Meeting the Moai in Easter Island

---

We arrived on the mysterious Easter island full of excitement to finally be here after watching so many TV programmes over the years about it. The island is about the most isolated place you can go in the world, it is in the Pacific, 4000 Km from Chile´s mainland and 2000 Km from the other nearest island, the Pitcairn island (population 40). On Easter Island there is not a big population either, only about 5000 people in total and most of the people live in the main town of Hanga Roa.

The town is small with only a few shops and a single supermarket which was only open a few hours a day, and hardly ever had any food in it. The day a delivery truck turned up, half the local population turned up too! Luckily, there were loads of restaurants for us tourists, even though they only get about 40,000 tourists a year apparently. Life in Hanga Roa seems very relaxed, a town where everyone seems to know each other and all so friendly. On Sundays people seemed to be with their families eating picnics on the beach and then spend the afternoon surfing.

Even though we were suffering from jet-lag after our over-night flight from Tahiti, we read about a couple of local Moai sites right near Hanga Roa, so what better way to try and cure jet-lag than to visit these on our first day. One of the statues was the famous one with the top-knot and white eyes, which stared at us rather spookily as we stood in front of it taking photos... apparently the belief was the eyes gave the statues their spirit.

As not many sites have any signs to explain their meaning or legend behind them and to get an insight into the islands fascinating history we found a local guide to try and learn a bit more about the island. He took us to the famous 15 standing Moai where the statues eerily look upon you as you walk up to them and then the nursery, which is an extinct volcano where the people carved the statues directly from the rock and then transported them to the platforms, sometimes many kms away to the other side of the island. On the slopes of the volcano there were many unfinished Moai, some attached to the rock still and others half buried with just their heads showing. We went to the remains of an old village to get a feel of how the people lived, and then we went to Anakena beach for lunch. Who would have guessed that Easter Island had such gorgeous beaches, with palm trees and then a few Moai at the back of the beach which was quite surreal.

After the tour we thought that we´d hire bikes for a couple of days and travel around the island looking at the other sites however our plans were scuppered as we we both picked up a bug somewhere and had to spend the next few days in the hostel. Unfortunately, we therefore didn´t get to see as much of the island as we had hoped for, but at least we saw the most famous Moai sites.

So, our South American adventure has begun, in the next few months we plan to travel to Patagonia, trek Machu Picchu, learn Spanish in Buenos Aires as currently "no hablo español", and visit the Galapagos Islands amongst many other things hopefully.

Thanks for all your messages, its really great hearing from you all whilst we are away, sorry we haven´t got round to replying to you all. Hope you all have a great Easter weekend, we will be making our way down to Ushuaia, Patagonia... the southern most city at "The End of the World".

---

Photos

View from the top of Rano Raraku, the extinct volcano
with the 15 Moai in the distance.