Ok, I lied in my last post, we have definitely not caught up to real time yet. We’re even further off. Blame it on bloody Chile and Brazil having a different power plug than the rest of South America, but I digress.

When doing my research for this trip, I came across a pro tip I’m going to share with you. If you ever want to go to Easter Island, book it via the Chilean Lan.com website. Seems like they change their prices according to location, so what would’ve been an AU $900 return trip in economy only ended up being a AU$600 return trip in business (economy would’ve been $100 less). Can I get a hell yeah?! Reaching Santiago, I was able to check into my flight straight away, looking forward to decent wifi and relaxing in the business lounge was immediately shattered when I realised Santiago didn’t have a Lan lounge in it’s domestic terminal. Feeling heartbroken, I wandered aimlessly around the terminal til I realised I should probably get some cash for Easter Island, I’d read ATMs were a little hard to come by there. I had a small lovers tiff with the ATM, it refused to give me my damn money, continually spitting my card back out. Conscious of the growing queue behind me, I was ready to start banging on the thing, but thankfully it gave up and graciously spat money at me. Feeling triumphant, I head off for my flight. Needless to say, I napped the whole way to Easter Island, missing the lunch service.
After standing my ground and possibly elbowing a few pushy people, I retrieved my bag from the crowded conveyor belt. I was greeted at the airport by a free airport transfer to my hostel and sized up the others who I would be staying at the hostel with. They were all couples bar myself and another girl. Feeling hopeful that another lone traveller might mean someone to hang with, we drove to the hostel I picked specifically because of its cliff side location (and relatively cheap price). I made myself familiar with my trusty tent that I’d call home for the next 4 nights, and tried to strike up a conversation with the French couple I arrived with. I was hoping that they might be open to teaming up for a tour since my initial research alluded that most of the island tours were private and needed a minimum of 2 people or one person had to pay for 2 and I wasn’t too keen on that. Yeah, they weren’t exactly friendly, polite but pretentious was the vibe I got from them, so feeling rejected I grabbed my daypack and headed off in search of food instead. The town of Hanga Roa is thankfully pretty small, you can walk everywhere. I managed to find the dive shop I’d read about on TripAdvisor at the far end of town and signed up for a dive to check out the underwater Moai and another to see the reef at another part of the island. I had wanted to do a night time dive, but they said conditions weren’t great at this time of the year for night dives, devastating I know! I enquired about tours at a few places and eventually settled on a random company that seemed to cover the main parts of the island. This time feeling accomplished, I finally went food shopping, but everything is pretty pricey for South American standards. Most of the food has to be flown/shipped to the island, even the fresh food, and almost everything is in aluminium style bladders instead of glass bottles or in tins to cut down on weight. I stopped off at a supermarket no bigger than a deli, and bought some staples. A bunch of local eggs, pasta, what I thought was pasta sauce, and also what I hoped was tinned tuna, on the way back I stopped off at a bakery that also sold deli meats and cheese and managed to gesture my way to buy a couple of bread rolls and a small cling wrap bundle of what looked like salami. Fun fact, they sell bread by weight, not by number of rolls. As I made my way back to the camp grounds, I contemplated renting a car for a day to explore the other parts of the island that the tour wouldn’t cover, but I couldn’t quite justify the AU$90 price just yet, a bike on the other hand seemed like a more reasonably option at AU$24. I decided to defer the decision til after the tour.
The tour turned out pretty informative and fascinating. We visited the crater-side quarry that all the tribes considered a neutral space where they wouldn’t fight. That’s where they’d carve the Moai statues, each tribe had their own side of the quarry. The Moai would be carved in place, then chipped off the foundation rock and ‘walked’ upright down the hill to its final destination (sort of like trying to move a fridge forward a little where you do a swing and shift move). There are 4 generations of Moai with evolving features, the earliest were smaller and rounded, whereas the newest are bigger, with squarish faces and longer ears. The Moai depicted tribal leaders who had passed, and out of the 1000+ statues, only a handful were women. It was really cool to visit the quarry and see all the half buried statues. It was only discovered a few years ago that the statues had bodies buried beneath them, according to the guide, the statues that were half buried were never meant to be moved any further, they most likely had an imperfection or the tribe ran out of resources to pay the people moving them (who also happened to be the same ones that carved it). 

We also visited the iconic site with 15 restored Moai on their Ahu (platform). Turns out, back in 1991, some rich Japanese guy who owned a crane company visited Easter Island and his dream was to have a picture of one of his cranes lift a Moai for restoration. So he met the residents of Hanga Roa and offered Us$1 million to restore the 15 Moai. Now there’s a small plaque at the site with a picture of his crane lifting a Moai, I guess some people dream of lifting Moai, and others just dream of frying a few eggs for dinner that night.

I’m not going to lie, the kitchen at camp wasn’t the greatest, and the cupboard with utensils they’d assign me had a distinct aroma of mothballs. After a a good scrub and copious amounts of detergent, I smother the once nonstick pan with butter and happily fried off some eggs whilst simultaneously swearing when the copious amounts of butter started spitting at me. Task accomplished, I set about making a sandwich when a girl, who’s been sitting along the bench that ran down the kitchen, came up and asked to use my buttered pan. We struck up a conversation over dinner, and it turned out that she’d tried to rent a car, but couldn’t once she realised it was only available in manual, plus she’d found a place that only charged AU$50! She also shared her hitchhiking story about her attempt to walk back from the other side of the island and resorting to thumbing it when the hike turned out bigger than expected. Sensing an opportunity, I offered to split the cost of the car since I was licensed to drive a manual and we settled on a date for our adventure. I went to bed with my spirits lifted that I’d have the opportunity to rent a car to explore and that I’d made a new friend! (Take THAT standoff-ish French couple).