Mysterious and Isolated Easter Island

For the first time in my adult travels about the world, the idea to travel to Easter Island wasn’t my own. Instead, it was my Dad who came up with the idea, one he had had for quite some time apparently, and he called up and asked if we would go with. Well of course! After all, I am the sort of traveler who would go to Iran, North Korea, and Cuba in a second if I had the patience to work out the visa issues. Or the issues with the US Department of the Treasury since technically US citizens can travel anywhere in the world, they just can’t spend their money anywhere in the world. This really was a clever work around of the Constitutional guarantees of freedom of movement when we decided to hate certain nations and not “bless” them with our tourist traffic, although seriously, if you have spent any amount of time around most American tourists, you quickly realize that they are anything but a blessing! “The Ugly American” is not only a book, but a physical reality. I remember one time on a bus in France…but I digress.

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So, Dad wanted to go to Easter Island and my parents entrusted me with making all the plans from airplane reservations to hotels to tours, the whole shebang. Wow, what a sense of responsibility but also of enormous trust, for which I was grateful. That doesn’t mean, however, that I was not completely paranoid that something would go wrong and that we would be stranded in Santiago, Chile, or worse yet, on Easter Island! Our hostess, Edith, declared me a good son for taking care of all the arrangements, so at least from the Polynesian perspective, I did a good thing and from Edith’s personal perspective, I filled two of her rooms and booked two full day tours. What shouldn’t she have loved about me!

As it was, it was all very simple really, especially with the Internet, on-line bookings, and e-mail. I knew I could fly my parents out of LAX to connect with the daily Delta service to Santiago, then change over to the LAN flight out of Santiago to Easter Island, some of which continue on to Papeete, Tahiti and some of which just turn around and go back to Chile. Regardless, LAN is the ONLY airline which will fly you to or from Easter Island, which sort of makes sense given that Easter Island is a sovereign part of Chile, and has been for some time, and LAN is the national carrier of Chile (and Peru as well, but again, I digress). So, just as LAN cannot transit you from LAX to Miami (well, they can via code-share with American, but again, I am digressing into the details of air travel that most of my readers don’t care about), a non-Chilean airline cannot fly you between two points in Chile. I guess that Air Tahiti Nui or Air France could start service from Papeete into Easter Island, but there would have to be demand, which probably exists, but also the Chilean government would have to agree, and that, yeah, that I don’t see happening. In case you didn’t realize it, every flight by any carrier, foreign or domestic that arrives or departs from US soil is approved by the FAA, and this is true for other nations as well utilizing their own version of the FAA. So, for Delta to fly to Santiago, the FAA has to agree and then the Chilean authorities have to agree as well. Complicated isn’t it? Something to consider the next time you fly somewhere, the level of bureaucratic complexity involved in getting you to your vacation spot.

My parent’s flight from LAX departed on time and arrived on time, so that was one stressor gone. Tim and I had arranged to meet their flight when it arrived, so we were on the concourse at the gate to do that. We then had a bite to eat and made our way out to the International Business Lounge, which is quite a nice place, as far as airport places go, to hang out and pass the time waiting to board a flight that wouldn’t leave for hours. I have seen enough panicked people trying to make connections in Atlanta that if I don’t have at least 2-3 hours between flights, I generally won’t book a connection. But we rarely have to anyway, or we just spend a night in NYC when we do have to. And NO ONE is complaining about a night in NYC!

To pass the time, Tim, my Dad, and I were playing a card game called Spite and Malice, which as you might have guessed isn’t about being nice to your opponents. I have no doubt we were all drinking cocktails as well, although what exactly they were I don’t recall and my trusty notepad doesn’t say either. Darn. Anyway, the three of us were playing, but Mom dislikes card games and was reading or people watching, something or the other. At some point she declared that we were being too loud and were apparently embarrassing her, so she disappeared to another part of the lounge or perhaps out on the concourse to “shop,” as close to a religious experience as my mother is likely to get. I don’t recall us being obnoxiously loud, although I do know we were having a good time. Besides, I can’t imagine that we could possible have been half as obnoxious as most people in airport lounges, or anywhere nowadays, with their damn cell phones broadcasting their lives to everyone in earshot. It was so bad in the SFO Crown Room a few weeks ago, that I actually moved to the other end of the room and when the drunk loudmouth moved my way, I pointedly moved to the other end of the room, judging CNN, which I detest, to be preferable among the two evils. And if you only knew how I hate CNN, you would realize how bad this guy had to be. My nightmare was that he would be on our flight back to Atlanta, but he wasn’t. I don’t recall where he was going, but it was somewhere uninteresting, which was probably best for all after he drunkenly and loudly proclaimed his support for Proposition 8 in California (a truly idiotic thing to do in an airport in San Francisco, I mean seriously, think about it. Do heterosexual men work in airport lounges in San Francisco? Yeah, I didn’t think so either) I figured that something ugly might have to occur if I was forced to share a cabin on an aircraft with him.

Wow, big digression. OK, point was, Mom was embarrassed by us and she disappeared for a bit. The three loud mouths played cards and had a good time without her, and given that Mom is so totally resilient and independent, I don’t think she suffered any.

The flight itself is about 10 hours long and for some reason, despite some of the most comfortable and luxurious seats Delta has to offer, I didn’t sleep well, which is unusual for me on an airplane of any type. We arrived in Santiago in the early morning and our outbound flight didn’t leave until the afternoon, but there really wasn’t enough time to try to go into the city itself, so we entertained ourselves at the airport.

One truly embarrassing thing about flying into most any international airport outside of the US that I have been to at least is how clean, organized, and nice they actually are compared to any US airport I have been to. Santiago, although a relatively small airport, is no exception. After re-checking our bags with LAN, we headed over to the domestic departures section. In Chile and many other countries, unlike in the US, you have to go through Passport Control to leave the country, but for domestic transit, since you have already cleared customs and immigration, you just stroll over to the domestic gates.

But first Dad wanted a cup of coffee and there was, of all possible things, a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise right there at the airport. Another great embarrassment of international travel is one realizes what the US truly exports to the world, i.e. fast junk food and fast junk celebrities like Paris Hilton and her ill ilk. But, surely Dunkin’ Donuts would have coffee. I think I was perhaps more prepared for the reality of this experience than my Dad was, but fast food outlets that are US based, even McDonalds, do modify their menus to more closely match local tastes. And in most of the world, coffee means what Americans call espresso, a very small cup of very strong coffee. This is decidedly NOT what my Dad thinks of as coffee. He expected drip brewed coffee like he makes at home, which is totally understandable. I don’t mind espresso, I don’t make it at home since I don’t have a machine for it, but I do make similar concoctions using a device purchased in Brasil (the correct Portuguese spelling by the way, NOT Brazil) that simply uses an alcohol burner and also Turkish coffee using a copper cup, fine ground coffee, and hot water. At any rate, I was very familiar with the idea that what Americans call coffee is really only to be found in the US. Chileans consider themselves fairly European and they serve coffee the same way the Spanish, French, Italians, etc do.

This created somewhat of a dilemma since I could easily see that the Dunkin’ Donuts folks did not have a drip machine. So, calling on some resources of recall, I remembered having read that in Europe one could ask for “café Americano” which would tell the barista that you were an American who drank shitty coffee, so he or she would make espresso and then dilute it with hot water to something vaguely resembling American drip. There was another bar across the way that served coffee, so I took Dad there and managed to find the Spanish words to explain what I wanted, which was one coffee and one glass of hot water. I think the girl who took the order was intrigued, but she produced what I asked for. I was more amazed that I was able to get across what I wanted, but in this case, the French and Spanish versions of what I wanted to say were not that different. Besides, I am not sure how one grows up in California, or lives most anywhere in the United States and doesn’t practically osmotically absorb some Spanish. You can learn quite a bit just reading aisle signs at Home Depot! Seriously, try it! Of course, my limited knowledge of French was no help days later when Mom wanted more butter for her bread because the French word for butter, beurre, is nothing like the Spanish word, mantequilla, but somehow I pulled that one out to everyone’s surprise! Of course, I am very good at saying “Would you like more information about lead or whatever… (¿Le gustaría obtener más información acerca del plomo o lo que sea) because I spent a LOT of hours copying and pasting the translations into Spanish done by Melissa Athie (of the Turkish leather jacket fame) or her equally fabulous, just stepped out of the pages of men’s Vogue, gets whatever he wants with a smile husband, Alfredo for the CDC-INFO project. But that really doesn’t come up much in travel now does it?

But the point, and there is a point here, is that I find it insufferably rude for traveling Americans to assume that everyone in the world will automatically speak your language. Granted, many many many times they do, but they don’t always, and you after all are the guest in their country. It really isn’t that hard to learn to ask “Do you speak English?” or “I don’t speak Albanian” or whatever so that you don’t just launch into a detailed request or question in a language the person you are speaking to doesn’t understand. Seriously put the shoe on the other foot and imagine how you would feel if a Chilean tourist walked up to you and started rambling away in Chilean Spanish (which is by all reports not standard Spanish) assuming that of course you would understand him? I imagine you might be offended or even ticked off! So why do Americans do this? Throughout our stay, I made every effort to remember whatever Spanish words I could (much better with nouns than verbs) and having studied French for an embarrassingly long time with little to show for it, I was able to do, apparently, a decent job of Spanish pronunciation from printed menus etc, enough so that at least one waiter actually thanked me for using, or trying to use, I am not exactly sure what he said since it was in Spanish, his language and that I had done a nice job in the attempt. I realize he could have been backhanding me for doing a really shitty job, but I was there and his expression didn’t communicate that at all. Oh by the way, attention, à lire et à repeater (pay attention, read, and repeat in French):

Do you speak English?
Parlez-vous anglais? (French)
¿Habla Inglés? (Spanish)
Flisni anglisht? (Albanian)
Vorbiţi în engleză? (Romanian)
İngilizce konuşabilir misiniz? (Turkish)
Você fala Inglês? (Portuguese)
هل تتكلم بالإنجليزية؟ (Arabic)

I do not speak __________.
Je ne parle pas le français. (French)
Yo no hablo español. (Spanish)
Unë nuk flas shqip. (Albanian)
Eu nu vorbesc limba română. (Romanian)
Türkçe konuşmak yok. (Turkish)
Eu não falam Português. (Portuguese)
أنا لا أتكلم العربية. (Arabic)
And what the hell, I do not speak Russian!
Я не говорю по-русски!
Or Chinese
我不会说中文！(simple)
我不會說中文！ (traditional)
And for my friend Deb in Switzerland,
Не говорим српски (Serbian)

See, was that really so hard? Now go forth and make me proud! What you do, or say, next is up to you, but at least you will have tried!

As it turned out, our flight to Easter Island had continuing service to Papeete, so some passengers were boarding from the domestic side, not having gone through Passport Control, and others were boarding from the international side. Problem was the two sides are separated by a glass wall with a locked door. I was intrigued as to how this would work and it turns out that Gate 23, I think it was, at Santiago, has gate entry doors on BOTH sides of the glass wall and the passenger jet ways join to allow for exactly this flight. Ingenious!

We were flying Business Class with LAN for two reasons. First of all, I admit that I am spoiled. Secondly, the difference in fare was less than $200 between Coach and Business, so why not for the 5 and one half hour flight? Did I mention Easter Island is isolated? It is over 1,200 miles to the nearest inhabited speck of land, which happens to be Pitcairn Island with about 50 people and no airport, so no help there. It is 2,336 miles back to Santiago or 2,644 on to Papeete, the next closest international airport. Cargo ships come maybe once per month, at best, but with no secure harbor or anchorage, ships might wait for a long time to offload cargo, which they must do onto small boats that can actually come into the tiny harbor that Easter Island has. In other words, let’s just say that there was no immigration check at arrival or departure from Easter Island because your options about how you got there or where you would be going is severely limited!

If you have viewed the pictures from Easter Island, you noted that the first one is of the Business Class cabin on the LAN Boeing 767. Bearing in mind that Delta flew us to Santiago in a 767, there was no other comparison possible. The LAN 767 fleet is fully converted to true lie-flat beds in business class, complete with down duvets, and unlike the Business Elite seats on Delta that have you reclining into the admittedly 5 feet of space between you and person behind you, which means the person in front of you reclines in to you, these beds go straight forward so no one reclines into you and you recline into no one. And, I am about 2 inches too tall for the Delta seats so my feet always hang off the end, which gets uncomfortable over the long haul. Granted, had I not had the LAN experience I might never have complained, but having flown with LAN, Delta’s Business Elite will never be quite the same. The food was divine, they actually close REAL curtains to protect me from the view, and bathroom hogging, of the hoi polloi flying cattle car section, and unlike in the US, my guess is that LAN can discriminate against unattractive flight attendants, because whether they were stewards or stewardesses, they were quite handsome, attentive, and kind.

One other thing that struck me about LAN was the pre-landing announcement. On Delta, and I assume other US carriers, they tell you that you are on “final” approach up to 45 minutes before you land. On LAN, when they tell you they are on approach, they MEAN it. Trust me, you have about 10 minutes to be in landing position, and when landing on Easter Island, where the runway IS the width of the island, or in Santiago, sandwiched, narrowly, between the coastal mountains and the Andes, these are landings you won’t forget.

Easter Island is a South Pacific island, but put aside any visions you have of Hawaii or Tahiti, because it isn’t that. There are less than 4,000 residents on the island; there is no higher education, and no doctor, just a resident RN and no hospital. Most everything is imported in the bellies of the 767s that fly in, so costs are going to be high for even the basics of life. Because it is expensive to get to the island, islanders assume something about your financial resources, figuring you would have picked a cheaper and easier place to get to if you didn’t have a fairly substantial cash flow, so their prices for everything tourists want from food to souvenirs is inflated. On the other hand, they have essentially no other means of earning a living, so I didn’t begrudge them their pricing. After all, aside from young people, the island doesn’t export anything.

For many years, the Chilean government didn’t care much about Easter Island, and in fact, they leased the entire island to European companies for sheep ranching. Prior to this, Peruvian slave ships used to round up Rapa Nui natives to take them by force to work in the guano mines of Peru, a place from which few returned alive. The pictures of the lava tube cave show where natives would hide when slave ships arrived. Imported European diseases also devastated the islanders, especially smallpox, but also measles. Naturally this didn’t endear the Chileans or Europeans to the native Rapa Nui people (the Polynesian name for the island is Rapa Nui as is the native language spoken on the island) but residents admit that Chile is doing better by them these days than in the past, and the biggest reason for that has to do with tourists wanting to visit. It also helped that the runway that our plane landed on is long enough to accommodate big passenger jets because NASA built it as a secondary emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle. But despite the improved level of interest and investment in Easter Island, make no mistake that there is a sharp distinction between the islanders and the resident Chileans who either operate shops or work for the Chilean Navy, because no one can own land on Easter Island except a native islander or the Chilean government. Our host, Lee, an Australian who married a native Rapa Nui woman, Edith, in Australia where she was working and he was married to someone else, there is a story there…but as I was saying, our host Lee commented that Edith being one of 22 children, everything in sight from their home/hotel was owned by Edith’s family. So I asked if that was true of the small store and Internet café across the road. “No,” Lee said dismissively, “those are Chileans.” But the world “Chileans” came out almost as a curse. And most Chilean families live on the other side of the airport runway in a distinctive section of the only village on the island, also the only place with electricity and running water, Hanga Roa.

Edith had gone to Australia for work, since as one might imagine, work on Easter Island is scarce. But she returned with Lee when her mother was taken ill, and since all land in Rapa Nui families is passed through the women, Edith inherited land, so she and Lee decided to build a house and expand it into a hotel property, Hotel Tau’ra. As I said, this isn’t Hawaii, and you won’t find a single high rise hotel or big development on the island, or at least not yet. There is the specter of a big development on the horizon, but the local people wield considerable power still and have been known to burn to the ground Chilean government installations they didn’t approve of before, so it remains yet to be seen what will really happen. So, for the time being at any rate, staying on the island means essentially staying in someone’s home, although Edith and Lee have separate buildings with baths for guests, so while it is clear that you are not in what you might consider a hotel to traditionally be in the US, you are also not quite in a bed and breakfast either, although Edith did cook breakfast every morning.

While our hotel did have a more or less traditional room with attached bath, the lack of climate control aside from a largely ineffective ceiling fan which caused us to leave all windows open at all times was certainly different, in a totally good way, from the traditional hotel experience. And there were plenty of dogs that nominally, perhaps, belonged to someone running or lolling about, and there was never a need for an alarm clock because the roosters would awaken you every morning whether you wanted them to or not. I recall that by my last morning I was ready to try my hand at literally wringing a rooster’s neck! But it certainly helped to remind you that you were in one of the last more or less undeveloped corners of the world.

One other thing that our hotel provided me with was a glimpse of the range of travelers who come to Easter Island. At breakfast during our stay were families or individuals from Brasil, Germany, Japan, Austria, Argentina, and of course the United States. I have no doubt that mine was a very small sampling of the worldwide draw that Easter Island holds over many.

Edith and Lee have one teenage daughter who has a child of her own. The girl is not married and as Lee explained it, as much as a parent wants to believe that his child won’t get pregnant and be unmarried, the fact is that Easter Island has one of the highest birth rates for teens on the planet and given that there are so few recreational or educational opportunities on the island itself, he wasn’t surprised by this. I sort of figured that the Republicans would love this place with all these pregnant teenagers not ending their pregnancies and contributing to an already over-populated planet since the whole Republican convention gave a standing ovation to the living proof of the failure of abstinence-only education in the form of Bristol Palin. But Lee assured us that the only people who came to Easter Island were from the “blue” states. He firmly swore that he had never met a person from the middle or south (red states) of the United States on Easter Island. Being from Georgia, Tim and I broke his trend, but we have other blue state characteristics and sentiments so we were OK in the end I suppose.

As we didn’t want to rent a jeep and drive ourselves about the island, we had Edith hire a relative of hers to be our guide for two very full days around the island. The driver, a Frenchman, had met his Rapa Nui wife while on military duty in Tahiti. There seems to be a long history from the HMS Bounty forward of European men losing their heads over Polynesian women that continues to this day!

Our guide, whose name I shamefully forget, was a nice woman who clearly knew a good deal about the island and her native culture. She spoke very disparagingly of those who would claim that the famous statues were the work of extraterrestrials or the Inca. And in fact, archeological work has pretty well established how the statues were made, moved, and raised, as well as why they were made. Archeological evidence also suggests that it is possible that the Rapa Nui might have visited the South American mainland, but Thor Heyderdahl’s ideas about mainland South Americans populating the Polynesian islands has been pretty effectively disproven through DNA studies.

I learned a great deal about how the statues were made and moved but given the wealth of resources out there that those of you truly interested in the archeology of Easter Island can access, I am reluctant to spend a lot of narrative time on it. Suffice it to say that all the statues were carved in situ from one volcano, they would originally have had eyes although most all of these were destroyed during a vicious civil war long ago, and some statutes had reddish stone topknots carved at and transported from a different volcano with the appropriate color of volcanic rock. The statues were carved to represent particularly powerful chiefs and the statues were erected to face toward and provide protection to the villages over which their likenesses formerly ruled. The statues were carved out of the rock and then keeled like a canoe which would allow them to be rocked back and forth to free them, and then slid down the mountain. If the statue broke, you started over again! Once down the mountain, logs, greased with cooked sweet potatoes and taro root, were used to roll the statue to where it would be erected. By piling stones and earth under the head of a statue, it could slowly be raised into position on the ahu, or burial platform of the chieftains being honored. These methods have been replicated to demonstrate that they could have worked, although modern restored ahu and moai have been accomplished with imported cranes and other heavy equipment.

Easter Island is a small island and one thing you will notice about it in the pictures and in person is that it is largely barren except for shrubs and grasses. Of course, this was not always true. Once, the island would have been forested but the demand for logs for fuel and for moving statues deforested the island leading to a series of catastrophes and also providing a microcosmic scale demonstration of the damage humans can, and do, do to their environment and the very real consequences of such damage. Trees help trap moisture and encourage rainfall. Fewer trees may result in drought and decreased food supplies, problematic for a growing population such as Easter Island once had and complicated by the use of food items such as sweet potatoes or taro for statue rolling lubrication. Trees also moderate temperature through the provision of shade, and believe me, the guy who ended up with a second degree sunburn on his nose and face from one day in the unfiltered tropical sun, this matters! Some crops might not grow well at all with little to no shade from the worst of the heat and a decrease in water. Note that there are no permanent streams on the island nor springs. Rainfall and some offshore springs would have been the source of drinking water. Also, trees anchor soil and when you remove them, you get massive erosion which filled fish ponds, fouled lobster and shellfish beds, covered gardens, and otherwise eliminated or restricted food supplies ultimately leading to starving people. Starving people tend to get really testy and cranky with their leaders, just ask the Republican party of the US, and this led to the civil war between the Long Ears, the elite leaders who had pierced and weighted earlobes, and the Short Ears or common folk. The Short Ears toppled and intentionally tried to break the statues at the neck to break the spiritual power of the old leaders and this was further done by intentionally gouging out the stone eyes. Eventually, the remaining Long Ears were forced to make a last stand on one of the islands volcanoes, but they were destroyed, largely through a gruesome process of being burned to death when the Short Ears set fire to grasses and lit trenches filled with combustibles that eventually consumed the Long Ears. Yep, starving subjects are not a good thing. Details about this process of environmental degradation and the resultant effects are provided by Jared Diamond in his excellent book, Collapse. And he quotes a former employer of mine, so you know it has to be good! Seriously, it is a great read with a great chapter on Easter Island. And he does cite Lucy Tompkins, M.D., Ph.D. to boot!

The statues are stunning and impressive in their immense size and number, but I confess that by the time we got to Rano Raraku, the volcano where the statues were carved, I was headed into statue overload. But I think it is very important to note that the idea that most of you probably have of what the statues look like, standing on nice and neat platforms, only exists in two sites, both of which are modern restorations. The VAST majority, over 99%, of the statues remain as they were at the end of the civil war, toppled, broken, and disintegrating. This was further exacerbated by the European sheep ranchers who took the readily available stones from ahu, or platforms, to construct stone sheep fences with.

At Rano Raraku, you can get a quick lesson in the effects of erosion when you realize that the 5 feet of the statue you see is because the other 15 feet has been buried by shifting volcanic soil due to the erosive power of rain and wind when the tree layers have been removed. This process continues and our guide pointed out that in the course of her own life she has seen more and more of the statues become buried. Of course, you can see this process at any construction site in northern Georgia as well, including right along the road we live just off of, where a heavy rain destroyed a presumably faulty retaining wall, which was only necessary because of the less than brilliant idea of denuding clay hills and then slicing into them to build roads and houses, to say nothing of entire warehouse complexes.

It was at Rano Raraku that we first encountered large numbers of the islands more or less feral horses. Some of them are branded and theoretically “belong” to someone, but many of them are unbranded and many more were colts, it being late spring/early summer in January south of the Equator, and we were warned that while not inherently dangerous, they were not exactly tame either. So, when a group of horses wanted to use the path over the pass to the crater lake inside Rano Raraku, we certainly gave them plenty of room. The water for the horses is supposed to be pumped out of the crater lake into a concrete cistern but the pipe was broken or non-functional, so the horses were having to try to get through deep mud and heavy reeds to get to the water with apparently only a marginal degree of success.

Horses are widely used on the island for transport and farm work, but they also wander about as they please, and eventually we would even see them wandering down the main street in Hanga Roa, minding their own business, with drivers of cars and motorbikes weaving around them as everyday obstacles that were of no apparent special concern to anyone. Easter Island is very laid back in that respect. No one is in a big hurry, where would you go anyway, and what would you do when you get there? If a plane is due to arrive, everyone knows when, so again, what’s to worry about? I had to wonder, in a sort of Carrie Bradshaw moment, if the Mormon missionaries wandering about the island would find ways to plant new things for the islanders to worry about. I certainly hope not, but I had to wonder, was sex about to die on Easter Island with the arrival of the black suited ones? If you don’t know who Carrie Bradshaw is, you are not in my demographic, to very liberally misquote Stephen Colbert, who actually said that if you remember the 80’s you are not in his demographic, so I stopped watching him. But even if you are not in my “demographic” and don’t know who Carrie Bradshaw is, please don’t stop reading!

Easter Island isn’t exporting lots of food both because they don’t grow enough for their own needs, although they do pretty well in terms of most produce except bananas which are widely used for just about everything and every meal, and because the cost of transport to export food would be prohibitive. But there are lots of folks selling their own farm fresh produce, especially watermelons as I recall and for breakfast I had zero interest in the eggs, which I detest anyway, but was loving the big bowls of fresh island fruit!

One of the folks who grow watermelons happened to also be acting as our waiter one evening, not because he worked at the restaurant so much as I think he was waiting for his girlfriend, or at least that night’s date, and was ingratiating himself. He came to explain that while he was technically from Easter Island, he had moved to Santiago for college and then on to Vallejo, California for more schooling with the goal of getting into UC Berkeley. He seemed a bit too much of a scatter-brained surfer boy type to get into Cal to me, but perhaps that was just because he was in his 20s and all people that age act that way in the eyes of someone rapidly pushing up against 40. And he might well have been a surfer “boy” in that young men certainly were surfing in the harbor area and the seas around the island certainly produce plenty of waves suitable for surfing (I am guessing as to what makes a wave suitable here of course). During the day though, he worked with his father on the watermelon farm they had. This was how he spent his “winter” break from a school in North America, hanging out in the summer heat of his home in the Southern Hemisphere.

What I found fascinating about it was how small the world really is. He would board a LAN flight from Easter Island to Santiago, then to LAX and then onto one of the San Francisco area airports, probably on American, just as easily as we would fly back to Santiago, then on to Atlanta, and in my parents’ case, on to LAX. Really, where can’t you get to in a day or so nowadays? It makes the concept of Jules Verne’s “Around the World In 80 Days” seem incredibly quaint.

Our second day was more or less mercifully free of more statues. Don’t get me wrong now, the statues were stunning, but a full day of looking at statues will do just about anyone in I think!

One of the more interesting stops on our second day from the perspective of Tim and I was the restoration nursery operated by the Chilean government. A German botanist succeeded in finding one, and only one, seed from the original trees that covered Easter Island in Orongo crater. Bravo to him both for finding the one seed and for braving that crater! He took the seed to Germany, where he was able to germinate it and begin to regrow the native trees. This process continues on the island today, and portions of the island are closed off to everyone as reforestation attempts are at work. The restoration garden also demonstrates traditional techniques for growing food crops on the island in round stone protective rings that conserve soil and moisture.

As seems depressingly true of most societies, Easter Islanders had to replace the former religion of ancestor worship with something new, so after the civil war was born the cult of the birdman. Briefly put, seabirds nest on two small rocky islands off the coast, and in a contest of swimming skill and rock climbing, the boy who returned up the sheer cliffs of Orongo with an unbroken bird’s egg which he would have had to swim round trip from the main island to obtain, and swim back and then climb up sheer cliffs, all without breaking that egg. He would then present the egg to his clan or village’s “candidate” for birdman, who would win the contest essentially by proxy. The “birdman” would live in a special ceremonial village, be fed and venerated for the entire year, and would emerge at the end of the year gaunt and with very long fingernails, which he didn’t cut for the year. This is the origin of the petroglyphs one can see surrounding Orongo crater as well as the many replica statues one can buy in town. David Attenborough, the inveterate British naturalist, has a special about the birdmen statues and cult of Easter Island that you can rent if you want to know more about it, provided that you can stand listening to David Attenborough!

On our last morning, Edith warned me not to go to Tahiti, a place she does not like at all for multiple reasons. My parents have been there briefly to board a ship to travel to other more pleasant places, but in principle I think I agree with Edith that the experience of Easter Island was more my kind of island thing. There is only one beach which is great for a white guy like me who burns to blisters in less than a day and since I live in the back of beyond, I am not terribly fond of overly developed and polished fake environments that are so common on heavily tourist infested islands like most of the Caribbean. In terms of a recommendation, I would tell a person who has an interest in natural history or archeology, or even just in remote places, that Easter Island is well worth the effort and expense, but if you require a high level of luxury or are otherwise easily bored or high maintenance, then I wouldn’t go. Get as far as Santiago and stay there for a week.

We did of course return through Santiago, a place Tim and I had been before and of which I have written before, so I won’t say a whole lot more about it other than to reiterate that I love it.

I think it is very important, but also sometimes hard for Americans to remember that if their only experience of Latin America is a Mexico border or beach town, that Chile is NOT Mexico. In fact, I don’t think most of Mexico is “that” Mexico either, but Chile reminds more than anything else of Mediterranean Europe both in terms of climate, architecture, food, and the whole feel of it. The city has a clean, safe, and efficient, not to mention dirt cheap, metro system that gets you wherever you want to go. And if you like shopping you won’t lack for opportunities. Admittedly I gave my mother grief about shopping and about visiting and marveling over the 7 story mall that was within walking distance of our hotel, but then I went to Istanbul, and two additional suitcases later sort of lost the high ground on that one. And I confess that I enjoyed the process of shopping for lapis lazuli jewelry with my Mom, and even picked up lapis cuff links to wear with my French cuffed shirt when on cruise ships and such things come out of the plastic the cleaners puts them in. Chile is one of only two places that commercially mine lapis, the other being Afghanistan, and you can imagine how much lapis isn’t coming out of there to American markets these days. Afghan heroin I hear though is a growth industry. I wonder what cut our military commanders get on that trade?

Not to say or imply though that Santiago will feel like most any American city because it won’t, in part because it has transit that is clean and safe, but also because you will find guinea pig on menus. Two of Tim’s nephews begged and begged for guinea pigs for Christmas and there is this evil part of me that wants to point out that their pets are someone else’s main dish, but I probably won’t do that…

I can’t say that the cable car ride up the mountain park didn’t scare the crap out of me, because those things always do whether up to Sugar Loaf in Rio or in Chile, but at least I knew some key Spanish prayer phrases for the occasion, Madre de Dios being frequently uttered! But admittedly, you do get an unrivaled view of the city from those little death traps dangling untold numbers of meters above terra firma!

Otherwise I reveled in the ability to buy over two pounds of fresh ripe cherries for less than a dollar along with plums that burst sweetness into my mouth with barely a bite. Having grown up amongst fruit trees, literally in my backyard, I find the produce section the second most depressing part of the grocery store because nothing is ripe and nothing tastes like I know it should. By the way, the most depressing part is the cookie aisle that I won’t walk down unless very depressed or it is very late at night. Chileans make fantastic seafood, including pulpo ceviche, which yes I know I shouldn’t eat, but I did it anyway and if ever in Chile again, I WILL eat it again. For those of you who don’t know, pulpo is octopus and ceviche refers to seafood that has been marinated in citrus which sort of “cooks” it without the application of heat. So, essentially it is raw but it doesn’t look or taste like sushi. Oh well, I like it for whatever reason! And the other aspect of Chile, as well as all the other parts of South America I have been fortunate enough to visit, that I so enjoy is the general cheerfulness and forgiving nature of the people. You may well mispronounce things, not understand things, whatever, but people cut you a lot of slack and no one ever seems to be in a bad mood whereas in the US bad moods and ‘tudes seem to the new normal. Who knows, maybe after I finish visiting all the US states and territories, I will tackle all the countries in South America. I wouldn’t put it past me, and to my extensive knowledge of such things, Bolivia and Paraguay are the only two I can’t get to while earning SkyMiles with Delta, and I am NOT cheating and discounting Guyana, to which Delta flies direct from JFK, Suriname, to which KLM, a Delta partner, flies to daily, nor even French Guiana to which Air France, yet another Delta partner, flies multiple times a day from various places. I have said many times that I know too much about airlines and also that I long to travel more than is good for me, my bank account, or the cleanliness of my house.

But perhaps beyond all of that which has occupied the previous sixteen pages I have written, the single most important aspect of the journey was the chance to travel with my parents again for the first time in over 20 years. For those of you who can, I seriously urge you to consider trying a trip, perhaps not as ambitious as Easter Island, with your parent(s) as an adult if you haven’t done so since you were a child. Granted, if you have tried this as an adult and found it impossible as I know at least one of my readers has, or delightful as I know at least one other reader has, then you don’t need to do this. But I think that most of us have no real sense of our parents as PEOPLE in the world because no matter how old we get, they will always be our PARENTS and there is something about that which never changes even as we do. I think travel is a great way to sort of equalize the footing because neither of you is on familiar turf, you are both finding your way and behaving differently than you would at home because you have to. Look, I am not claiming that this will work for everyone but I think it is worth the risk as long as you go into it with your eyes wide open and as long as you communicate any expectations you have clearly before you leave. And on that front I give my Mom huge credit. She told me in no uncertain terms that she would NOT be herded about to do what the majority wanted to do, that if she wanted to do something different or nothing at all, that I would have to be fine with that. Not that I couldn’t do whatever it is that I wanted to do, but I best not expect her to feel obliged to do exactly what I wanted to do, nor did I have to do exactly what she wanted to do. And she was as good as her word. If she wanted to go to the mall, she did whether I wanted to or not. And if Tim and I wanted to do something that they didn’t or were too tired to do, that wasn’t an issue either. But also don’t have illusions about yourself either. I know I can be a cranky fart at times, especially when I am tired or in pain, or especially when both are true, and frequently both are true! And I know that as I got tired or pain increased, I got cranky at times, hopefully not most of the time, during the Easter Island trip. But I sort of figured that if my Dad could climb those volcanoes no more than 3 months status-post knee replacement surgery than so could I! And we both did along with Tim and Mom. And you know what, something that I think will live with me for all my life was the joy of climbing that third volcano surrounded by people I loved and taking in the view of practically the entirety of one of the most remote places on Earth. To steal from a common commercial, “discovering your parents as adults and people in the world: priceless.”

To summarize it all, I think I could and would safely recommend Chile to just about anyone, and Easter Island only those with interests I mentioned before. Fortunately for me, the entire adventure was a success on multiple levels, and I look forward to hanging out with my Mom and Dad again in Death Valley for a weekend in April and to being with them on a 29 day cruise, not counting the pre-departure and return time, including the 14+ hour return flight from Sydney, Australia, in November/December of this year. In fact, I look forward to as many more travel opportunities with my parents as I can pack in, and on some level Dad and I already agree that Cape Town, South Africa, or the Okavango Delta of Botswana should be on the list, and I think my Mom agrees that taking Delta’s new service into Manaus, Brasil to go up the Amazon to Iquitos, Peru, to fly to Lima, then on to Cuzco for Machu Picchu, then back to Lima for Delta’s return daily service, is a good concept means that I will likely move forward on that intent.

In the meantime, I encourage each and every one of you to remember that is a HUGE and fascinating world out there, so go explore even some small corner of it that you haven’t been to before. No matter what your limitations physical, financial, chronological, real, or perceived, there IS an adventure you can undertake, I practically guarantee it, and I have very little doubt but that you will be the better and even happier person for having done it. Enjoy and tell whomever you meet, that I sent you.

Cheers until next time!