Easter Island (Chile)

Hi again,


See how well we are behaving now? Six new posts in a few days! (although as you might have noticed we changed the dates in the posts to match when we actually visited the places...)


We said goodbye to Santiago with a great night out with Carmen Gloria and Alastair (thanks again for taking such a good care of us)! We payed due homage to Pisco in all its delicious variations. You name it, Pisco Sour, Pisco Mango or Piscola, we are now Pisconnoiceurs! Having got to bed at about 4.30 it was seriously hard to get up at 6am the next morning but our destination was worth the effort: Easter Island!!!

Now, when Tom was organising the trip, Easter Island was Vania's first request. However, the ticket would have cost us 500 pounds, so we decided to leave it for another time. You can imagine how happy we were when we found out that our flight from Chile to Tahiti had a free stopover in.......Easter Island. Result!


The island is one of the most remote place on Earth, lying 4000km off the Chilean coast with it's nearest island over 2000km away. It was formed by the explosion of three nearby volcanoes, which over time accumulated enough debris in between them to form the island. All the volcanoes are now extinct are their craters are the sites for the few lakes on the island.

For some, this remoteness presents opportunities. You may remember a few years ago Coca-Cola launched a new mineral water, Dasani, claiming its its 'NASA-approved reverse osmosis multi-barrier filtration system' created water so pure it was much better than tap water. What they actually meant to say was that it was really just tap water from Dartford! When illegal levels of carciogenic bromate chemicals were also discovered in the water, Coca -Cola abandoned the Dasani launch. The whole thing caused Coca Cola worldwide embarrassment, and yet here we are in one of the remotest places on the planet and what do we see on sale everywhere?! Coca-Cola, peddling your expensive tap water to the Rapa Nui people, you should be ashamed of yourself! Of course, we made a point of telling the locals the truth.

No one really knows when the island was first inhabited by polynesian tribes. Upon arrival, these people were faced with an island very different than the ones they were used to. Easter island or Rapa Nui ("The World's Vessel" in its indigenous name) has only two beaches, making the access to the sea quite tricky. The sea is not as rich in life as other Pacific Islands nor is the soil as fertile. As the island's population grew, resources gradually became scarce: most sea birds were hunted to extinction and the island became deforested.

At the same time a peculiar cult was developed, although again no one really knows how it started. Massive stone statues called Moai ("The living face") were carved in the centre of the island and then moved to the coastal areas, where most settlements were situated close to fresh water springs.

According to the accounts of the natives, the statues represented important leaders or ancestors of the village. They were carved during the lifetime of the person and taken to the ahu, a platform facing the village.

Some people believe that the moai "walked" from the quarry to the village, by being rocked from one side to the other (like you would move a fridge) but others believe that they were transported on rolling tree trunks. When the person died, its body was placed in front of the moai and the statue's eyes were carved and covered in coral, finalising the statue and closing the person's spirit inside the moai. Through the moai the ancestors could continue to protect their villages.





Just after the first europeans visited the island in the late 18th century, something triggered massive inter-tribal fights. Some scholars believe that the effort placed on sculpting and moving the moai was so big that it overtook all other activities like farming and fishing. The lack of resources lead to intense fighting, during which members of one tribe would vandalise their opponents ahus by topping over the moais. When the europeans visited the island again, there were no moais left standing.

Fortunately, tourism has a positive role on this story (at least so far...). Until the 1970s, the island's only contact with the outside world was the annual warship from the mainland bringing supplies. Now, with LAN Chile offering daily flights, Easter Island welcomes 60 000 tourists all year around and has become a very popular destination. To please them, some of the ahu's were restored and the moai brought back to their former glory. In the old days, the moai stood by balancing on the ahu, since the indigenous didn't have any form of cementing them. This feat is particularly impressive in the moai with topknots, where a true balancing game was at play between the ahu, the moai and the topknot. Again, no one really knows why at some point the carvers decided to add topknots to the statues nor what do they mean. The best theory we heard is that the topknot actually represents the hair of the moai and that it is sculpted in a different rock because the natives would be red-haired. This means that the first colonisers of Easter Island were actually the Scots!! Or the vikings, but we prefer the former.





Vania admited to having naughty feelings when she saw the moai nicely lined up in their platforms... She keep having these visions of large scale dominoes falling synchronously! Probably this is why the people restoring the moai decided to use cement to keep them vertical and dissuade some tourists from trying to push them...





There are almost a thousand moai in the island. We decided to hire some mountain bikes to get around the island and see some of them upclose. Most are still in the quarry and seem to have been suddenly abandoned half way through completion. Over the years they became buried by the eroding montain. Who knows which secrets might still be hidden there? The largest moai of all remains in quarry, towering 21m high! I guess that even if its sculptors wanted to, that moai would have never left the quarry: too big a fridge to walk to the coast!

There isn't much else to do in Easter Island but for admiring the Moai. Fortunately there are so many of them that you can be entertained this way for a longtime! And they are quite stunning at any time of the day or night. When we weren't Moai-spotting we spent time relaxing at the hostel, which was more like staying with a family. They were very friendly, although the daughter had turned up for the week to stay/boss everyone around, including the guests! We were allowed to use the kitchen, although were allocated a slot for dinner between 9.15-9.25pm. We were allowed to eat, although when Tom spilt something on the tablecloth the woman immediately appeared, pointing at the mark whilst hopping around and waving a cloth around. Feeding the cat was also a big no-no (whoops, shouldnt have given it the rest of our dinner)! Fortunately, she mainly spoke in Spanish (and our Rapa Nui was a bit rusty) so it was Vania who got the bollocking after each misdemeanour, much to Tom's amusement!

Oh this reminds us of our worst night so far! We had gone to bed quite early as there was no electricity in the island (they were replacing the generators, apparently). At some point Tom woke up because we had a moth flying around in the room. This turned out to be a cockroach, and as Tom went to get the torch out a splat in the back of his neck confirmed that it was of the flying variety! How disgusting! And it wasn't alone, it had brought two friends with it! Whilst Tom was chasing around in the dark trying to simultaneously kill the roaches and put the mosquito net up, Vania made the obvious move of hiding under the bed covers and refusing to come out. It wouldn't be fair to say Vania was no help at all during all this, at one point she bravely exposed one hand from under the bedsheets for a couple of seconds in order to hold the torch! To add insult to injury, the next morning we were told by the owner of the hotel it had been our fault the night visit had happen. We had taken the key with us so they couldn't clean our room! In fairness to then, we never had other problems in the following nights, to Tom's relief...

Bye for now,

Tom & Vania