Easter Island, known in the native language as Rapa Nui is an island in the south Pacific belonging to Chile located 2237 miles west of Chile. It is one of the most isolated inhabited islands in the world and known for the Moai statues. There are 887 statues on the island. The large stone statues were carved from 1100-1680. They were carved to resemble the spiritual head of the household, some being female, others male. In life, they didn’t cut their hair or nails, because of this, many people thought they had extremely long fingers, but it was their nails. Also, their hair is piled high on their head. All statues on the island are looking inward, protecting the people. They believed in reincarnation, so the statues were carved to resemble the deceased.
The day started out by having the wrong setting on the alarm clock. Supposed to wake at 5:30, but actually woke up at 3:30 and showered, then forced ourselves back to sleep once we realized it was way too early! Our tour was to depart at 7:15, unusually early, but because we had to be tendered there and the shoreline had no protection from the rough waves of the sea. Very rough boarding the tender, so the tender broke away after Nancy boarded, leaving Jerry back on the ship, watching as our tender headed to shore with heavy waves breaking over our bow. At shore, they had to jury rig our entrance. They moved another tender in between our tender and the floating dock as to protect our tender from crashing against the rock. We did get off successfully and Jerry followed within 15 minutes. Later in the day, one of the tenders did actually crash, busting up the dock and breaking a hole in the side of the tender. Shutting down tender service to/from the ship for over 2 hours. The tender could not be fixed and had to be left behind at Easter Island. A second dock, which was brought out from the ship, also was destroyed about an hour later. People had to crawl through a hatch door to get into the tender. I don’t know if the pictures will show how forceful the waves were, but we are SO GRATEFUL the captain and mates did what they did to get us all to shore and back safely.
Horses ran wild in herds of 1 to 50+. Right now, many are diseased and it is killing them off. It has something to do with dehydration, but they will not even drink water once they have contacted the disease. They are working very hard to solve this problem, it is so tragic. We witnessed one go down at the National Park and saw dead horses as we were driving. Horses are their main mode of transportation, and we drove on one paved road, the others are dirt.
Our first stop was was at Tonga Riki where 15 Moai statues are.
Our next stop of Hanga Tetenga, the National Park where the quarry that yielded stone for ALL of the Moai. There are 397 statues on the slopes of the extinct volcano. The statues are in various stages of completion. Several were placed standing but have now been filled with dirt from landslides and storms from their feet up to their necks. Those will be the ones that you will only see their heads. Others have fell over and are laying on the ground. There is also a big crater there, but we didn’t get to hike there as there wasn’t enough time.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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