Palau: La Maddalena Archipelago Boat Tour with 4 Stops

We LOVED this daytrip! This is such a fun activity with beautiful stops for swimming, snorkeling, tanning, and admiring the views. My dad and sister usually get seasick but due to the short trips and long stops they did not feel bad at all. The onboard service is also really good with very reasonable prices for freshly made pastas as well as beers and aperol. We enjoyed the day so much, and cannot recommend it enough!

I highly recommend it :) We went with my family and found it very relaxed, the beaches were really beautiful with clear waters. The boat makes two stops at beaches, and the third stop is simply a final swim in the open water (optional), you don't actually go ashore for that one. Finally, you get to explore the small town of Maddalena, which has no beach but is very picturesque, with lovely local shops for souvenirs and clothing, plus a chance to grab a gelato. We went in low season (mid-September), so there weren't many people either on the boat or at the beaches. This is worth keeping in mind, since I imagine the experience is quite different during high season.

The Maddalena Archipelago is truly stunning, but that is the only good thing about this excursion. Overall, the experience is so commercialized that even the natural beauty—the main reason for the tour—loses its charm. They pack so many people onto the boat that it is impossible to move around comfortably. They crammed eight of us at a table where four people would already be a tight fit, so we spent the entire journey packed in like sardines. Essentially, we got absolutely nothing out of the sightseeing during the boat ride, as we couldn't see much while squeezed at the table. At each stop, several other boats like ours would arrive at the same beach simultaneously. You can imagine the scene when up to a thousand people—all wanting to lie on the sand and swim in the beautiful water—suddenly flood a beach that isn't even large. Not to mention that while standing in the sea (swimming was barely possible) at the archipelago's most beautiful beach, there was a stench of sewage.