I wake up early, shower and then I’m off to the north. The previous day, James suggested I meet up with him and some of his friends at a northern beach for a trash pickup Sunday morning. Having nothing better to do, I decide to go. Guam is bisected by one major road – Marine Corp Drive. It goes from Anderson Airforce Base in the extreme north to the Navy Base in the extreme south. After 20 minutes, I realize I’ve driven too far and turn around. Amazingly I somehow find the correct turnoff and descend the steep cliff to the beach “park” bellow.
I realize that this is not a park for tourists, but one frequented by the locals. There are some old concrete signs and a large trash filled parking area, but despite the ill kept appearance, it is beautiful. I meet James and some other people and begin to pick up trash. We head away from the main parking down a dirt road that leads to an amazing cove. Trash covers the beach and road for over a mile. And I mean a lot of trash.
There are more than one places where large families have held a cookout and then left everything when they were done. One pile is clearly from the night before complete with food, Styrofoam plates, hot dog wrappers, raw meat wrappers, empty bags of buns, chips, and cookies as well as several dirty diapers and not to mention the dozens of empty beer cans. I am truly disgusted. We pick up garbage for over three hours and barely leave a mark. The sheer volume of garbage is mind blowing. On a side note, a few days before I arrived on Guam, the territorial land fill run by the local government was placed in receivership by U.S. Federal court order. Apparently in 1987 the EPA notified the landfill authorities that the landfill was in violation of a number of environmental protection laws. After over twenty years of warnings and fines with no results, a Federal judge felt he had no alternative than to take the landfill away from local authority and give it to a private company out of Virginia of all places. Reporters from the Guam Pacific Daily News arrive to report the event.
They take this picture and even though I've been on the island for less than 48 hours, I've already made the paper (I'm in green).
http://www.guampdn.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008803310307
I wake up early, shower and then I’m off to the north. The previous day, James suggested I meet up with him and some of his friends at a northern beach for a trash pickup Sunday morning. Having nothing better to do, I decide to go. Guam is bisected by one major road – Marine Corp Drive. It goes from Anderson Airforce Base in the extreme north to the Navy Base in the extreme south. After 20 minutes, I realize I’ve driven too far and turn around. Amazingly I somehow find the correct turnoff and descend the steep cliff to the beach “park” bellow. 
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