ok, RAPA NUI (Easter Island / Isla de Pascua) finally:

I got back from the trip Thursday night but starting Friday was thrown into the dieciocho Independence Day celebrations back here in Santiago so I haven’t had time to write or post pictures in a while. So here is everything in one giant paragraph of bad grammar and lacking poetry: I stayed up all night Friday before leaving researching Rapa Nui since I didn’t know anything and found out lots of interesting things such as: 1.) It is the most isolated place on the planet in terms of distance from other populations of people. 2.) It has excellent fish and fruit but everything else is really expensive since there are only 3 shipments of supplies from the mainland a year. This is especially visible in the horses who are all dying and starving because there is not enough horsefeed sent to feed them so they eat non indigenous plants that ruin their livers. It was weird, everything was healthy and great except the horses were sickly sickly skinny. 3.) In old times Rapa Nuis considered the Island the Navel of the world or te pito te henua. 4.) It is plio-pleistocene volcanic and man the volcanic rock is fucking cool and everything from the beach to asphalt to tombstones is made of igneous rock. Sleeping on rocks that were formed from volcanos millions of years ago that still looked like volcanic rock was really exciting. (albeit hard) 5.) “delinquency does not exist” 6.) there are not really any animals on the island other than dogs, cats, rats, mice, and of course large webfooted rats, which we luckily didn’t run into but we heard some pretty loud dinosaur growls when we were inside the Rano Kao crater and then found a mutilated kitten which I think can only be attributed to the webfeet. 7.) In the 17th/18th century (maybe before too, I can’t remember) there was this practice called the birdman ritual that there are pyroglyphs of all over the island based on the migration of the only visitors the island ever received: the sooty tern birds. The practice was that each leader chose someone to jump off a cliff into the Pacific ocean and swim to a nearby island where the birds mated and find the first egg laid. Then he swam back through the ocean carrying the egg supposedly strapped to his forehead. And the prize for the leader whose swimmer brought back the egg was that he got to stay in his house for a whole year. And the houses (shaped like boats) were only 4 feet tall with no windows or light! Pretty crazy. Not to mention the Moai. But that will come later. I haven’t even gotten to the part where I arrive yet. After an impressively delicious meal on LAN we arrived in the early afternoon and although warned against it by everyone at the airport who wanted us to pay them to camp in their yards, Jenna and I started walking around looking for a place to camp for the night. After ten minutes of walking with no idea where we were going to go and backpacks full of water and food and a tent and sleeping bags we were about to pass out when a guy in a pickup truck pulled over and offered to drive us wherever we needed to go. So we told him we were going to try to camp and he drove us to the coast which was beautiful and showed us a nice cave to camp in but then offered to give us some water and fruit from his house so we went back there and ended up getting the keys to his cabana so that we could shower and use the bathroom and we just ended up staying there for free for most of the week hanging out and cooking dinner with him every night and eating fresh fruit from his fruit trees. [biography: Napohe. I have no idea how old he was, a lot older than us. He’s a designer and makes these really nice cloth prints related to Rapa Nui, which he gave us, and lived in a really cool house. Apparently when he was 22 he met a 44 year old woman traveling to Easter Island who worked for NASA and was very wealthy and I guess having a midlife crisis. He moved to California with her where they lived for 8 years and had a daughter. But he couldn’t handle living there and in such high class society, especially since he was so much younger than her and she wouldn’t let him work or do anything. He also traveled around Europe and the states but really just liked Rapa Nui life so he moved back and opened this design company. Etc. I don’t know if anyone else is interested in this, especially since you didn’t meet him, but I think people’s biographies are fascinating.] It was really fun and great to not have to stay in a hotel and only hang out with other tourists and I think we got a totally different understanding of Easter island than everyone else we met who was also visiting. (I’m sorry there are no paragraphs, the blog doesn’t let me do them for some reason). We did camp as well which was also fantastic. On Sunday we woke up and went to mass at the Catholic Church, which was really beautiful and full of singing in Rapa Nui and Spanish and it was pretty cool to understand an hour of mass in Spanish. (One of my new projects is to try to understand religion more, especially the religious phenomenon in Latin America, and visit all of the different churches in Santiago each Sunday. I think I’m going to go to Synagogue this weekend for Rosh Hashanah). After church we set out with our backpacks along the east coast feasting on wild guavas along the way and climbing over old lava. Since we were walking I felt like we were really discovering every foot of the island and we stopped at every site of fallen Moai and got a really good idea of their intensity and what it would have taken to carry them so far. Our final destination for the day was the crater (Rano Raraku) from which they were carved so we walked in reverse the path that they would have had to have walked to carry them and it was really neat to understand it that way. I was exhausted just from carrying a backpack; the idea of moving a 10-meter giant stone figure is pretty unbelievable. It was impossible not to feel excited about life and have amazing thoughts while we were walking. Something that Jenna said that I liked was that we are going to find what we’re looking for because we’re still looking. And I was thinking about how great everything was going and how easy things were working out for us, almost as if we had a guardian angel, but really it was just life. And we were just aprovecharing it. And something important I realized was that I’m not pessimistic. And that feels great. So we walked for about six hours and were about to pass out when six loud boys from new york and jersey on motorbikes pulled over and offered to give us a ride the rest of the way (which only turned out to be 10 minutes by bike). But it was awful. After a whole day of slowly and quietly noticing every step I took and everything that was around me and feeling at total peace with myself and the environment, being on the bike was unbearably loud and intrusive and conquering and completely missed everything. You couldn’t see anything because you had to look out for potholes and horses (the boy driving me was an inch away from hitting a mother and colt and almost crashing us) and there was constantly wind blowing in your eyes and you had to drive on the road so they missed all of the neat things that we saw by walking on the coast and actually being able to stop and look at everything. But they were mostly there to surf so I guess they didn’t care. I don’t know who goes to Easter Island to surf, but whatever. We wouldn’t have been able to make it without them, although finally getting to Tongariki (where 15 Moai are lined up together in front of the ocean) in such a way was kind of a let down. So Jenna and I decided to walk back down the road to where we couldn’t see them and walk back up and pretend that we were just getting there for the first time but along the way we ran into a family and some people having a fish barbeque in a cave and they invited us to have piscolas with them and hang out. (and it turned out that one was a park ranger in Rano Raraku who we saw the next day and another worked in the airport and we saw her again too in town and when we were leaving. It was fun to feel like I knew people). So we spent the night in the cave but we didn’t have sleeping pads and sleeping on rock is kind of difficult so I hardly slept at all even though we went to bed at 8 as soon as it got dark. Then we almost woke up at sunrise but not quite and went to Rano Raraku which is a giant crater of a volcano which is where the Moai were carved from. They were littered all over the outside of the crater and some of the rock sides of the cliff were full of parts that were half carved out and abandoned (possibly because they ran out of trees to carry them with?). Somehow embarrassingly we missed the giant moai that is 20 meters tall. I don’t understand how we missed something that was 20 meters tall but we could never find it even though it was supposedly right there in the exact place we were. Very mysterious. We also walked all around the inside of the crater and had a guava feast next to a few moai which was pretty funny. Then we walked halfway across the island to get to the beach Anakena and got picked up by some Chilean tourists for the rest of the way. Going in car still felt weird and missed a lot but it was a ton better than motorbike. That was really funny too because they were tourists so they were stopping to see all the sights along the way so we obviously stopped too and got out and visited the places with them as if we were part of their family. We got to Anakena and it was a perfect white (or actually pink from the coral) sand beach with crystal clear turquoise water and little blue and silver fish swimming everywhere along with palm trees and more moai. But it was kind of windy and drizzly and we were too exhausted to try to find another place to camp so we got a ride back from a really nice Rapa Nui couple who had been out fishing for the day and were so obviously in love with each other that we couldn’t help smiling for the whole ride. Then by chance we ran into Napo in the street who was shocked to see us since we were back a day early but he came home and we all cooked dinner together and he drove us around and picked us fresh fruit: pineapple, papaya, avocado, strawberries, lemons, the most delicious bananas, and nispero which really should just be called divine heaven fruit because they are so delicious, like a ripe juicy apricot multiplied by a million degrees of deliciousness. The fact that we could live for free on fruit, get around for free because everybody gave rides to everybody, camp for free or live with nice people who offered their houses for free, and spend only about $40 total instead of the $40 a day estimated by the guidebooks was almost the best part of being there. Well obviously not the best, but it made me feel competent. And after talking with Napo a lot I realized I didn’t even have to feel guilty about not putting money into the primarily tourist economy since Rapa Nuis don’t hoard money in the same way there and generally work as much as they need to be comfortable, fish and grow a lot of their own vegetables and fruits and make enough off of all the other tourists for it not to be a big deal. Hmmm….We did a lot of other things but I kind of forget what right now. We went to the Southern part of the island to Rano Kao and made friends with the park rangers who let us hike down to the bottom where there were supposed to be lots of fruit. We thought everybody was pulling our legs because they said there was a whole forest at the bottom with avocados and oranges and grapes and trees that were 20 meters tall but from above it looked like rock cliffs and maybe a few bushes. But sure enough we made it down and were engulfed in a humid forest. We couldn’t find the avocados, which was too bad since we had brought crackers and were hoping to be able to eat lunch there, but we found some nispero and coffee plants and more guava. Raw coffee fruit is actually pretty good, kind of like tangy milk. But then we got worried that they weren’t really coffee plants and they were poisonous and it started to get dark and we heard lots of noises and saw the dead kitten and started to freak out so we abandoned the avocado search and left. Then we were walking home and saw Napo driving with somebody else in his truck and got worried that maybe he had a woman back at the house and it would be awkward if we went back there to sleep in the cabana again but it was all in our heads and he invited us in and we all made rice pudding together. Bizarre. I guess we just hung out in Hanga Roa (the city) for the rest of the time. It was a really neat place. And there were nasturtiums everywhere to feast on. They are one of my favorite flavors in the world. Oh, and there was a super pregnant cat who wasn’t Napo’s but for some reason hung out only in his house (along with 5 roosters and chicks that also weren’t his) who he hated but we loved and every night after he went to bed we snuck into his refrigerator and gave her all of his leftovers. And then she gave birth to 5 kittens!!!!!! They were so little they weren’t even cute yet. It was amazing. And Jenna had a really crazy allergic reaction to something when we were hiking and the whole bottoms of her legs turned bright red like a rash or inflammation. We spent half of Wednesday at the hospital with this funny American kid named Robert who also was living at Napo’s and Jenna had to have a cortisone shot and has been taking benadryl twice a day since then but it’s still not gone. And I have a weird skin discoloration all over my arms too but not from Easter Island. Ok, enough. That took me about 3 hours to write. the end.