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Northern Easter Island tour

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11 April 2019

 

Easter Island

Chile

 

27°07'S
109°20'W

0 - 95m ASL

 

Google Maps Link

 

   

WELL THIS morning I'm doing a full day trip around the island. Here's a really spectacular place with fifteen moai apparently all on display facing west. It's probably the south western side of the island here. It's a little bit exposed but these are absolutely massive. I'm going to get some really good pictures here. Over here is the centre of the volcano.

Well I'm up on the volcano where the moai were made. As you can see, we've got some pretty spectacular ones right here sitting in the ground pretty close to where they were excavated. A bit further up the hill there are some that were still in the process of being carved and have just been left there. So, this is a pretty amazing spot here up on the hill. I'll take you through. Obviously, the sun is kind of in the wrong direction at the moment. These carved pieces of volcanic rock are quite mysterious sticking out of the volcano here. There's actually quite a lot of people here which explains why there are one or two flights from Santiago every day. I'm now just looking back towards the town which is over those distant hills, and over the vast Pacific Ocean.

I'm still walking through the field of moai carved into the volcanic rock. These ones are really amazing just the way they are standing there forever looking out over the ocean and the sky. It's quite a spectacular thing to behold. Usually mountains have some pretty amazing stuff happening but these moai really just take it off.

I'm now exploring what used to be the remains of an old village. There's a couple of moai, one over there and a few over in that direction. This is along the north coast and I think this is the most spectacular beach on the whole island. As you can see it's got sand on it looks pretty popular as well. I'm just exploring this area looking at the northern sites now. We've been to quite a few sites today. I'm only showing a couple of them on the video but the old camera's got lot of shots. The photography here's been pretty amazing.

Being in the subtropics at about the same latitude as I am at home, I've just tried out the water and it's nice and comfortably warm at somewhere in the mid to high twenties. It is certainly a whole lot warmer than it had been down in Antarctica and Ushuaia and Patagonia areas. It's nice being back in the subtropical environment again. The water is nice and warm which keeps the air temperature warm. We had an overnight low of 20 degrees last night which is absolutely fantastic. I've had several weeks where even the daytime temperature didn't reach 20 degrees. So, it's nice being in a subtropical area where it is staying above 20 degrees even at night.

Well I'm exploring more of the village here (at the same beach) and have found out that this area here is actually the very first settlement of the Easter Island Rapanui culture that was settled here around 1200 years ago. That's a fair time ago. At the time they first arrived the entire island was covered in forest. As they settled, they started clearing some of the forest to make way for their village and to use the resources. Over a number of years, they cleared the entire island of forest. There's none of the original forest left. These trees here and all the coconut palms were all introduced here much later with European settlement. The original inhabitants cleared all the forest. When they ran out of forest their culture seriously declined. It's interesting the only remaining big settlement here at the main town is at the far side of the island. So perhaps that marks where the last of the original settlement (and clearing) was. It's almost a microcosm of what's happening around the entire world at the moment with all the deforestation and clearing and everything. This reminds me of what's going to happen when we run out of all our resources. This is a very interesting island to explore.

 
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