Just got back from 3 days in Guam with Mrs. YH and her parents. What the hell is Guam you ask? Guam is a small Pacific island about 2000kms east of the Phillippines. Oh, and it is also a territory of the USA:

From CIA World Factbook
Guam was ceded to the US by Spain in 1898. Captured by the Japanese in 1941, it was retaken by the US three years later. The military installation on the island is one of the most strategically important US bases in the Pacific.

Guam is a Pacific backwater and quick getaway for Japanese tourists that can’t make it to Hawaii. After a three hour flight from Osaka we landed at the tiny airport and went through passport control. Every person was fingerprinted and photographed except me; Canadians are exempt from all the new immigration rules. (Kind of a big loophole doncha think?)

In the bus on the way to the hotel all I saw were gun clubs, strip joints and Japanese restaurants. A Japanese businessman’s dream getaway: guns, sex and sake.

The population of Guam is quite mixed; the indigenous Chamorro, a Micronesian ethnic group, make up about a third of the population. Filipinos make up a quarter, and another quarter is a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. The last 10% is white people. The big topic for Guamanians is about how great their island is, and how it is “forgotten” by the mainland US. A legitimate concern I think, since Guam is much further away and doesn’t bring in nearly as much tourism as Hawaii. It is clearly out of the sphere of American domestic interest, and even though it can be considered an important “forward base” for the Pacific, the US still has tons of troops in Japan and Korea that could be deployed quicker and in more numbers to a China or a Taiwan. Opportunities for the locals are pretty scarce, pretty much the tourism industry or the military. They have a severe homeless problem and I got the impression of a depressed youth. Unlike the backwaters of mainland USA, these kids can’t easily “go to the city,” as they would have to pay for a long and expensive flight.

All in all we had a short, but good time. The in-laws and the wife have all been to Hawaii more than once and thus were disappointed with Guams meager offerings, but I was pretty impressed with my first tropical island. Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet any Phillippine-style rebels or Hawaiin-style seperatists, but I did get to go on some wikked waterslides!

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