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Cruise line makes ‘historic’ visit to Pagan
Northern Islands development planners Herman B. Cabrera, Jerome Aldan, and William Torres welcome the captain of the cruise liner Silver Explorer, Capt. Adam Boczek, during the vessel’s port call on Saipan last week. The cruise line also made stopovers on Pagan and Tinian. (Contributed Photo)
According to group chair Herman B. Cabrera, the idea of a cruise liner visiting Pagan sprang up in a September 2012 Frontier Summit conference on Saipan, which examined economic development alternatives for the Northern Islands.
He called the Silver Explorer visit an “historic undertaking” of two years, with Pacific Development Inc., the tour guide of the trip, recently telling them there was a good possibility of eventually having four cruise liners passing through Pagan in the future.
“This is the beginning,” he said.
The group notes the importance of redevelopment that is consistent with the “natural beauty” of the island, and is looking for tourism that will leave “no heavy footprint.”
“We don’t want to have a lot of indiscriminate kinds of tourists,” he said, adding they are looking for tourists who are sensitive to nature and the “fragile ecosystem” of the island.
The group was at the Silver Explorer’s brief port call on Saipan and urged the captain to make the trip “the first of many more” to come.
The group believes the economy the island is capable of sustaining would deal with agriculture, fishery, and the use of small cottages.
Silver Explorer’s Pagan visit on Sept. 28 took tourists on a trip to one of the island’s most recent lava flows and abandoned World War II runways.
