Schnecken on the run

When I asked Whitney a year ago, if she would like to go with me to Rapa Nui, what the Chileans call their Easter Island, she answered that she had heard that is was just an island with a couple of stones lying around. I told her, that this was wrong.
I talked so much about the Easter Island that she thought, that I would probably ask her to marry me there. In New Zealand I showed her, that this was as well wrong (-;
Now we have spent one week on the island and she fully understands me.
It is not possible to describe the mystic about Rapa Nui. It is the most isolated and inhabited place in the world. To the east it is 3500 km to Chile, to the west it is almost as many kilometer toTahiti and inbetween is only water.

The flight from Santiago, Chile, takes about 5,5 hrs and during that flight you start asking yourself, how people hundreds of years ago managed to get to this remote place. There are many theories about this „how“ and „from where“ and it is believed today, that the first man came from the ocean, from Polynesia, long before any south american or european explorer first reached this island.

The mystic fact about this place lies in its undiscovered history. There are lots of ideas about the rising and the fall of this little society, who once have lived here in paradise, before they started to compete and fight against each other and finally destroy what they had.

One of the most exciting outcomes about the Rapa Nui history is for me to see how a society grows and developes without any influence from the outside. You put a couple of people on a piece of land, an island in the shape of a triangle with its longest side 24 kilometers, close the door and wait a couple of hundred years before you open it again and see what they have been up to. And here we go: They developed all sorts of cults and believes, had their own hierachies, built more than 1000 huge statues (Moai) and as well hundreds of ceremonial platforms (Ahu). They developed their own language and their own writing, which is still not completely understood.
All this without anybody telling them to do so!

We took it easy on the island. The first day, we walked along the rough westcoast, visiting one of the best preserved Ahus and Moais before we searched a couple of hours to find the caves which I remembered visiting three years ago. We found it finally in the late afternoon: The cave „Dos Ventana“, called so, because after you crawl and walk for about 50 meters through it you reach two big window like openings in the middle of the high cliffs, overlooking the wide ocean. There is enough evidence of people once living in these caves (cooking holes, sitting areas etc.) so the idea of this window being the view you have from your bedroom in the morning made us smile.

The next two days we hired a scooter and cruised the island with a nice couple from Holland. We visited all the important sights and read what the guidebook told us about them and the Rapa Nui culture. Rapa Nui is the name for the island, as well as the name for the people living here also the language they speak.

We were camping right at the ocean, with a great view and a nice kitchen and hang out area and so we enjoyed taking it easy and taking our time. We brought most of the food we needed from the mainland but still went in the morning to the main street of the islands only „city“ Hanga Roa, a 10 minute walk, to buy vegetables or fish. We enjoyed watching the locals doing their thing, interesting, as they seem to be doing it day by day, without lots of changes. And whenever we could, we somehow interacted with the extremly friendly people we met there.

On the day before our week was over and we were to leave for Lima, Peru, we luckily got invited to a family afternoon lunch. We went down to the little harbour and had found one of the fishing boats that just came back. The fisherman showed us their impressive catch: A Tuna, two Baracudas and Mahi Mahi, what is as I understood one of the better fish you can get here in Polynesia. The guys were friendly, pointed to their house nearby and said that we should come for some food and drinks. We saw already other people standing beside the house preparing lunch. We joined them half an hour later and had a great two hours of talking, trying and learning. They offered us food out of a big pot. A stew with meat and all sorts of potatoe like roots. We tried Tuna liver and a fish soup made from eel and crab. Very interesting!!. The grandfather and boss of this huge original Rapa Nui family invited us to come to the next evenings dinner, where they would prepare the fish they had just caught in the traditional way, it would be cooked in a hole in the ground for many hours. Sadly our plane was leaving the next day so we could not go, but we were very happy to be part of this „pre-Party“.

We learned that the fishing boat was new and as tradition states, the first three catches with a new boat should not be sold, but should be shared with other people. This was the second catch so we assumed that the party the next evening would have been a great get together.

After 6 days we left the island. We were happy that we came here and thrilled that we came with some free time so we could and did slowly feel and enjoy the pace of this mystic place.

Unfortunately it seems, that you can´t grab the mystic that we experienced here, if you don´t visit this Island. Our suggestion: Pack your things and go!