This most recent trip yielded just two stamps in the passport, but provided us with a wealth of unique experiences that we could never get on the mainland of the United States. For more than a week we technically didn’t leave U.S. soil, but it is difficult to really see all these distant pacific islands as belonging to the same country. Most of the time, they are not even on the same day as the mainland. Based on my definitions of what constitutes a country, however, I did technically count Guam and Saipan (entered in my records as the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands) as their own countries. With that being said, an American would not need a passport to visit these islands, though I would definitely bring it. It is all a bit ambiguous. I think Saipan actually made us show it before going back to Guam. Regardless, as much as I would say, “You should definitely check it out! You don’t even have to leave the country!” It’s a bit more complicated than that.
For starters, it’s really far, and flights are limited. You would have to start in Hawai’i, then take the daily flight to Guam. That flight alone is eight hours on a packed 777. At press time, that flight (one-way) in economy class would have cost $2356. “That’s nothing! I fly free!,” say people like Brad. Fair enough, but the flight tomorrow currently has 53 people on the standby list if you fancy throwing your hat into that ring of chaos. The point is that we got lucky. Really lucky. Not just with flights, but everything else. And had we not been lucky in so many different ways, this trip might have been viewed through a totally different lens.
While we struggled to schedule things on Palau like a rental car, a boat tour, or a sightseeing flight, we did eventually solve these puzzles. Palau is very outdoor-centric, and is therefore highly weather dependent. The weather was perfect for our sightseeing flight — after being overcast all morning. Our boat trip was also almost entirely sunny with only a spritz of rain on our way back. And as much as I kvetched about Brad in this blog, I actually think he’s the only reason we went swimming with the sharks, one of my highlights of the trip. He complained at one point that he wanted to do more swimming, and I honestly think the guide was trolling him by taking us to a spot that Brad was a bit hesitant to swim in. Nowhere on TripAdvisor, does anyone mention swimming with the sharks with that tour group. So thanks, Brad, for being really annoying. Then while filling out paperwork to rent kayaks, it was a downpour. We walked out to the boat and it was sunny. After returning the boat and getting in the car, it began to downpour again. What were the odds?
As we shifted to a very different climate in the mountains of Honshu, Japan, we were gifted with very photogenic snow falling on the towns, gardens, and snow monkeys. It was cold enough for snow to happen, but not too cold to make us uncomfortable. For viewing the famous Japanese macaques (or snow monkeys), there is nothing more perfect than a gently falling snow to complete the atmosphere. It was perhaps one of the few times in my life where I was happy to see snow. It created a whole mood. I was relaxed.
And as a whole this was a fairly relaxing trip . . .to a point. It would be disingenuous to not talk about some things that were a bit of a disappointment. Japan has always ranked highly on both of our country lists thanks to its cleanliness, efficiency, and excessive hospitality. The kindness and warmth of the Japanese people has always gone a long way. It cannot, however, fix the inefficiencies of how train tickets are purchased. If it was say, 1992, an insistence on paying with cash might make sense. But as a global population, we have moved into a more cashless society. The Japanese rail network, however, has yet to fully adopt this. Furthermore, I cannot recall the last time one of my debit cards was rejected for being “foreign.”
Japan only reopened to foreigners back in October, and perhaps it is best we weren’t able to do this trip then because immigration alone was an absolute mess of QR codes and poorly designed websites. One would think, however, that a global pandemic would have affected Japan in a way that would have encouraged it to move away from cash. However, Japan, in a bizarre way, seems to have actually regressed. It is like it is still 2020 there. Our temperatures were taken at various establishments and masks are required everywhere. You won’t find me complaining about wearing a mask on an overcrowded Tokyo subway, but Japan’s insistence on repeatedly delaying its opening seems to have less to do with Covid and more to do with a preference for isolationism.
That may all seem minor, especially if you are someone who enjoys the feel of cash in your unwashed hands. I can confirm that Japan is still just as friendly if not friendlier since my last visit. The trains still leave exactly on time. At one point, I exclaimed to Nicole, “They left a minute early!” I was incorrect. The time had literally just flipped over to the next minute as it started moving. So that may have seemed like a very long rant about Japan not taking credit cards in enough places, but we hold Japan to a very high standard and expect better from it. That is all.
So in conclusion, it was a trip of many highlights. We snorkeled with sharks, we swam to submerged WWII tanks, we saw snow monkeys in the snow. And for all of that to happen, we were lucky. Those are all once in a lifetime experiences. I have vowed to never let the benefits afforded to me be taken for granted. I keep track of every flight and what its cost would have been to remind me that we are not normal, and that there’s no way we could have otherwise afforded this trip. Whereas we didn’t seem to have much luck back in October when we missed five flights out of LAX and took an Uber home in shame, it did provide us with a bit of perspective. Standby travel giveth and it taketh away. Brad’s bold predictions of getting business class all the way from Palau back to the U.S. proved to be overconfident. Nicole checked the loads of a flight he was supposed to be on and discovered he did not get business class. Schadenfreude. We are never overconfident. We just assume we will be offloaded due to a miscount, or given seats in the lavatory.
This last trip had a lot of pieces that had to come together. And since we didn’t know for sure if we were getting on flights, we couldn’t book things until we knew we would get there. We struggled to find an available boat tour of the rock islands after all the main companies reported no vacancies. We struggled to find a rental car on Palau. We barely got a sightseeing flight before they closed for the next three days. We had minutes between complicated train transfers in Japan. And yet, shockingly, it all kind of worked. So we are going to call this one a resounding success, but more than that we were just plain lucky.
passports & pepto bismol 