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First impressions of Easter Island

January 2, 2011

I woke up at 07:44am when Helene shouted to me that we had overslept. I had been updating the blog until 4:30 in the morning, so it took quite a while to boot my brain. I could not understand how it was possible. The last thing I did before going to bed was to double-check that the alarm on my iPhone was set to 06:30. I knew that Helene had done the same.

Helene had luckily woken up by herself. If the family had been dependent on me waking up like that we would have slept a lot longer.

If there was one flight we couldn´t afford to miss, it was this one. We had checked in yesterday, so our tickets were already used. It was completely impossible to get new tickets now during peak season. And if we did they would cost the annual budget of a small European country.

The flight left at 09:30, boarding at 08:45, in an hour. We were not dressed, had not eaten, I had to dismantle the charging station and we had to pack all the stuff we had gotten out of the luggage last night.

We had very little time.

I spent the first minute double-checking that it was indeed 07:44. The iPhone alarm was still set and the time zone was correct. The only reasonable explanation was a software bug in the Apple alarm code, but that in turn was also highly improbable. Did everyone in the world who used their iPhone as an alarm clock oversleep today? I had no time to ponder any more on the issue.

To work!

We shook the kids and got everyone to get into gear. We all jumped into yesterday´s clothes. I dismantled the charging station in record time with Adrian´s help. Helene got everything in the bathroom. We all zipped tight our backpacks and put on the padlocks. From the first moment of panic and high stress the situation turned into very efficient family cooperation. Like a well oiled machine we got everything ready. After 13 minutes, at 07:57, everything was ready and I could turn around and quickly take this photo.

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I didn´t have time to wait for the auto-focus. At 08:00, 16 minutes after waking up, Helene was checking out of the hotel, there was no waiting line.

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I hurried over the street to the airport together with the kids. Helene came after us when she had finished checking out. It took some time to find the check-in counter. The flight to Easter Island is a domestic flight, but leaves from the international part of the airport. There was almost no waiting line at check-in. I guess people were either at the airport in time or were sleeping sound because their iPhones malfunctioned. At 08:11 we were handing over our backpacks and got our boarding cards, more than half an hour before boarding. Good margin by my standards. 27 minutes earlier we had all been sound asleep in our hotel beds. Adrian still had his braces retainer on. Extremely close call, indeed.

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We even had time to stop at an ATM to get the cash we needed to pay for the bed & breakfast on Easter Island. They do not take credit cards.

We passed by a cool artistic installation at the airport. To me it represented piles of lost luggage:

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It was a strange feeling to finally sit on the plane, my adrenaline pump had been running constantly since we got up. We were all exhausted and very hungry. Luckily we had managed to grab some sandwiches from a cafeteria in the airport.

Our plane was another LAN 767-300, like we had from Lima to Buenos Aires. The kids were very happy, they would get almost 6 hours in airline entertainment system heaven.

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On the plane I finally managed to finish the book which has become the new reference book on Easter Island, “Island at the End of the World” by Steven Roger Fischer. It was not a very easy read, you have to remember lots and lots of names and terms in Rapa Nui, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island. The story is completely fascinating, though. A hundred years ago Easter Island was probably the least understood of the Polynesian islands in terms of history. Thanks to a lot of interest and hard work from archeologists, linguists, geneticists and anthropologists it is today probably the island we know most about.

At last, we were on Easter Island. For me, an old dream come true. Iseline was not in the mood for being photographed after a 6 hour flight.

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We were met by our host, Christophe. He is French and he runs a little bed & breakfast together with his Easter Island wife. He came here over 14 years ago after having done French military service in Tahiti.

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Hey, could I get some smiles, please?

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The bed & breakfast (or pension, as the French call it) “Cabanas Christophe” was perfect for us. The garden was lovely and there was a trampoline. The kids did not waste much time:

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We rented their family unit with one room for the kids:

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one room for me and Helene:

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and a living room:

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plus a kitchen:

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There was also a great porch:

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There was wifi in the air, but the capacity of the connection left much to be desired. Updating the blog was completely out of the question. Christophe explained that all internet and phone communication to and from the island went through one single sattelite dish.

I did a search for “iPhone alarm” on Google News. Wow! Up popped a gazillion articles about how people all over the world had overslept because of a bug in the alarm application on the iPhone. It wasn´t our fault after all, it was Apple´s! For some very strange reason the alarm would not work for the first two days of 2011. It was the little brother of the year-2000-bug,

I started to imagine the massive amounts of law suits Apple might have to deal with in the US. What an embarrassment for a company that prides itself in having more stable and bug-free software than the competition.

Christophe was an excptional host. He was a walking encyclopedia on the history of the island, completely service-minded and fantastic with the kids.

After we had unpacked and rested a bit he drove us into town to a restaurant.

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They made us try on some funny hats:

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Iseline was cold and borrowed Helene´s shirt. With the hat she turned into a scarecrow:

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Easter Island is a part of Chile and, except for fish and some vegetables, all food on Easter Island is brought in from Chile via boat or plane. Today there are about 6 supply ship arrivals per year. Not too long ago there was only one per year and the Chileans weren´t always very punctual. The supply ship could be several months late and the islanders would suffer as they ran out of gas for cooking, flour, cooking oil and lots of other stuff.

The airport has changed life on the island in many ways. In the 1970s there were weekly flights to Santiago. Today there are daily flights. There is a thriving tourist industry on the island and the whole economy is based on tourism. Many other pacific islands are financially dependent on using natural resources, through e.g. mining or agriculture and have a challenge with young people leaving to live and seek careers elsewhere. On Easter Island this is less of a problem, as it is possible to pursue a career on the island. The tourist industry is very much run by the Polynesians and a career path here can be driver to vehicle owner to tourist guide to owner of a tourist business.

There is still no deep water port on Easter Island. All large ships have to anchor offshore and everything brought in by small boats. This can be a very hazardous operation. There is no coral reef or other protection from the harsh ocean around the island. Sometimes supply ships have to wait for many days before offloading is possible. Oil and gasoline are stored in several very large white storage tanks. They are very visible and Christophe called them the modern day Easter Island statues. There is an elaborate system with flexible underwater pipes connected to buoys. When a tank ship arrives air is pumped into the buoys attached the ends of the pipes at the ocean floor. The pipes then float up and can be caught and attached to the ship. Once pumping into the tanks is finished the pipes are lowered again. All electricity on the island is generated by a diesel operated power plant. With the constant strong wind and hot sun on the island it is a pity they have not tried to harness these renewable energy resources.

Prices on the island are hefty since everything needs to transported so far. Can you imagine the price levels in Maine in the US if everything, literally everything, you can buy in a store had to be brought over from Ireland? That´s roughly how far away Chile is.

Easter island is the most isolated place in the world. The closest habitable islands are the Pitcairn islands, 1800 kilometers (1100 miles) to the west.

After dinner we stopped by an ice-cream place Christophe had recommended. It was the most expensive ice-cream we have ever bought, but we could not complain about the size of the portions:

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We walked through Hanga Roa, the capital of Easter Island. More or less the entire population of roughly 3000 people live here:

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We followed the coast and slowly made our way back again. We passed by a Polynesian Easter Island flag. For many years it was forbidden and the by law the chilean flag was the only flag which could wave on the island:

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There were some big, big waves coming in and we spent a long time just watching them. The rocks in the foreground are taller than I am, the waves must have been at least 5 meters (16 feet) tall:

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The waves came in waves and when the ocean was a bit calm we would wait for the next wave of waves:

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We stumbled onto our first ahu and moai, the constructions that have made Easter Island world famous There was a sign. The whole island is peppered with archeological sites and everything is very well kept and marked:

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An ahu is a platform. A moai is a statue and it is placed on an ahu.

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Ahus are in fact graves and were always placed close to the ocean. The ashes of dead important people were placed in the ahu. A moai was erected to represent and preserve the mana of the deceased. Mana was, more or less, the social and religious power of the deceased. Mana was the life force in the universe and mana could be used to create favorable weather, good harvests, good health, you name it. In short mana was a bit like the force in Star Wars.

The moai channeled the mana so it could be used to protect the local village even after death. This is why, with one exception, all moais are faced with their faces inland, towards what was a village.

There has been much debate over how exactly the Polynesians managed to transport and erect the moais. They weigh many tons (the heaviest erected weighs 86 metric tons) and some of them were placed 12 km (7 1/2 miles) from the quarry. They were probably transported on “roads” made by tree logs. The major theory for erecting them is that they were lifted by wooden levers and rocks were gradually put under them. The rocks would eventually form a hill suporting the moai until it stood upright. The hill was then removed and used to construct the wings of the ahu around the statue. This theory is supported by the fact that the volume of the mass used to make the ahus always correspond roughly to the mass necessary to build such a hill.

There was a toppled moai close to the ahu You can see parts of the ahu structure and the standing moai in the background:

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By the mid 18-hundreds all moai on Easter Island had been toppled by the islanders themselves after a series of wars. All the standing moai today have been re-erected in modern times.The moai represented mana and the winner of a battle would always try to topple the moai of their enemies, so they would have less protection from them. Often boulders were deliberately placed so the moai would be decapitated when it fell, like the one on the picture above.

The moais were built in the period from AD 1250 to AD 1500.

The ahus and moais have made Easter Island famous and tourism here has exploded. LAN Chile has a monpoly on flying to Easter Island and has steadily increased the number of flights. Now there is at least one flight per day from Santiago. Very recently they have also opened a route from Lima.

10 years ago there were 8000 tourists per year on the island. Now there are more than 60000!  This has also meant that conservation has become increasingly important. It is strictly forbidden to walk on an ahu or touch a moai and these laws are policed. If you touch a moai you might be photographed by a civilian policeman and fined a very large sum.

A Finn actually tore off the ear of a moai a few years ago by hammering on it with a rock. He was caught and told the police he wanted a souvenir. He was heavily fined and deported.

We found a playground close to the bed & breakfast:

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The sun set around 9:30 pm.

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The time zone here is only 2 hours before Chile, probably to make the transition from Chile as easy as possible, but it skews the time of sunrise and sunset. I checked the GPS position and calculated. Easter Island time is almost 2 1/2 hours after solar time. This means the sun will be at its highest at about 2:30 pm tomorrow. Good to know in terms of heat and sunscreen planning.

Tomorrow Christophe is going to start showing us around the island. We are very much looking forward to that.

Eirik

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One Comment

  1. Stale says:

    Happy new year to all of you !
    It was about time you posted again. Reading about your trip is like watching a good TV-series: You want to see the next episode right away.

    I doesn’t make us less jealous of your “paradise exploration” that the weather in Oslo right now is wet and foggy.

    Looking forward to reading more about Easter Island. It’s already on my “Things I want to do when i grow up”-list.

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