Easter Island - high on our life list. We're here at last. Actually we're not "here"......we're nowhere!
Easter Island is so remote that - unlike the Galapagos - no mammals or reptiles (and very few insects) drifted here prior to the arrival of man, in approximately 500AD. It was virtually "fauna sterile".
Only 4,000 people live here on this 64 square mile spot in the ocean. Short of Tristan da Cunha or Pitcairn, this is as far away from anywhere that you can be.
There's a surprising french flavour since the Tahiti-Santiago flight stops enroute and many french vacationers spend a few days. When the food is french, the end of the world is not a bad place to be.....unless your preference tends to "freedom fries"!
We visited the Galapagos to see what evolution had wrought over millions of years. We came to Easter Island to see what man had made and unmade in mere hundreds of years. It was a moving 3 days.
Liz found us a perfect tropical hotel in the centre of town - walking distance to the restaurants and stone monoliths on the beach....plus it came with chickens and inflatable toys.
But even at the end of the world - cell coverage is ubiquitous
This island is physically beautiful; tragically deforested, it is a series of open multi-hued vistas...all inevitably culminating in the azure sea. The smoke is not volcanic (the islands are tectonically dead), it is from farmers burning off fields....sadly for all the wrong reasons:
To put our comments into context, we need a brief history review
#1 Polynesians arrive and create culture that sculpts and erects huge stone heads (the "moai") as religious/ancestral worship icons
#2 Environmental/cultural/agricultural diasters/warfare cause disallusion with moai based religion - stone heads are toppled by their creators
#3 Cult of the Birdmen appears
#4 Europeans arrive - slavery/disease/exploitation - Chile claims for maritime importance
#5 Stone heads re-erected - archeaological research
#6 Becomes tourist destination
The Bird Man Cult
The island is a triangle with a volcanic caldera at each vertex.
At one corner (lower left on the above map) is this perfect caldera - it has Fresh water and is approximately 60' deep - the reeds are migrants from South America and the source of the fibre that the Rapa Nui used to erect the Moai
Standing off shore from the crater are three islands where terns nest. The governing structure developed that whichever tribe's champion climbs down the cliff, swims to the island, gets one of the first laid tern eggs, swims back with the egg tied to his forehead and climbs up the cliff again.....will be the winner and his tribal chief gets to rule the island for the next year - all making Iron Man look like a Sunday walk!
Below - the Islands, the petroglyphs carved to celebrate winners and our guide Carlos
A culinary digression
After our first day we find what is described as the best and most expensive restaurant on the island - "Taverne du Pechuers" - right on both counts.....marvelous food. Absolutely fresh ingredients, lovingly cooked and aggressively priced - but far less expensive than comparable food in Paris or New York or Toronto. Below - shrimps with hot peppers ("pil pil"), startlingly good tuna ceviche, grilled tuna in roquefort sauce and - in Liz's opinion - the best lobster she's eaten in memory - a slipper lobster cocktail with avocado. For $100 it was in retrospect an epic meal....and a reminder that the French still know how to really cook
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