Blogs from Hanga Roa, Easter Island, Chile, South America - page 4

Geo: -27.1308, -109.342Today i took the mountain bike and drove along the southern coast of the island before i headed north to explore Puna Pau, the quarry where they made the Pukao's or head knots for the Moai statues. After a beautiful sunset sitting by those giants the evening got even better with great news about the successful landing of Mars rover "Curiosity". What a day! :)Heute nahm ich mir ein Mountainbike und fuhr die Suedkueste entlang bevor es in Richtung Norden zum Steinbruch von Puna Pau ging, wo man die Pukao's oder Huete fuer die Moai's anfertigte. Nach einem Bilderbuch-Sonnenuntergang bei den Statuen von Tahai war der Abend dann perfekt, als die Neuigkeit eintraf, dass der Rover "Curiosity" erfolgreich auf dem Mars gelandet sei. Was fuer ein Tag! :)... read more

A wee photo montage of Jill's journey through Chile and Argentina. She is always the best travel companion; packs light, never complains and is always the ice breaker at parties!... read more

Easter Island. Hanga Roa. Rapa Nui. Isla de Pascua. Call it what you will, but I do like "Belly Button of the Earth". It's appropriate and you do get that feeling when you are so, so isolated from anything. Today was our last full day on the Island, we had plans to go to the beach, do some shopping, relax, enjoy and just chill. It had been 17 days of a full adventure on our vacation, and the thought of doing mostly nothing sounded appealing, and Easter Island felt like the perfect place to do so. To get to Anakena beach, you can hire a taxi to take you round trip and you just schedule a pick up time, cost is about $25US. We had our taxi pick us up around 10 and had plans to ... read more

Happy New Years Everyone! Today was not only New Years Eve, but also our full day tour of the Island with Freida. He picked us up at 09:30 and we quickly discovered that pretty much all the tour companies do the same tour at the same time. For such a small island there sure seemed to be a lot of tourists! (who us? never!) But with our vehicle only having the 3 of us we were quickly in and out of sites (when we wanted to be) and generally managed to stay away from the crowds (which in a big city would have seemed small). We visited all the main sights on the island, including Vaihu where the statues fell face forward; Akahanga where the Moai are well preserved and this is where the first king ... read more

Day 8 - Morning came to another fine chorus of chickens a doole-dooing. Disappointingly our cunning plan to eat as much chicken for breakfast, dinner and tea had not turned out to be as cunning a plan as one of Baldrick's. This was our last morning and Russ had remembered reading something about getting your passport stamped at the post office. So in a quick bid to do a last minute shop and to see if there was any substance behind Russ's claim we packed up our bags before heading off into town. We located the post office and proffered our passports at the girl behind the counter. She showed us a picture of four different stamps, explaining that the plainest of the four was free, and that if we wanted any of the others, it ... read more