Saipan
The view of Saipan's coral reef from our cute plane. |
The only possible glitch is that we were traveling on a
shoestring and decided to share a hotel room. The kids like us so much that
they didn’t want to be separated from us even a little bit. Yep, we are that
cool. The hotel, however, allowed a maximum of three people to a room, ignoring
the fact that there was sleeping room for four. Nick had learned a lot growing
up with Roger, including the maxim that it’s ok to lie a little to save some
cash. We had to decide who of the four of us was the least obvious person among
us. This person would have to slink around the resort unobtrusively,
Ninja-like, staying under the radar of the three-person-max police. It seems
crazy, I know, but for some reason, we chose Roger. There was some logic to it
at the time, but I can’t remember for the life of me what our reasoning
was. Anyway, we chose the very person
MOST likely to strike up conversations with security guards, random Japanese
tourists, and terrified Russian nymphets. More on that later.
We didn’t bank on the possibility that we would be the only
Caucasian non-Russians in the 435-room hotel. Yep. We didn’t exactly BLEND. As
the Aussies used to say, we stood out like dogs’ balls. This surprised us,
since Saipan is American, more or less. It is a part of the Commonwealth
of the Northern Marianas Islands, and belongs to the US. However it is FAR from
the US mainland, and only a five-hour flight from Vladivostok, Russia, and even
closer than that to Japan. Since there aren’t many tropical islands within
a stone’s throw of those places, the tourists flock here.
The Japanese presence on the island is huge (and we are
happy to report that they are much friendlier toward Americans they meet on the
beach than they were in July 1944.)
Signs on storefronts, at tourist attractions, and in advertising are
mainly Japanese, with Russian running a close second. Many shop employees don’t
speak English at all. The tourist map we used to navigate the island had
captions in all three languages. We are accustomed to dealing with people who
speak other languages, but it was disconcerting to deal with that in America.
Very interesting, but strange.
Typical signage in Saipan |
The bomb pit for Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb. |
Like Saipan, Tinian teems with WWII sites, but unlike Saipan
there are few tourists, Japanese or otherwise. During our first three hours
driving around, we saw only three other cars. We drove down Runway Able, the
runway that the Enola Gay used on its
bombing run to Hiroshima, and saw the pits used to load the atomic bombs before
the flights. The bombs were so big and so heavy they couldn’t be loaded
conventionally. So they dug two concrete
pits, positioned Little Boy and Fat Man, then taxied the B29’s over the pits
and winched them into the bomb bays. The
island is scattered with ruins of Japanese bomb shelters, weapons, buildings,
and vehicles--all accessible and ready to be explored.
Not all the sights were war-related. Tinian is home to the House of Taga, which has the largest latte stones in the Marianas Islands. Big
suckers. Never hear of latte stones, you say? Neither did we until we arrived
in Guam. Latte stones are two-piece upright pillars that supported a
traditional house. They are all over Guam and the other Marianas and are common
symbol of the area.
Latte stone, Amanda, and Nick |
Then there was the Tinian Shrine, a Shinto site from the
Japanese occupation that was nearly impossible to find. The map had it wrong, and we circled for some
minutes until we found a few actual residents in a driveway. We stopped to ask directions, and they
explained that the road shown on the map no longer existed, and it was
impossible for us to find it. “We’ll
take you,” they said and Josiah, Frances, and J.J. piled into a pickup, with
Josiah perched in the back of the pickup, king-like on a bench seat removed from
a mini-van and with a sun-shielding umbrella over his head. We followed them off-road up a jungle track to
the shrine, overgrown and eerie in the dappled jungle sunlight.
Russian Nymphets: Don't they have bugs in Siberia?
There is only one adventure to relate from the Saipan trip,
much to everyone’s relief. Late one
evening, Roger decided to take a walk down by the pool to reconnoiter. He took the elevator from 7, pressed Ground,
and was surprised when the elevator stopped on 2. Waiting in front of the opened elevator stood
a twenty-something Russian, obviously in distress. She wrung her hands and
said, “Help! Please! Come!” and she motioned to the opened doorway to her room,
visible from the elevator. Thinking
someone must be hurt, Roger followed her into the room, where her girlfriend
stood sobbing and shaking, still dripping from the shower.
“What’s wrong?” They pointed to the bathroom, its door shut.
They took turns pointing to the bathroom and sobbing. They were terrified. “What is it?” One girl put her hands under
her chin, as one might imitate a rabid chipmunk, and made a noise that sounded
like “beep…beep…beep.”
So Roger opened the bathroom door—cautiously, to be sure—and
looked around, scanning the floor beneath the sink. The girls gathered closely behind him. “No! No!” they said, as they pointed to a washcloth
on the vanity shelf.
Roger shut the door, always prudent. “What is it?
A mouse?” “No mouse.” “A rat?”
“No rat.” She indicated with her fingers something the size of a half-inch
or so, and repeated the pantomime of the rabid chipmunk. “Beep…beep…beep,” she
said, probably in Russian.
So Roger bravely re-entered the bathroom, girls watching
anxiously from behind, and proceeded to pound the shit out of the washcloth
with a hairbrush until he heard the expected “crunch”. He removed the
washcloth, and found beneath it a cockroach the size of a Tylenol caplet, promptly
flushing it down the toilet.
“Everything is good now,” he reassured them. “My job here is done. Everything is o.k.” He felt pretty damned good, truth be
told. They were very grateful (not that grateful, as it turned out), and Roger got a warm hug from one of the girls, and a wet and sticky one from the other.
We met them at breakfast the next morning, and they were still
effusively grateful, although in Russian.
With this confirmation, we now believe this story to be true. The girls explained that they were from Khabarovsk,
500 miles north of Vladivostok, and that all the Russians one sees in the
Marianas are from eastern Siberia, a five-hour flight. That explains the throngs of Russians,
comrades. So we were able to do a Good
Deed, improve American-Russian relations immeasurably, and learn something at
the same time. This is why we like to
travel.
Saipanda, silliest marketing mascot ever, is actually a bit of word play in Japanese. "SAI" is the the Japanese word for rhinoceros, so a Saipanda would look like...Get it? The Japanese LOVE IT. |