{"id":110,"date":"2009-06-12T18:02:03","date_gmt":"2009-06-12T22:02:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.Sarcastic-Travels.com\/?p=110"},"modified":"2009-06-12T18:02:03","modified_gmt":"2009-06-12T22:02:03","slug":"mysterious-and-isolated-easter-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sarcastic-travels.com\/mysterious-and-isolated-easter-island\/","title":{"rendered":"Mysterious and Isolated Easter Island"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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.<\/p>\n
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[set_id=72157614975297193]<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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):<\/p>\n
Do you speak English?
\nParlez-vous anglais? (French)
\n¿Habla Inglés? (Spanish)
\nFlisni anglisht? (Albanian)
\nVorbiţi în engleză? (Romanian)
\nİngilizce konuşabilir misiniz? (Turkish)
\nVocê fala Inglês? (Portuguese)
\nهل تتكلم بالإنجليزية؟ (Arabic)<\/p>\n
I do not speak __________.
\nJe ne parle pas le français. (French)
\nYo no hablo español. (Spanish)
\nUnë nuk flas shqip. (Albanian)
\nEu nu vorbesc limba română. (Romanian)
\nTürkçe konuşmak yok. (Turkish)
\nEu não falam Português. (Portuguese)
\nأنا لا أتكلم العربية. (Arabic)
\nAnd what the hell, I do not speak Russian!
\nЯ не говорю по-русски!
\nOr Chinese
\n我不会说中文!(simple)
\n我不會說中文! (traditional)
\nAnd for my friend Deb in Switzerland,
\nНе говорим српски (Serbian)<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n