Honestly, I never ever thought I would make it to Easter Island one day. Florian neighter... But since living in Chile, Easter Island was suddenly just a stone's throw away. We had to go there - now or never! A direct flight from Santiago took us across 3750km of vast ocean to Rapa Nui, a.k.a. Isla de Pascua or Easter Island. It's the most isolated inhabited place on earth. The island is tiny (12x24km) and the airport runway stretches almost from beach to beach. Due to Rapa Nui's strategic Pacific location, it's also an emergency landing site for NASA space shuttles, fortunately unutilized till this day.
At the airport all new arrivals were welcomed with live music and flower necklaces. What's more, there was a spicy fresh aroma in the air - after 6 months Santiago I almost forgot how wonderful air can smell! It gave us the vacation feeling in an instant :-) Most tourists come to Rapa Nui for the famous stone statues and you will find them scattered literally all over the island. However, after seeing the first nearby statues and petroglyphs, we skipped the real sightseeing for the day after and went to a local restaurant to energize our taste buds with tuna steak (an island speciality) and freshly squeezed mango juice. Weather was great and we still had half a day left. So we hired a quadbike and headed straight to Anakena beach!
At the airport all new arrivals were welcomed with live music and flower necklaces. What's more, there was a spicy fresh aroma in the air - after 6 months Santiago I almost forgot how wonderful air can smell! It gave us the vacation feeling in an instant :-) Most tourists come to Rapa Nui for the famous stone statues and you will find them scattered literally all over the island. However, after seeing the first nearby statues and petroglyphs, we skipped the real sightseeing for the day after and went to a local restaurant to energize our taste buds with tuna steak (an island speciality) and freshly squeezed mango juice. Weather was great and we still had half a day left. So we hired a quadbike and headed straight to Anakena beach!
I avoid Santiago's crazy nose-to-tale traffic, but quadbiking on Easter Island is a whole other story. I loved it! So next morning we dashed out onto the coastal road in search of our first encounter with a "Moai" statue. The majority of the islands Moai's had been toppled over in an act of tribal warfare. That's why first we only saw broken statues, lying face-down. But further down the way we reached Rano Raraku, a truely fascinating place! The tuff quarry at this volcano is said to be the nursery, from which all Moai's were cut. The slopes are lined with hundreds of giant statues, some of them buried up to their necks. At Rano Raraku it's not too hard to imagine Rapa Nui's dramatic history of famine, epidemics, civil war, cannibalism, slave raids, colonialism and near deforestation. In 1877 there were only 111 Rapa Nui people left! It is believed that competition between clans to create ever bigger statues hugely contributed to Rapa Nui's environmental degradation, because ever more wood was needed to move the heavy Moai's to their coastal position...
Today fast growing eucalyptus trees have been planted to work against erosion, the population is back to 5000 and some impressive Moai formations have been reconstructed, like the famous site at Tongariki.
Today fast growing eucalyptus trees have been planted to work against erosion, the population is back to 5000 and some impressive Moai formations have been reconstructed, like the famous site at Tongariki.
Voilà, my favourite spot on Easter Island: Rano Kau. No Moai statues this time, just natural beauty. Rano Kau is one of the island's three extinct volcanos and it lay within walking distance of our holiday home at Cabanas Christophe. We've been up there several times. Each time the site looked different, but always breathtaking. The swamp-like crater lake is home to some rare endemic species. And through the blast in the crater wall you can see the ocean sparkle...
We let our last vacation day unwind watching the photogenic sunset and dining at a luscious seaside restaurant in Rapa Nui's only town Hanga Roa. Still, there was one touristy thing left to do: visit the highly recommended cultural dance performance. And it was worth it! The performing Rapa Nui's really put their souls into it. Interestingly, songs and dances were rather Polynesian than Chilean. Women in feather trimmings, painted buff men yelling war cries... The island may belong to Chile politically, but natives are far from considering themselves Chilean. They are very proud to live on Rapa Nui, speak Rapa Nui and to be nothing but Rapa Nui. Reason why they freaked out, when Florian shouted "WHHHHHHOOOOOAAAAAAAAA" louder than any Rapa Nui, the moment I took a pic ;-)
