Shan in Japan

A few more photos have trickled in from the Guam race. (expecting more too)
Shusei Yamada kindly gave us a few more shots I've put on the Guam album.

Here is a photo of the Guam Speedlink team courtesy of Shusei Yamada - pro photographer at the race.
From left to right: Tatsuya, Makiko(bright light), Yushi and me.

There are some other photos up on the GEAR site -> click here
You can also see the times and placings of the teams. Speedlink did pretty good, if only we could have finished with all our team members!

I've decided to store and manage photos separate from this site.
You can view photos and vids here: http://imageevent.com/shanakin/

To be honest, if it wasn't for the GEAR 05, I don't think I would ever have visited Guam.
A popular tourist destination for Japanese, it is often described as a mini Honolulu.

The desired tourist for Guam is your shopaholic money loaded tourist on a safe all inclusive package deal where they never have set foot out of the comfort of the resort area - Tumon Beach. You can see plenty of them about. I guess they keep the economy turning.

Through the GEAR race, I was priveleged enough to get outside that bubble and see and learn some pretty amazing stuff. Moreover, I met some great local crew. After the race, I ended as a homeless backpacker cruising the streets on my mountain bike. Thanks to the hospitality of James, the race director, I had a place to crash and an insightful tour of the island.

It is much bigger than I expected. I clocked over a 100kms on my bike (including the race) just riding around.
We drove down to the southern part where jungle was dense and quite a different feel to the northern part.

The history of the place is a bit depressing... Like many cultures, the Chamorro people were almost wiped out by Spanish missionaries through disease and failure to believe in a little guy on a stick cross.
Then after the Spanish were done, Americans took over in 1898 and lost it at the same time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941. After a brief but brutal occupation by the Japanese, it is now an unofficial territory of the US.

Hard to think such a beautiful island was razed through fierce fighting during the war. Interesting story about Sgt. Yokoi who seemed to think the war never ended. He ended up hiding in the jungle until 1972!

After reccuperating from the race on Sunday....yeah ok, and Monday, I got out and about. Had dinner and beers with a couple of local lads - Dan and Tommy. Next day, I went for a beach dive with a dive master named Doug. Viz was a bit poor that day with overcast conditions, but plenty of fish about and warm water. Went down to a max. depth of 30metres. Highlight was seeing a huge puffer fish with these little cleaner fish swimming through his mouth and out the side of his gill!

Sat on the beach reading my travel books and pondering this and that. Then along came Tommy and Charlie with some kayaks amped up for a late afternoon paddle. We headed off out past the reef and up past Gun beach (because there is a big black gun on it) and pulled up a bay just before 'Two Lovers Point'. We headed into a huge cave - that I had actually zipped in and out of during the race to note down a code word.
Now I had the chance to appreciate it at a more leisurely pace. There were pools of aqua crystal clear fresh water at the bottom and the narrow entrance that soon opened up into a huge amphitheatre.
Outside there were some ruins of Latte stones - huge foundation stones carved out of the reef by ancient Chamorro people and used for the foundation pillars of their houses.

Back to the kayaks. We found a nice little reef break with just 2footer waves, they seemed pretty harmless.
After picking off a few and trying not to catch an edge with the cumbersome kayak, I went for one of the larger sets. It jacked up and sucked the water dry off the reef and I speared it with my kayak. Kind of similar experience to my mountain crash the other week. I defended myself from the coral with my paddle and played safe after that.

The final night, Charlie and Tommy took me to a local steakhouse..I forget the name.
'I'll have a baseball medium rare' says Charlie...I was like what?!
Turned out to be juicy nugget of steak - about the size and shape of a baseball. Great feed.

On the last day, I had lunch with James. I owe this awesome experience of Guam to his efforts - legend.
At the airport I finally managed to catch up with Roland - a guy I met at the Xterra in Japan last year. There are nearly zero internet cafes in Guam, so bummer I couldn't have gotten hold of him sooner (I guess I could have asked around because everyone seems to know everyone). Top guy - he hooked me up with a bag of goodies for the flight home. Which concludes that Guam has some really genuinely nice people and thats what counts the most. I'd definitely be keen to head back there again - its only a 3 hr flight from Tokyo too.

Back to Tokyo now. I did manage to score some strange heat rash kind of allergy I have just above my brow....

Last week I headed down to Guam for the Guam Extreme Adventure Race (GEAR) on May 14
This race has been held annually for the past five years...hence the name GEAR 05.

A 24 hour race consisting teams of 4 people, covering a distance of well over 100km on mountain bike, kayak and trail running.

My team members were Yushi, Tatsuya and Makiko. We had all briefly met for drinks in Tokyo a few weeks prior to the race, so all pretty much strangers to one another.

So how did the race go?
After nearly sleeping in, we managed to get outselves down to the beach for the 5am start.
Already sweltering heat before the sunrise, I knew this was going to be a killer day.

As this was my first long distance 'adventure' race, I had to keep reminding myself to take it easy and not burn out too early. Because of the slow steady pace, almost feels like your not 'racing'. Teams spread out pretty quickly and you soon lose sight of who is in front and who is behind you.

On the kayaking section, we saw a pod of dolpins swim by. Naturally, as I stopped to grab my camera they disappeared....

Speaking of photos, I had an instant waterproof camera. Most the shots didn't come out so good but here some that managed to make the cut. http://imageevent.com/shanakin/guam

Considering our team hardly new each other, we all got on well under the boiling conditions.
I won't go into the finer details of the race, but by the 7th Checkpoint (9 check points in all) and 15 and half hours later our team had to withdraw from the race;-(

It was getting dark and we didn't make the time cut off for the next stage. Furthermore, Tatsuya sliced his head open on the sharp rocks on the coast section. While attending to him, Makiko also cut her head open with an even worse gash than Tatsuya. My only ailments were blisters on my feet, which probably saved me from the razor volcanic rocks as I opted to swim in the sea where possible so I didn't have to walk on my aching feet.

I was actually feeling pretty good and felt disappointed being told we could not continue the race. Then on second thought, actually I was quite relieved. 'That'll do for me!'

So as Makiko and Tatsuya were whisked off to hospital to be stitched up, Yushi and I rode a shortened course back to the finish line. One of the support crew had icy cold beers for us - what a legend! As we couldn't finish the race with all 4 members, our time was not recorded. Out of 11 teams, only 4 or 5 teams (need to check) completed the entire race.

I have to take my hat off to our support guy - Brad. He did a top job of keeping us fed, hydrated, gear set up and overall motivated. Definitely a major factor in getting us through this race.

We then kicked back and cheered on some of the other finishers. Later headed back to the hotel and fell asleep like a stone.

So why do I do this? It's like drinking and waking up with a hangover saying 'I'll never drink again!'
Doing the race is fun and towards the end when the 'hangover' kicks in you're cursing yourself for doing this gruelling mission. But now it is over, it is definitely a sense of accomplishment. Seeing how far you can push yourself, learning about your limits and surpassing them. Of course, its much healthier than the drinking analogy!

Further to my photos of Moon Mountain, the crew from Japan Adventures have some more photos here.
Japan Adventures are a bunch of outdoor enthusiasts who organize some great tours and events to lure us out of the concrete Tokyo jungle and into the beautiful wilderness Japan has to offer.

At the Gassan trip, while I was skiing around alone listening to some sounds, little did I know the rest of the crew packed up and left the mountain to go and do some bungy jumping. I was left behind;-(
Ah well, more ski runs for me. Wasn't too keen on bungy jumping anyway.

こんにちは！
今日から新しいブログを始めました。
日本語で入力できるといいよね。
ほとんど英語で書くと思うが、時々日本語で打っちゃうかな。。
コメントが日本語でもいただければ、ありがたいです。
よろしくお願いします！

hi there!
As I'll soon be hitting the road, I thought the best way to keep in touch with everyone would be to start a blog. Hopefully, I can keep this updated and interesting enough so that you'll check in on it once and a while;-)

So where are we at right now?
It's golden week in Japan, a succession of holidays. I was intending to work through, but the weather has been top notch. I headed out to Okutama on tuesday for some mountain biking. Found a great single track course and flew down it. Soon I hit a boulder/ tree root? - which stopped the bike, though I continued on to nicely plant my head on the only rock on the trail. "crack!" - my helmet took the brunt of that. I'm so glad I wore that dorky thing.

Went home with bruised and bloody knees, broken chain, dented bike frame (and helmet) and with a grin:-)
Last few days, have been milder just chilling in the parks, taking swims and reading Jack Kerouac's "On the road".

Off to Guam next week for an adventure race - GEAR 5
Will keep you updated on that.

For now, I'm just going to toy around with this blog, hopefully get some photo albums up soon too.
Keen to hear comments.