We are on Easter Island. It is a magical place.
We flew in on Monday, watched a massive downpour from the airport concourse, and got a ride to the campsite. The fact that the ride was in the load-bed of a pickup truck did suggest that this was a different place. We pitched the tent, and went for a look around. There are palm, coconut and banana trees all over the place. No one wears seatbelts. The Chilean naval base looks like a beach hut. We have taken hundreds of photos, A crude sneak preview.
The statues are massive and eerie. We spent some time staring at them. There are no signs as to why they are there or how they were made.
Pete They must have been raised by aliens. Wait, I probably said that
yesterday.
Laura: Yesterday you just pointed and said aliens! aliens!
Tuesday we went horse riding up to the top of the Island. This was massively painful, and was probably a mistake. We are plotting making a parody of I´m on a horse. Afterwards we staggered around the museum (very much like Newgrange - they have no idea why the statues are there) and then wandered into town to drink picso sours until we stopped hurting. The local beer is wonderful too.
Yesterday we rented a car (a fake 4x4 - it looked the part but didn´t have four wheel drive) and zoomed around the sites. The sites are wonderful - hundreds of statues just standing there. We drove around to the island´s beach, which was paradise. White sand, lovely clear water, coconut trees. We watched the fishes swim past - a sight I have never seen in Britain or Ireland. There were flat fish and schools of smaller fish and the occasional large fish of different sorts. The beach had a excellent warning sign: danger, falling coconuts. It was just spectactular.
Notes from Laura: Car hire here is very simple, you ask for a car and you get the keys, no questions asked about a licence and no insurance. The locals ride around in the back of trucks and whole families ride around on a single motorbike without helmets. The Daihatsu chugged along and the engine sounded knackered. As soon as we got off the tarmac road and on to the dirt tracks we knew why all the controls felt so loose and shaky.
The bird diversity here is low although there are islands offshore which are important for seabirds. The highlight so far has been Red-tailed tropicbirds. Common diuca finchs are everywhere but they are non native. One bird of prey species is also everywhere and is probably the Chimango Caracara can´t be sure yet. Now back to Pete...
We´re met some interesting people here. Main source of giggling was an american family on the horse riding trip. The adult son was on his gap year in Buenos Aires, and the parents had flown down to vist him and tour the sites. Half way around the riding, Mum started nagging son about the fact he was not wearing sun cream on the back of his neck. "But mum, I do not want toooo". We also watched a guy run around the statues at Rano Raraku. He also did handstands in front of them. He was quietly mocked by a pair of german women walking ahead of us.
I sense the nerds might be interested in the internet connection. I suspect a sat connection. It has about 10kbs of bandwidth. I also think the router here is doing dialup to a number in mainland Chile, since its the second hop of the traceroute that has the crazy latency. ssh is pretty show but not terrible. web browsing is painful. The Picasa uploader for photos is useless. I think there are a few sites out there thinking we are doing a slowaris attack.
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