Guam-ish

Three hours from Tokyo, a quick car ride to the Pacific Islands Club on Tumon Bay in Guam, and this was our 9th floor view.



As everyone tells you, this sort of "all-inclusive resort" family trip is not about adventure. It's about visiting a comfortable, fun, warm spot on the globe where your children are well-occupied and exhausted by the end of the day without wrecking their parents' vacation. It worked.

We stayed at the resort most of the time and bought the 3-meal/day plan to make life even easier. PIC has big kid-friendly, adult-friendly buffets - and good Asian food, a daily donut and fresh, ripe papaya doesn't hurt either.

Activities are included: swimming pools, a lap pool, water slides, snorkeling, windsurfing (which I taught when I was 19), white-sand beach and beach toys, tennis, basketball, archery. Relevant resort pix:




The "kids club" was free for kids age 4 and up, and we hired a babysitter to supervise Arno for kids' club activities. The Korean sitter, Eve, was among several dozen college-age Koreans and Japanese who work at PIC to learn hotel management.

The clientele is mainly Japanese and Korean, with a few Chinese, Russians and Americans thrown in. The cafeteria offers huge bowls of kimchi, the super-spicy Korean condiment, with every meal including breakfast.

Guam is a huge shopping destination for East Asians, especially with the cheap dollar and no sales tax. The main drag near the hotels is lined with designer malls (Chanel, 2 Louis Vuittons, Dior, Cartier, Rolex) and strip malls with karoaoke and strip joints. I went to K-mart to buy medicines (you don't find Robitussin in Japan) and Payless to find flashing-light Tinker Bell sneakers for Lucinda - whoop-de-doo!

Late in the vaca, Blaine rented a car for work, which jolted us out of our resort stupor. We circled the southern end of the island to see hills of volcanic rock coated with thick jungle - what Japanese soldiers and US soldies and Marines saw during the Battle of Guam in 1944, when 18,000 Japanese and 3,000 Americans were killed. (Wikipedia tells me that a Japanese soldier lived in tunnels in Guam for 27 yrs after the war ended.)



We found a relaxed place to stop for lunch - Jeff's Pirates Cove - though the food was wretched.



While Blaine intvued Jeff for a WaPo story, the kids played around.



We also went to "Two Lovers Point," a cliff overlooking Tumon Bay. Entry fee: $3!







Naturally, we found a...



Legend has it that a well-born young woman with a Spanish-aristocrat father and Chamorro-princess mother (Chamorro is Guam's native tribe) jumped to her death with her commoner Chamorro boyfriend rather than marry an arrogant Spanish captain.

In the modern version, tourists declare their own eternal love by attaching luggage tags and locks to a fence overlooking the tragic spot.





One last thought, which cracks me up: