Stef and Matt

Easter Island – almost everybody has heard of it.

The place with the huge stone statues!

We were really excited when we bought our tickets to go to the “most remote location on earth“, and even more excited when we boarded the plane early one Sunday morning in Santiago. (Of course, flying first class was really nice, too We spent Sunday afternoon through Thursday morning there, and were really surprised by some of the things we learned about the island, like:

• The island itself is very green, with lots of grass and a few forests – there’s very little volcanic surface
• The landing strip is huge – our 767 had twice as much room as it needed to land – because the US Government helped upgrade it so it could be an alternate landing strip for the Space Shuttle
• The moai (statues) were created to honor great leaders of the island’s different clans, not gods of some pagan religion



• After the civilization suffered a tremendous population loss, a new religion (based on sea-birds, fertility, and the “bird-men”) grew powerful in the south-western corner of the island (Orongo)
• The island suffered from strong depopulation from the 1700′s to the mid-1900′s due to several factors (for more on this, read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse):
  • Inter-tribal conflict
  • European visits introducing previously-unknown illnesses to the islanders
  • European pilfering of islanders for slavery (Peru), and other purposes (Chile)
  • Chilean use of the island as a sheep-farming colony in the early 1900′s (Reminiscent of Galapageran history during the 1800′s)
• Kevin Costner made a movie called Rapa Nui that purports to document  the lives of native Easter Islanders
  • It failed in the box office
  • They managed to damage one of the infamous stone statues during filming
  • A bar in the town shows the film three nights a week (it costs US$6 per person to watch), but we showed up twice, each time about 10 minutes late, and they refused to play it for us. Kind of funny, since we were the only people in town remotely interested in seeing it!

We spent most of our time on the island doing our own thing:

• Walking around the village Sunday afternoon
• Hiking the island’s northern coast on Monday (during a torrential rainstorm that soaked us clear through in the first hour, andlasted for 5 hours)
• Rented a Suzuki jeep on Tuesday and drove all over the island, seeing Orongo, several of the Ahus, and two of the three volcanoes that make up the island
• Checking out different restaurants for dinner
• Two guided tours on Wednesday, which were alright, but nothing special

While we were on Easter Island, so was a tropical depression. It met us twice more during our travels (yes, the same tropical storm):

1. In Miami during our layover
2. In Philadelphia while we were at the hospital with Joe

Check out the rest of our photos – click each one below to see more!

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