Easter Island - April 5 - 8, 2018

We spent 4 nights and 3 full days on Easter Island.  Approximately a 5 hour flight from Santiago on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner – nicest plane I’ve ever flown on.  Even the economy seats had nice leg room.   Josie is our guide for our time here, and she is fantastic.  She is half Rapa Nui and half Caucasian.  She grew up mostly in the States and went to University of Arizona in Tuscon, but came back to Easter Island over 20 years ago, met and married a Rapu Nui man, and approximately 4 years ago adopted a girl from Tahiti.  Both she and her husband are guides, and also run a bed and breakfast here.  Her grandfather was an archaeological professor at the University of Wyoming, who came here back in the 1950’s joining Thor Heyerdahl as they began finding the Moai (the statues honoring the Rapu Nui ancestors), and re-erecting a number of the Moai at various sites around the island as well as other associated archaeological work.   Another claim to fame is that she was interviewed by Matt Lauer of Today show infamy as part of the Where in the World is Matt Lauer segments from a few years ago.

Archaeologists believe the island was first inhabited most likely around the eighth century from other Polynesian islands.  The Moai were carved and erected over a number of centuries.  Later resource depletion and internal wars including the toppling and abandonment of many of the Moai among the various groups characterized the period before contact with western civilization .  The first contact with Europeans occurred on Easter Sunday, in 1722, an event that led to the well-known name for the island today, Easter Island. 

Easter Island is the remotest inhabited island in the world with Pitcairn island (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame) being the next closest inhabited island, around 1300 miles away.

Brad almost met his demise on Easter Island.  After dinner the first night we walked over to the closest Moai site to get pictures of the Moai at sunset…we were at two different locations, and a herd of horses came galloping through the area….they  literally missed Brad by only a foot or two…he very nearly was trampled to death.  I got a photo of the horses narrowly missing another man, but alas missed the Brad near miss photo.