Easter Island/Rapa Nui

To celebrate my 65th birthday I decided I wanted to fulfill a longtime dream of going to Easter Island. My wife, Gloria, took on the difficult task of arranging it. After a great deal of internet research we settled on a tour package offered by LAN, the national airline of Chile, through its tour office in, of all places, Salt Lake City, Utah. The package provided a circle tour from Honolulu, to Tahili, to Easter Island, to mainland Chile, to Peru, to Los Angeles, and back to Honolulu, with the privilege of spending as much time as we wanted at any stop.

On Monday, February 1st, we boarded a Hawaiian Airlines flight and landed in Papeete, Tahiti around midnight. The most memorable thing about the five and a half hour flight was the tiny little cheese sandwich that was handed to us without a wrapper for our main meal. A taxi met us at the airport and took us to our modest, but comfortable, hotel. The next day we walked into town, but since it was Sunday almost everything was closed. Near midnight we were picked up and taken to the airport to catch the overnight LAN flight to Easter Island.

In spite of all my traveling it was still a thrill to catch my first glimpse of the famous Easter Island just before we landed on the morning of February 3rd. That first impression was of a fairly barren landscape with lots of volcanic cones all over it. After we rolled down the very long runway (built with US funds under the Reagan administration as an emergency landing site for the space shuttle) we stopped in front of a tiny airport. At the edge of the runway a crowd of Rapanui islanders were waiting for a rowdy, fun-loving, people-loving group of Maoris from New Zealand who were visiting for the festival.

The immigration process was a bit slow because all the passport info had to be copied down by hand, but we finally made it through. We were met by representatives of Rapa Nui Tours, a German-Chilean company. Our tour guide, Victor Ika, was fluent in English and half a dozen other languages and seemed to be in his mid-twenties. Our driver, Pedro, was very friendly, but spoke little English. Both were Rapa Nui natives. Fortunately, both Gloria and I speak some Spanish, which we used a lot on the whole trip.

As soon as our bags were in the van we were whisked off in short order to our lodgings, the Hotel Otai in "downtown" Hanga Roa, the only town on the island. It was more like a motel than a hotel, but there was a nice pool, the Rapanui staff were quite friendly (in fact, all the Rapanui people we met were very friendly), there were lots of flowers and lush greenery, and there was an acerola cherry tree full of ripe fruit. On the downside, there was no air-conditioning (I was able to borrow a fan from an unoccupied room and it helped), no television, no available internet service, a minimalist continental breakfast, and our room was on a direct acoustical ley line with the festival loudspeakers about half a mile away.

After a refreshing shower we lunched at a tiny, shack-like, open-air cafe next to the hotel (nearly every single restaurant in town was a tiny, shack-like, open-air cafe, except that some were more shack-like than others). For our first meal on Rapanui I had a "churrasco" (sorta kinda like a cheesburger deluxe with sliced beef) and Gloria had a fishburger. We wandered around town a bit, poking around the tiny souvenir shops and the tiny supermarket (sorry about the repetitive adjective, but most things were just darned tiny). We bought a lot of bottled water for the room and the tours. Although Rapanui water is supposed to be safe to drink, it's recommended that visitors don't try it because of the high mineral content that does strange things to the digestive system.

Other features of the town included a small park, the only school, a couple of craft centers, and a church.

Every evening but two (on Sunday it was closed and on another night we had a traditional dinner at Pedro's) we had dinner at Le Pecheur, the closest thing to a gourmet restaurant on the island, operated by a friendly Frenchman and his Rapanui wife. Located right at the "port" of Hanga Roa with open views of the sun setting in the ocean, it had an interesting decor composed of odds and ends picked up by the owners on their travels, real tablecloths and real napkins, and even candles. Dinner delights included Uruguayan steak forestiere, rape-rape (slipper lobster), Spanish paella, and fresh salmon. The fresh mahimahi looked and tasted a lot like swordfish, but the excellent pisco sours and Chilean wines made up for that.

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