Guam is not a large island (48 miles long and 8 miles wide), but it is big enough to have a river. Every day, a riverboat head off up said river, giving tourists a view of the tropical rainforests, the exotic animal life, and, during monsoon season, torrential rains. There are strange jungle sounds, alien jungle smells, and possibly killer jungle piranha.
The day I was to board the riverboat and chug off upstream, I wasn't prepared for what I was about to experience. There was the surly boat captain. There was the prim sister of a British missionary who had been killed while working in one of the local villages. There were white water rapids. There were Germans attacking us with machine guns.
Wait.
Wait.
That wasn't what happened. Those are all scenes from "The African Queen," starring Humphrey Bogart as the rough-and-rowdy riverboat captain and Katharine Hepburn as the missionary's straitlaced sister (and starring a bunch of Germans with machine guns as the Germans with machine guns).
Since "The African Queen" was one of my favorite movies, I had been looking forward to steaming up a tropical African river (even if it wasn't in Africa) to see if there were any similarities. But it wasn't to be. The bus that was supposed to take us to the riverboat never showed up. By the time I got to where we were supposed to be, it was too late. There would be no riverboat ride for me. And no second chance. I was only going to be in Guam for a couple of days, and I'd already scheduled snorkeling for Day Two.
What would Humphrey Bogart do in such a situation?
Well, he'd probably go find a bar, get drunk, and then take Lauren Bacall out to dinner. However, I wasn't inclined to get drunk and I didn't really know Lauren Bacall all that well; I went to the beach instead.
The only problem with that was that the aforementioned monsoon season was in progress. The clouds made a great backdrop to a series of sunset pictures, but the impending rains sent me scurrying back to shelter.
The next day, all prepared for a snorkeling adventure to offset the lack of riverboat goodness, I made my way outside to meet the van that would take me to the diving grounds.
The only problem with that was that the aforementioned monsoon season (also aforely-mentioned a couple of paragraphs up) was in progress. Rain was coming down so hard and fast that it had made a marsh out of a nearby field and rivers out of the roads.
As a general rule, snorkeling takes place underwater; we weren't too concerned.
The van sloshed and swayed, dunked and dipped, fighting the current. Finally, we scrambled out of it at the dive shop, only to discover that the waves offshore were so bad that all the fishing, SCUBA, and snorkeling excursions had been cancelled.
Initially, riding back in the van, I was morose -- "the best-laid plans" and all that. But then I looked out the window and saw how the palm were being lashed back and forth by the wind. I saw the wake churned up by the van as it cut through the water washing down the streets. I even saw a couple of German tourists (albeit without machine guns) huddled under the awning of a roadside restaurant.
I smiled and started looking for piranha.
The author is currently wandering about Asia, trying to find a country, province, nation, or territory that isn't in the middle of forty days and forty nights of rainfall.
