Guam is 1550 miles south of Japan and 3800 miles west of Hawaii and is the major hub in Micronesia (2000 islands stretching across 3 million square miles). Continental is the region's largest carrier and most of the flights are at god-awful times of the night - so that they connect nicely at the US hubs! However, our 19-hour layover in Guam gave us the perfect opportunity to visit Jim Brandt (our favourite Course Director from ProDive Florida) and his wife Bonnie who moved back to Guam recently.Bonnie works for the University of Guam and Jim is Operations Manager of MDA (Micronesian Divers Association) specializing in training the thousands of US Military Personnel that are based on Guam. They have two dive shops inside the bases and even fly their instructors onto incoming Aircraft Carriers so that crew can do their coursework before they even get to port!
We picked up a car and drove to the only place open at 5am – Kings Diner – where we marveled at the 32 menu items containing SPAM. We even saw Spam Sushi at the airport … I kid you not … 2 slices of Spam with rice in the middle!! Tamuning, the downtown area of Guam is very busy, full of duty-free swanky shops like Gucci, Cartier etc, high-rise hotels, the Hard Rock Café and even a K-Mart!
Jim & Bonnie live in Ipan on the east coast of the island which is very picturesque with secluded bays and tropical scenery (very much like Fiji). We met them after work and they took us out on their boat for a fantastic sunset booze cruise to catch up on the gossip from all our mutual friends.
The next day we met up with Tim Rock (renowned photographer & dive travel writer) whom our prospective boss in Yap wanted us to meet. He has lived in Micronesia for many years and traveled extensively writing dive guides and Lonely Planet books etc. so was able to give us a great insight into the culture, diving and tourism industry in the region. He packaged us off with a bundle of freebie books & DVDs, so we hope to be able to take him and his wife for dinner on our return.
That evening we flew on to Palau and since we had another 3-hour layover, we grabbed a taxi and went into town. The taxi-driver was great and told us all about Palau while his ancient car limped along on vapour and grinding bearings. We couldn’t really see much of the town in the dark but it seemed to be full of Japanese restaurants (servicing their main tourist market). We found Kramers (sp?) a bar recommended by Tim and we had a fantastic dinner of blackened sashimi and several beers before being picked up again for our flight to Yap.
