Operation: Guam: waterfall

Shenanigans from this past week include a lovely sounding hike and a spontaneous snorkel excursion!

Last weekend we decided we wanted to try one of the hikes in our hiking book but we didn't have a lot of time, so we chose one that wasn't too far from base (Asan Falls). It promised to be a fairly short hike (two hours) and we were supposed to see three waterfalls.

One thing we did not take into account was the off and on raining that had been occurring all morning. The hike started on a dirt road which was super muddy...and slippery!! I was taking it slow going down some of the short hills because it was super slippery and there wasn't much to grab onto for support. When we came to the water, we found that we were just below one of the waterfalls and right at the top of the middle waterfall. According to the book, we were supposed to cross the water and hike down to the last waterfall (which we could see). Once we got across though, we realized that not only did the hike down look a bit treacherous, there was no trail on that side of the water! So the only way we could reach the other waterfall was to actually wade through the water and we had no idea how deep it was. We hadn't dressed for wading through water and we didn't exactly have rope with us to scale the rocky descent. So we ended up cutting our hike short! Hopefully we will be able to complete that hike at some point.

There were a bunch of these tiny frogs on the trail!

One of the waterfalls

Selfie!

Another waterfall

July 21st is Liberation Day in Guam, it is the day that U.S. forces liberated Guam from Japanese forces during WWII. It is their Fourth of July and it is a huge deal! They have celebrations going on the whole month and there is a four hour parade on that day. Most of the businesses in town are closed on that day and it was supposed to be a day off for Carlton.

Well, things don't always go as planned and he ended up having to work the first half of the day. But we wanted to do something with the rest of his free day, so we decided to return to Gab Gab beach and snorkel. We had been told that "Clown Town" was not far from shore, so we decided that we should look for it. On one of our previous scuba dives, we had found a couple anemones with clown fish at Gab Gab. "Clown Town" is a larger anemone with lots of clown fish. Besides it was a rainy day and hiking was out of the question, so getting in the water seemed like a good alternative!

We snorkeled for almost an hour looking for this anemone with no luck. We had covered quite a bit of the reef and decided that we should head back. Of course it was right when we were getting back to the pool at Gab Gab where Carlton found "Clown Town"! The problem is that it's about 20-30 feet below the surface, so it's a bit hard to see when you are snorkeling. I did some free diving to try to get pictures but they did not come out as well as I had hoped. We do plan to return sometime when we scuba dive so we can get better pictures. For now, here are the pics from our snorkeling!