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Published: December 11th 2010
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Reckless and expensive? Yes. But you can only really get to Easter Island from Chile, and what are the chances of us being in Santiago again with a few days to kill? Slim. I blame my brother. We were so sad after he left us in New Zealand that we went ahead and booked our flights to cheer ourselves up.
So, this week was spent on Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, a speck of volcanic rock a 5-hour flight away across the Pacific, 2000 miles from the nearest land mass and the most remote inhabited place on earth.
Landing there was a bit like when James Bond arrives on a tropical island - drummers playing, hula girls putting flowers around peoples' necks, the whole island out to meet the plane, dogs barking, palm trees swaying, and a man in dark shades holding a board with my name on it.
No car chase from the airport though - just a ride the back of a pick-up through Hanga Roa, the only town on the island. And I don’t think James Bond had to deal with the greying masses at the luggage carousel either, who as far as I could
tell were attempting a Goretex-clad re-enactment of the poll tax riots and at one stage almost became attached to each other in one giant velcro cluster.
No doubt you’ll have heard of the place, famous for its rows of mysterious and iconic stone statues (Moai). I won’t go into detail here, suffice to say there are nearly a thousand of them scattered all around the island, and they date from 900AD onwards. All are similar - simple, solid, big and bold, with rectangular heads, and range in size from 6 feet to an unfinished one 70 feet tall, still attached to the rock.
Each one is carved from a single chunk of volcanic rock, and they’re thought to have housed ancestral spirits of the Rapa Nui people. Most have toppled over, cracked and eroded, but a few are restored to how they would have looked originally - lined up on a stone platforms on the coast, looking inland.
Anyway, the island is tiny - about half the size of the Isle of Wight, so rather than being shuttled around on a bus with the bum-bag and tennis shoe brigade we decided to do it all on foot
This is Tongariki.
Flattened by a Tsunami in the 60s, now restored. ourselves. We had 4 full days, and as it turns out three were spent exploring, and one groaning and dealing with blisters the size of marbles.
Day one we took a taxi out to Anakena on the north coast, and then followed a horse track the 25km back to town, skirting the craggy coastline. A rocky volcano sloping up to our left, shiny black cliffs dropping down to the sea on our right, and a 180-degree of the blue Pacific Ocean for most of the way around.
Fantastic.
We saw very little else except for one stray dog, some dive-bombing hawks, a whole lot of wild horses, some cows, one bull, and every now and then a collapsed stone platform and half-buried Moai. No trees, and only two other people passed us the whole day - I saw them coming with my binoculars, and almost spat out my hobnob when I realised they were both naked, of advanced years and closing fast.
Luckily they’d covered up their critical areas when they caught up with us about an hour later, and pleasantries were exchanged.
The next day we climbed Rano Kau, a volcano crater. This seemed fairly
mundane as we trudged up in the horizontal rain, until we got to the top, when the clouds parted, the sun poked through and our jaws hit
the ground: A near-perfect circular crater 1500m across and 200m down.
Dark blue lagoons and swamps inside it, then over the rim to the right, the Pacific Ocean again. Hawks hovering in the updraft of the wind. We spent the day walking around the edge, dangling our feet over, and mostly just laughing maniacally at how beautiful it all was.
This was also the site of Orongo, a ceremonial village perched on the high cliffs between the sea and the crater, and used by the ritualistic ‘birdman cult’ in the final years of the island’s history.
From here the islanders would race to see who could catch the first egg of the sooty tern, which involved scaling down the cliffs and swimming out several hundred metres to another small island. There was a perfectly good Spar in town, so I’m not sure why they did this.
Day three was the Ranu Raraku quarry, probably the most popular site on the island. It’s another volcano crater from which all of
the island‘s Moai were carved. There’s half-carved ones still attached to the rock, and other finished ones sitting frowning on the grassy hillside, waiting to be delivered to their final destination.
They manage to be both haunting and heroic-looking at the same time. It looks as if the workers just downed tools one day and never came back
We taxi-ed it out to the quarry first thing, took around a quarter of a million photos, ate a packet of biscuits in front of nearby Tongariki (one of the restored platforms with ten Moai standing on it) watched only by a skinny Alsatian, and then trekked back to town from there along the south coast.
This walk began like an episode of Coast, us both striding off into the distance with big beaming smiles, waving at passing pick-ups, the sun shining, and ended about seven hours later like an episode of 999, as we collapsed in a dusty heap at the hostel, sunburned, dehydrated and with bleeding feet, having passed fewer and fewer people, and more and more horse carcases as we went. I could have been hallucinating but swear I heard Michael Buerk’s voiceover during that last
couple of hours.
The last day was largely spent with me groaning and hobbling around our hostel like an old man, with Paula serving me tea on the veranda as I watched the waves roll in.
All in all it was an amazing place. Mostly treeless and windswept. I didn't get the 'mystical energy' often quoted, but there was certainly something melancholic about the place, a real sense of loss; all those silent, colossal Moai staring out of the hillsides, or face down in the rubble; the constant howling of the tradewinds in our ears, and skinny wild horses everywhere. Desolate, isolated, tragic.
I’ve never been anywhere like it. It’s left a lasting impression on both of us.
[If you're hungry for more photos have a look at http://www.flickr.com/photos/30278624@N02/sets/72157625480711072/
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fouldsy
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Desolte, isolated, tragic. I've never been anywhere like it. Er you're from leicester