. A small, but healthy tourism industry has grown up around Palau's robust reefs, consisting of mostly small hotels and a slew of dive and water-focused outfits catering to about 60,000 annual visitors. Now as this small nation nears its much-publicized period of major development, a Japanese investor is gearing up to diversify Palau tourism with the country's first golf resort.

According to plans unveiled earlier this year, Japanese radio commentator and investment manager, Toshio Masuda, is backing a premier 18-hole golf course and resort proposed for 425 acres on the mostly undeveloped island of Babeldaob, where a 53-mile ring road to be completed in 2006 is expected to lead to substantial economic growth.

Masuda says the golf course and resort is expected to cost between $22 million and $30 million to build and could be open in as little as two years. The course would be built in the foothills of Aimeliik State with a clubhouse that overlooks 16 holes and the ocean.

Masuda is partnered locally with Alan Seid, the chairman of the Micronesian Investment and Development Corporation, and the driving force behind Palau Micronesia Air. The joint venture is called Palau Golf Inc., with Masuda, his wife Mariko Ejiri, and their Tokyo-based investment company Sunra World Corporation as the primary investor. Palau Golf Inc. has contracted CCA International Ltd., a high-end, worldwide club management company, to build and operate a resort that caters towards wealthy and long-term tourists. The resort plan is aiming for a minimum of 100 villas, a hotel with about 60 rooms, and a spa.

Palau Golf Inc. hired noted golf course architect Robin Nelson, of Nelson and Haworth, to design the course. Nelson has designed numerous golf courses around the world including Guam's prized Mangilao Golf Course, and a number of popular courses in Hawaii. Keeping with Palau's environmental bent, Nelson says the golf course is proposed for former farmland that is severely degraded. So the course would require little earth moving or clearing and would reforest around some of the proposed holes, Nelson says.

The golf course has been in the works since the mid-1990s, but following the Asian market crash in 1997, investors chose to wait. With signs of growth in Asia today and Palau's potential for growth, Seid says, "the timing is perfect."