Rabaul and Saipan

Greetings once again. Queen Victoria is currently en route to Aqaba, Jordan, but this post is about a month late. Enjoy...


February 26, 2009
Rabaul, Papua New Guinea

When Queen Victoria docked mid-morning on February 26 in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, it was greeted with a healthy dose of ash coming from a nearby active volcano. I had no idea what to expect from my visit to this port. All I heard about Papua New Guinea is that it was an island full of cannibals at one point in time, so I spent my entire day hoping that I would not get eaten. My musical director jokingly warned all the musicians that if the drums started beating louder and louder to run away from the noise… needless to say, I experienced no such thing and spent the entire day in culture shock, not fear. I only got off the ship for about four hours to do a tour called “Pacific Memories”. The tour took me to a couple locations significant to World War II including a tunnel built by the Japanese to store their landing barges, a memorial cemetery, and a war museum (which mostly consisted of plane wreckage, old anti-aircraft guns, and a couple of vehicles), but driving around the island was the most interesting part of the tour. I got to see a different side of the world that most people never see and other people are forced to live in on a daily, weekly, and yearly basis, and I am grateful that I got to see it. Houses were built with whatever people could manage to find, there are no two-story buildings, and very few people, if any, seem to live past the age of 70. When the people of Rabaul finally built themselves a decent village, it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption and they had to build on the rubble. In the reconstructed village, there are two washers and dryers for everyone to use and very few public toilets as well.

Again, the trip to Rabaul was a major eye-opener for me and I am glad I got to experience what I did. Everyone needs to see this type of civilization once in a lifetime. However, I hope I never return.March 1, 2009
Saipan, Mariana Islands

It was interesting to travel nearly halfway around the world from my home and reach a commonwealth of the United States. Seeing the occasional American flag brought back happy thoughts of home, especially after spending all but four days in as many months anywhere but the USA. Nonetheless, Saipan was not very American and had obviously been heavily influenced by Southeast Asia.

I chose to do the only tour offered by the excursions office for this port, niftily dubbed “Discover Saipan”. It was a short (four-hour) tour that took me to four different spots on the island, three of which dealt with World War II. Our drive along the coast first took us to the Banzai cliffs, which, in addition to being a beautiful spot for a seaside panoramic view, is the location that several hundred Japanese civilians chose death by cliff-jumping suicide over surrender to the Americans. They were led to believe thanks to Japanese war propaganda that if they surrendered they would be brutally tortured and killed so chose to take their own lives by jumping down to the rocky waters. The cliffs were scattered with memorials from different foundations and countries and I enjoyed viewing and photographing many of the memorials prior to boarding the bus for our next stops. En route to our next stop, the American Memorial Park, we stopped briefly at a panoramic viewpoint called Bird Island, which was very much worth the brief stop there before continuing on to the park. It was just a small island maybe 50 yards off the coast, but the color of the water and the waves crashing against the island and the coastline were like nothing I had ever seen.Shortly after leaving Bird Island, we arrived at the American Memorial Park, a beautiful park sitting on more than 100 acres of land with a memorial that lists all the US Armed Forces members who perished while fighting for Saipan, and I enjoyed walking around the park and visiting the museum located there which talked about the battles that took place. It was nice to visit somewhere that discussed the historical significance of the location to World War II again, especially after visiting Pearl Harbor a month earlier.Our last stop on the tour was one of the beaches that US Marines came ashore on during the invasion of Saipan in 1944. It was like no beach I had ever been to, in that not only was the water crystal clear, but the gun turrets from some WWII Sherman Tanks were visible peaking out of the water. I do not know where else in the world it is possible to see such things.

Following the tour, I capped my day off by finding a nice restaurant and eating some great sushi before walking around a small shopping center and then heading back to the ship.

In the end, my visit to Saipan turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had anticipated and I am glad that I decided to do the tour and got to visit the places I went to.