lorana from Easter Island!

Where on earth is Easter Island? It is the world’s most remote inhabited island! It is located about 2,500 miles from both Tahiti and Chile in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

We took this photo from our iPad:

The Flight
There is only one flight a week from Tahiti to Easter Island so this flight was tricky to book! Thankfully we got a ticket… and the flight was on time! We’re not sure what the airline does with you if this flight gets cancelled… maybe you wait until the next week? We’re glad we didn’t have to find out!

The interesting part is that the flight leaves at 1:55 AM! We have no clue why a flight would leave at this time, but it does!

Where to stay?
Finding a place to stay on Easter Island was an adventure! There was a place that looked great… until I saw it was $1,000-$1,500 per night. My goodness!! There were a couple of other very very expensive options… and then it dropped instantly to not nice at all. I hunted and hunted and finally found a new eco cabin. It is actually great! It won an eco design award and is complete with solar panels on the top for heating the water.

The cabin had a full kitchen, a flat screen TV, and was super clean. It was very nice for the island! We were even greeted at the airport with a flower necklace…and our own flock of wild roosters and hens!

Driving – An Adventure!
The island is about 50 km around so we definitely needed a rental to get around. While some roads are fine, lots of the roads here are an adventure to say the least!

The rentals are almost all SUVs with 4 x 4. Even with a 4 x 4, the rental car representative told us that there was a “bad” road we couldn’t go on as it could be unsafe for the car and the people. They also showed us specifically where the spare tire and toolkit were… hmmmm….

We understood the road restrictions and spare tire when we saw the “good” roads! While there are several paved roads, there are lots of roads with huge rocks, red mud, and massive ruts.

There are wild horses all around the islands so they are sometimes on the roads… as well as cows, dogs, and roosters. This little SUV was also a manual. The whole experience was an adventure!

What time is it?
Our friends at Apple certainly don’t know!

Normally the airline announces the local time when you deboard the plane, but it didn’t seem to happen on our flight in. The rental car clock was also several hours off, and the cabin has no clock. To get the current time we updated our iPhones via the local cell carrier and went on our way. In fact, all was well for our first half a day here as we started exploring the island.

On the morning of Day 2, we got up to see sunrise. We had looked up the sun time table on http://www.timeanddate.com and saw it was for 7:55 AM. When we woke up, the sun was already up!

Ryan (forever the time manager) was of course very distraught that he could be operating 1 hr off for half a day and have no clue. It took him a while to figure out what was off, but it turns out Apple hadn’t programed in new Daylight Savings Times for Easter Island! While DST begins in mid October next year, last year it was in early August. This year DST happened in September. What?!

Thankfully we figured out in time that we arrived for our main tour of the island on time!

The Crazy Statues & A Brief Overview
Why go to Easter Island? It is know for the Moai statues that are all over the island. These statues were carved by the islanders between 1000 – 1600 AD in honor of ancestors. Each statue took about a year to complete and often weighed several tons! The really crazy part is that the statues then had to be transported to their chosen resting place… which was often several kilometers away! This transporation process often took 1 – 1.5 years!

Things were ok for the islanders for several hundred years, but then they ran out of wood. Much of the island’s wood had been used for transporting statues and had left the island barren. This resulted in intertribal fighting in which tribes likely knocked down the moai of other tribes.

Eventually, the tribes started to settle disputes through what was called the “Birdman Competiton” in which the tribal leaders competed to see who would be the overall head leader for the year.

Things forever changed on the island when raiders from Peru came to the island and forcibly took many islanders as slaves. Only 15 were ever returned to the island, but these returned slaves brought back smallpox which decimated much of the remaining population. At one point the population was just 111 people.

With Chile winning a war over Peru and Bolivia, Chile took over control of the island. After a disastrous move of turning the whole island into a sheep farm for 40-50 years, things have finally turned around. Many statues were stood back up, and Chile is investing in the island. Tourism has gone from 6,000 visitors a year a decade ago to 60,000 a year today.

Don’t step on the statues!

Touring the Island
To understand these people and the statues, we took a great tour led by a New Zealander who had moved here. This allowed for an English tour and lots of kiwi humor! We had a great day visiting all over the island and getting some fun pictures!

I have been working on my long jumping skills!

While in Easter Island an exciting discovery occurred…two additional moai were found! Archeologists are coming from around the world to research.

We also saw the main quarry where the moai were carved. There were hundreds of moai in various stages of construction left there.

We also ventured out in our 4 x 4 to see the island’s main dormant volcano as well as see the remnants of the Birdman Competition huts.

On try #2 we also saw sunrise since we overrode Apple this time! 🙂

After a fun stop at Easter Island, we will spend the night in Santiago before moving on to Bolivia for a very exciting part of our trip! We will be volunteering with Samaritan’s Purse on a mission trip. We will tell you more about the mission work soon, but until then we appreciate prayer for our team and the work that will be done!