Tamuning Plaza Hotel

... thing!
We started out from another road and hiked 3 hours through trails that had lots of forks, finding several times that we were going in the wrong direction. However we were more familiar with the topography and features so that kept us giong in the right general direction. The hike goes al over the place, through an old WW2 tank farm and down a steep mud sice cliff where we used a rope down into the lower Sigua falls ...

... old Japanese WWII gun still preserved in the side of a cliff. The beach is famous for firecoral (not cool!), manta rays, sea turtles and the occasional whitetip reef shark. I saw plenty of firecoral! but didnt get the opportunity to see any of the above. Apparently 2 of the guys saw a reef shark swimming away from us but unfortunately I missed that one. I saw a lot of cool nocturnal fish that only come out at night and hide ...

... little trouble finding the exact diving spot but ran into some locals along the way who helped us out. Apparently we hiked through an ancient Chamorro tribal village... Heres some pics of us diving and snorkeling and fooling around with the new underwater camera

We slumbered too late and had requested a late checkout, so by the time we got to eat, our breakfast was verging on lunch anyway. We chose to go to Kings, a restaurant made famous in Hawaii but given a Guamanian twist as the menu features traditional Chamorran dishes, a cuisine native to the indigenous peoples of Guam. The casual restaurant was decorated with various artefacts such as native tools used by the Chamorran people, and had plastic screens of ...

After a long 12 hour flight from Los Angeles we have landed in Guam for a quick refueling stop before completing our journey to Manila. So far I've watched "Enchanted" and "Bee Movie" both are quite funny but I found "Enchanted" to be more to my liking. My butt is somewhat numb but all in all I'm doing fairly well. Next stop, Manila!

Due to flight schedules I had a day to kill in Guam. I arrived looking a little worse for the wear from my dog bite, it was a good conversation starter though! I wasn't really looking forward to seeing the biggest K-Mart in the world, but under the circumstances it came in quite handy to restock my first aid kit with band-aids. In the main town here it is a lot like ...

The National Park Service operates the War in the Pacific National Historic Park. I highly recommend visiting the online site for this park, because it gives more details than I can recollect from our tour. I did not realize that Guam had been invaded and occupied by the Japanese ...

... This makes for some incredible snorkeling and scuba diving (much of the crew got qualified, but I didn't have time to take the on-ship classes before pulling in to port). As we waded out into the calm, lapping water, we looked through our masks to the floor of the bay. White sand... shells... no fish! As I was about to ask Chris if he saw any fish, I raised my view closer to the surface, and saw hundreds of fish gliding past me, only 20 feet from the beach! As we swam ...