When to Go
The spectacular sights on
Easter Island can make a visit rewarding in any season. Generally the best
but most crowded time to visit are the Summer months (December through
March). The iIsland is cooler, slightly cheaper (off season) and much less
crowded outside the summer months. In winter you have to keep in mind that
the rains may make some of the walking tracks inaccessible.
Getting there
Lan Chile flies to Easter
Island, with flights operating between Santiago (Chile) and Papeete (Tahiti).
Airfare from Santiago to Easter Island and back costs approximately 1000
US$. There is a 30 US$ departure tax (payable in cash). Baggage
is inspected by customs on all incoming & outgoing flights.
Food & Entertainment
You can drink the water.
Bottled water can be purchased in the village stores, but the water coming
from taps is good, although it has a high mineral content. Stores all
carry soft drinks and alcoholic beverages.
Food is expensive; everything coming from the
mainland costs more for shipping, thus all staples (coffee, tea, flour,
sugar, etc.) are costly. Restaurant meals can be very expensive. Usually
the best deal can be had by taking the dinner meal at your hotel. Lunch
items can be bought in the local stores. The
main diet is fish and chicken. Lobster is a delicious local treat and
there is sweet potato, yam and poi made from taro. There is an excellent
French restaurant by the Caleta in the village.
There are now two "supermercados" in
the village and they carry a surprising amount of things, a far cry from
just ten years ago. The supermarket on the main street (Policarpo Toro
Street) takes credit cards: it is called Tumu Kai (literally, Foods for
the Family).
Note: there is nothing outside the village to eat
or drink. Take water with you, lunch, or snacks when going sight-seeing.
It is a good idea to toss in your luggage some trail mix, energy bars,
etc., for snacks while out hiking around.
Nightlife
is confined to the bigger hotels on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
Activities &
Shopping
The
best swimming is at Anakena or Ovahe beaches on the north coast. There is
also big game fishing with local fishermen who will take you out in their
boats. You can also snorkel, go hiking or horseback riding.
Wood
or stone carvings are popular with tourists and islanders often come to
the hotels to display and sell their work. Also available are colourful
T-shirt and parea's. Collecting genuine artefacts is frowned upon
and such exports will be confiscated. Luggage
is inspected upon departure to enforce
this ruling.
The Statues (Moai's)
Anyone who has visited
Fiji or any other Polynesian island will immediately feel at home on
Easter Island. In fact, Polynesia and Spanish "maņana" come
together here, resulting in an atmosphere even more laid-back than sleepy
Samoa or tranquil Tonga. It would be a worthwhile holiday destination if
there weren't any statues. However, even by the standards of travel
literature hyperbole, its original Polynesian name of Rapa Nui meaning
"navel of the earth" is pitching its pre-eminence rather too
strongly. Then again, its residents would have only had rare visitors to
let them know that this tiny island wasn't the only inhabited dry land on
the planet. Even in the mid 1950's there was no airport and the island was
resupplied from Chile just once a year.
Easter Island is roughly triangular, with a
volcano in each corner. It's a fertile, subtropical island about 24 km
long by 12 km wide that once supported about 7000 inhabitants. After civil
war took its toll in the 18th century, Peruvian slave traders moved in and
captured a large proportion of the survivors. The few slaves who later
returned home introduced syphilis and other diseases and the decimation of
the population continued. By 1910 there were only 131 Easter Islanders
left.
No matter where you go on the island, you'll see
the statues (more correctly called "moai" while the platforms
they stand on are "ahus"). There are some 600 figures scattered
around the coast, many partially hidden in long grass. Until now, visitors
have had to be content to view shattered remains lying below the platforms
on which they once stood, a few rather sterile reconstructions made in the
60s, or the figures abandoned in the quarries where they were being carved
- drifting soil has covered their torsos and given them the appearance of
disembodied heads leaning together in eternal discourse.
However, after three years of Japanese-funded
work, a most impressive row of 15 statues has been almost completed by the
sea at Tongariki. Only the red stone hats lie to one side awaiting the
money needed to put them back in place. Some researchers believe these
"hats" may really be hair pieces. That's big hair indeed - some
topknots weigh up to eight tonnes apiece. It's worth the effort to come to
the island, just to see this single collection of giant figures, the
tallest of which is more than 10 metres high.
These carvings represent various chief's notable
ancestors so they don't all look alike and only a few resemble Malcolm
Fraser. Indeed, I saw a shorter one with a passing resemblance to John
Howard. Sadly, earnest investigation revealed no Whitlams, Keatings or
Hawkes. And, despite the islanders' past fascination with extended ears,
Billy McMahon was one recent Australian liberal Prime Minister not on
display.
As every visitors seems to get one free shot at
guessing what the statues all mean, here's mine. It's an extreme example
of the "farm holiday syndrome". You know, when you stay on a
friend's farm for a week to get away from it all but after a few days of
each others' company you're so bored that you start building kites or
commence major excavations to dam the creek.
The people who settled Easter Island succeeded
beyond anyone's wildest dreams in getting away from it all. The island was
fertile enough to provide an easy living so there was time for a
remarkably complex society to arise. Carving giant statues at a single
inland quarry and rolling them many kilometres down to platforms by the
sea would certainly have filled in the days and provided a rock-solid
basis for inter-family rivalry. Too bad the island was eventually denuded
of trees (they were used as rollers). Then when the noble families finally
ran out of money, the carvers simply downed tools, leaving the last
figures standing or lying in the quarry. This is known as The Nursery and
it's one of the strangest places in the world, where giant eye sockets
peek at you through the grass, broken stone bodies litter the slopes, and
every rock ledge reveals partial carving of the features of heads, hands
and belly.
When the statue culture had run its course, the
locals simply concentrated on the birdman culture practised elsewhere in
Polynesia. Once a year, everyone would gather at the cliffs at the
southernmost tip of the island and a champion from each clan would take
part in a race to clamber down to the sea, swim across to one of three
tiny offshore islets and return with the egg of a sooty tern. The chief of
the winning clan became supreme chief of the island for the year. Visitors
can still see intricate mortarless stone houses at the site and the rocky
cliffs are covered in petroglyphs, strange symbolic drawings that reveal
the same active imagination as the moai.
The first Europeans to visit the island observed
that every house had wooden tablets covered in a strange hieroglyphic
script known as "rongo-rongo". "En masse" the quaint
rounded figures look rather like an orgy of gecko lizards. Few tablets now
survive and no-one ever found out what they meant or how they could be
read.
Easter Island is a destination that visitors
leave with more questions than answers. It's an affordable destination
with a good climate, hospitable local people, and grand volcanic scenery.
On top of that , it is one of the world's most enigmatic places where one
can simply sit and watch the sun set over giant stone figures and wonder
what really went on here over the past few hundred years?
For more information on the Sights
of Easter Island, go to:
