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  • Day 403

    Rapa Nui

    June 13, 2018 in Chile ⋅ ⛅ 20 °C

    Rapa Nui. Isla de Pascua. Easter Island. Whichever name you want to use, the giant statues (Moai) on this incredibly remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean have been something we’ve wanted to see with our own eyes for as long as we can remember. It’s crazy to think people journeyed here in canoes from somewhere in the South Pacific 800-1000 years ago because this is a really small, easy to miss, dot of land.
    The culture here seems to take much more from Polynesia than Chile and the people here are very proud and seem to enjoy a pretty good life. The Chilean government is apparently afraid of an independence bid by the island so has sought to make staying part of Chile very attractive to the native Rapa Nui people by offering free healthcare, education, $50k towards their first house, and zero taxes. Not too bad!
    The ruins here were really interesting. We spent a day doing a small tour with a guide, then rented a car and wandered around the island on our own for another few days. The weather on our last two days was pretty wet and windy (John said to get ready for Wellington!) but this just added to the unique beauty and atmosphere of the island. The prevailing belief is that the statues were built as early as ~1200 as tributes to important ancestors. Then, due to some sort of famine or major disruption (which isn’t hard to imagine happening on such a tiny island with so few natural resources), the statues stopped being produced and were all toppled during some sort of infighting. Some, but not all, of the statues were re-erected in the 1970’s. The stone carving is impressive and we were able to visit the quarry where the statues were originally carved and to see the trail of incomplete Moai that were abandoned as they stood.
    This was an incredible visit to a unique place, however we did observe one sad feature. We were walking on a small sandy beach, with several Moai standing in the sand dunes in the background, when we noticed small colorful objects in the sand about 1/8th of an inch across. We realized these were small pieces of plastic that had washed up on the beach. As we looked around we noticed the beach littered with these tiny plastic particles. A couple of locals were doing their best to clean the beach, but it looked like an uphill battle. Amazing that 2000km from the nearest inhabited island and 3600km from the South American Continent that this type of pollution could find it’s way here. The owner of our hotel suggested there is a huge trash ‘patch’ in the seas between Rapa Nui and the Galapagos Islands. What have we done?
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