Saipan Day 1 - Travel and Hotel Fiasco

Hi All,
For our Saipan trip we took so many pictures and did so many things that we are going to split up the posts by day. To summarize briefly, the trip was amazing. The weather was unbelievable for the entire time, 27ºC and sunny. JM and I learned that we travel well together and we both really enjoy snorkelling. We spent most of the vacation finding private beaches to explore and snorkel just off shore. There are lots of historical WWII sites on the island and we also toured around some of these. Overall, the vacation was exactly what we needed.

  

Prior to Day 1

The day before we left for Saipan, I received a troublesome email from Expedia. It went something along the lines of, "Unfortunately we cannot confirm your hotel reservation, please call us immediately". Even though the hotel had been confirmed weeks ago, Hotel Galleria realized last minute that they had overbooked. They were willing to refund 80% of our hotel price, if we stayed at the Prince Hotel. Upon searching for the Prince Hotel, there was little information on the Internet. We took a gamble because there were literally no other options. Every hotel room on the island was booked.

Day 1 - December 29

We arrived in Saipan at 3:30am after a long night of travel. The Hotel Galleria staff were very nice and apologized for the error. Over the week they were quite accommodating, paying for our taxis to and from the Prince Hotel and the airport. The Hotel Galleria is located in the downtown area of the main city, Garapan, and we chose it because it was so central. The Prince Hotel is located about 3km down the highway and off the beaten path. It was nice that they recognized how displaced we were. But this hotel mishap also encouraged JM and I to rent scooters (lil' mopeds) so that we had the freedom to come and go as we pleased and tour the island on our own. This was the best decision we made.

Our room at the Prince Hotel was very basic. It was part of an old apartment complex that used to be for those who worked in the clothing sweatshops. There were some hotel-like rooms for rent, and others were actually rented out as apartments.


Hotel room facing the entrance

Hotel room facing the window (a little dark)

The view from our room

Our first day was spent sleeping in like crazy. We eventually got up and walked the 3km into town and explored a bit of American Memorial Park, where we found this cool tree inside a tree!

Here is a map of Saipan where I marked all the places we visited. I have highlighted the two places we were on Day 1, the Prince Hotel and American Memorial Park. You can find the virtual map here.