roganjosh

I´d heard so many stories about muggings, robberies and hijackings in South America that I arrived expecting to be scammed or robbed waiting for my bag to turn up at the airport. Instead Chile has been such a fantastically laid back introduction to South America that the only time I felt in any danger was when the riot police used tear gas to break up a teacher´s demonstration and I got caught down wind of it. Tears and choking aside Santiago was great, all beautiful sunshine and faded colonial buildings. Me and my Easter Island buddy Sarah decided to get acclimatised as soon as possible by joining in a wine tasting session at our hostel, which gave us an invaluable insight into how good very, very cheap wine can be! Red wine was a frequent feature of the trip from then on, along with pisco sours – pisco being another grape derived booze that originated in Chile (or Peru, depending on who you talk to). Myself, Sarah and Sanne (another Easter Island escapee) travelled up to Valparaiso after Santiago, where there were more teachers´demonstrations, and more piscos! Our host at the hostel, Pedro, introduced us to a drink called an earthquake – pisco, orange juice and icecream! pretty good, although judging by everyone else the next morning I´m glad I only had two of them…

Chile is such a thin country that the journey up to Peru is basically a straight line, so after Sarah had left on a 28 hour bus journey to Beunos Aires, the rest of us in the hostel that were going up became travel buddies for the next couple of days. Steve and Jeff joined myself and Sanne travelling up first to La Serena to see the Pisco Elqui valley and sample some piscos, and then up to the Atacama desert to enjoy some scorching hot days and freezing cold nights. We met a guy called Pablo walking along the tiny high street in San Pedro de Atacama, who directed us to our hostel and then became our tour guide for the next couple of days. We knew we´d made a good decision when he started into his first can of escudo at our first stop on the first day! Him and his driver Eduardo were our entertainment after that, but the desert was pretty cool too. Our tour largely consisted of driving somewhere very remote and then jumping into some body of water, be it a salt lagoon, a freezing cold pool (to wash off the salt) or a thermal pool during the cold of the early morning. For me driving around the mountains and canyons of the Atacama was a highlight. The whole place could be a backdrop for an old John Wayne movie, except for the occasional herds of llamas that you pass. After each day of touring we´d spend the nights huddled around the fire at our hostel drinking red wine, which also had to be warmed on the fire to keep it drinkably warm! Man it was cold!

Sanne left us in the desert for her 20 hour bus journey back to Santiago, and myself and the guys have been hopping buses for the last couple of days, from the desert to Iquique in northern Chile, and then on to Tacna in Peru via taxi before another long bus journey to Arequipa, where we´re trying to get our heads around Peru. So far it seems a bit more confusing than Chile, but I think we´ve gotten the hang of crossing the roads that are teeming with taxis now. Next stop, Nazca!

I knew when I booked my flight to Easter Island that May was meant to be the wettest month but I was still a bit surprised when my flight had to circle the runway waiting for a break in the heaviest of the rain for us to land. I even had a brief moment of worry that we might have to be diverted to the nearest other airport… three and a half thousand km away in Santiago! We landed safely in pouring rain though, to a landscape of rolling green hills, palm trees and megalithic statues. I headed out into the rain once I´d recovered from the flight to get my first proper glimpse of the statues in the only town there is, Hanga Roa. I´ve spent so much time in the past messing around with photos of the statues to make daft pictures that meeting them for the first time was like running into old friends. The statues are amazing, and once you start looking around the island you realise that they are everywhere. Most of them were toppled by the locals around about the time that Europeans first started visting the island, but quite a few of the major sites have been restored now. Walking towards the Moai from a distance it´s hard to get a sense of scale, and it´s only when you´re trying to take a photograph and someone wanders into your shot that you realise just how massive these things are! The tallest that ever stood was over 9m tall, and construction began on one that would have stood over 20m tall!

One of the best places to explore the statues is in the quarry of Rano Raraku where the statues were carved. Around the base of the volcanic crater the giant heads of the statues peer out of the ground, the pits they were standing in either filled in by landslide, or by people trying to protect them. Here the statues would have been completed, and you get to see the newest statues that were left unfinished when the production of Moai ended. That it was possible to move the statues around to carve them at all is mind boggling, but to then stare out across the hilly landscape and imagine the Moai being transported across paved roads is almost unbelievable. It´s also interesting that the newest statues are in the style that you normally think of when it comes to the Easter Island statues; elongated faces, chiselled chins and thoughtful expression, but there are huge differences between those and the earliest statues, which tended to be smaller and less extravagantly stylised, or quite squat and rounded. Some of the older statues have actually been found broken up inside the base of their replacements, so it´s hardly surprising that the more modern statues are the ones that people have seen.

The more you see of the civilisation that created and then abandoned the statues the more questions you have, but unfortunately it´s unlikely that any of those questions will ever really be answered. The population of Easter Island has variously been decimated by the collapse of their environment, by slave raids and then by the introduction of diseases when a handful of the slaves were returned to their home. That any of the legends survived at all is quite impressive! Statues aside the island itself is stunning. The green hills, and unpredictable weather start to fool you into thinking this is just like going on holiday in Ireland, until you drive around a corner and suddenly find a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by palm trees, or walk up a hill to come across the most amazing volcanic crater at Orongo, containing a lake covered in reeds so dense a horse can ride across them! Perhaps even more unexpected is that there are even two discos in the town, that don´t even start to get going till 3am on a Thursday! I had one too many piscolas that evening, but luckily the rain the next day gave me a reasonable excuse to lounge around at the hostel all day…

Before the visit I was so excited about going to the island that I tried to not get my hopes up too much in case I ended up disappointed, but in the end I loved it! The statues were everything I was expecting them to be, but the island itself was nothing like I imagined. That the little town of Hanga Roa is still recognisably a place that people live in, rather than just another stop on a tourist trail is incredible when you think that the 4,000 locals host 60,000 tourists every year! Even the weather was amazing. Sure it could rain for hours at a time, and it could even turn from bright sunshine to a downpour in the drop of hat, but I had more good days than bad, and some days were scorching! Maybe May isn´t the month when you´re supposed to visit either but I was lucky enough to catch the local school´s fundraising show, where the dance troups showed off their acts, and to visit the museum on the day when they opened up the basement storerooms and gave a tour (albeit, in Spanish) of the items you don´t normally get to see. I´d always thought that a visit to Easter Island would be a once in a lifetime thing, but man, I´d love to go back and spend a few more hours looking at a line of Moai as the sun sets behind them.