Easter Island

Today is our last day on Easter Island and everyone in our group agrees that we should have stayed longer. That is all five of us, yup it’s unanimous AND there are only five in our group. I am the only Canadian and there are two Australians and two Americans.

The one girl, from Kentucky just graduated from University and this trip is her graduation present! Really. She and her family are immigrating to Canada in the summer so I will definitely see her again in the future.

We took two tours today. It was a long day again, like yesterday except that they were two separate tours so we asked our guide to drop us off in town so we could send some postcards. We had two hours to wander around town which was great. The only problem was that the post office closes from about 12:30 to 2:30 for siesta and the bus was picking us up at 2:30. We hung around the post office hoping that the tour bus would be late and we were lucky enough to get the post cards sent. We were also fortunate enough to get our passports stamped. I really wanted an Easter Island stamp and they didn’t stamp our passports at the airport on our way in. Easter Island is owned by Chile so it was a domestic flight which is why our passports weren’t stamped.

Other than a few of the main roads the roads here are pretty rough, some being very similar to some dirt trails I have travelled. We were very dusty and feeling a little beat up after some of the stops.

Our first stop was Orango. It is a national park. Most of Easter Island is a national park but of all the sites we visited , about 14 or 15 including the ones we could walk to from our hotel we only had to pay for two of them. It is a $60. fee which covers two separate days. We got a deal because our tour guide was given some so we payed him $50. for the ticket.

Orango is an extinct volcano and so beautiful. There are homes built into the mountain, dug into the ground. The crater of the volcano looks a little like the surface of the moon. This was the site of a yearly competition on the island. Family members would send young men as representatives and the competition involved swimming out to an island off the coast and finding a frigate bird egg. They would then have to swim back and scale the cliff wall to show the judges at the top, with the egg still intact. The winning family would be the rulers for the next year. The judges of the competition lived in the homes at the top all year and not in the villages with the other families. There were sharks in the water once upon a time and so sometimes a competitor didn’t make it.

Orango was a nice place to walk around. The crater was unbelievable, we were able to see many hieroglyphs in the rocks around and the island off the coast was beautiful! The water was lovely crystal blue colour.

Our afternoon started with a tour of the largest volcanic cave on the island. It was a tiny hike down and the opening of the cave was totally open with trees around it. The timing couldn’t have been better as it started to rain. It was pouring down while we were in the cave. It lasted for maybe half an hour and the we left when the rain stopped. We were fortunate, I wouldn’t have wanted to be at one of the sites out in the open during the rain.

We went to Te Pahu next. This is an often photographed site on the island. There are seven Moai here and they are a bit of an anomaly as they are the only ones that don’t have their backs to the sea. The Moai were considered the family ancestors looking out for their families but these seven were the boys that were protecting the island, not the families and so their backs are to the island.

Puna Pau was our last stop for the day. It is the rock quarry that they used to carve the top knots with. It is a different type of rock, a red volcanic rock. We had a terrific view from the top of the quarry. We could see the village, and the Airport and the runway and much of the island. The runway on Easter Island goes right up the center of the island. The US government invested in the runway a number of years ago because they wanted someplace in the centre of the Pacific in case the space shuttle was in trouble. They never needed it but that is why larger airplanes can land on the island. They have twelve flights a week from Santiago, Chile and maybe one a week fromTahiti. Tourism is their largest industry.

We had a nice dinner out on the patio, watching the sunset into the sea. It will hard to leave tomorrow. We are headed back to Buenos Aires.