Subtitled
"
Going Boldly Where No (Wo)Man Had Gone Before"
As some of you may recall, a while ago I was asking and searching on various forums for anyone who had ridden Easter Island, further extensive research which mainly included asking down at the pub still hadn't produced any yes answers so I set off into the unknown, which to be honest is how most of my trips start, and certainly my first one which was pre-Internet (I was a slow IT starter!).
Naturally I went, and here are my two-wheeled tales of travel in Rapa Nui.
I had finished leading a group through northern Chile, Bolivia and Peru and was at a loose end in Santaigo, the capital of Chile. I found myself looking out across the Pacific Ocean, on the far side of this vast body of water is New Zealand and Australia but somewhere in between is a tiny pinprick of land - Rapa Nui (Easter Island) a volcanic island which is the most remote place inhabited by people on the planet.
The call of a remote place is just too irresistible for me and I found myself on a plane flying out over the Pacific in the hope that I'd find a motorbike of some sort that I could ride and explore this smudge of a place.
It's about a six hour flight from Chile, endless hours of ocean and then suddenly the island appears.
yep - volcanic with a rocky and rugged coastline.
The island is about 64 square miles, and has a total population of about 5,000 people, most of whom are Rapa Nui - original Polynesian inhabitants. The island is the most far-flung of the Polynesian group which stretches west to New Zealand and as far north as Hawaii.
The island is called Rapa Nui as is the language and the people who have been here for over 2000 years.
We call it Easter Island because it was Easter Sunday that a European first arrived here - he obviously wasn't the most imaginative of people. For hundreds of years it remained very isolated - and we're talking VERY isolated, just one ship a year used to call in with post and supplies. This was until the 1960s when the US was looking around for escape routes for the Space Shuttle. They spotted this remote island in the middle of the ocean and built a large runway - which they never used.
So from having outsiders arrive just once a year by boat the island now has almost daily flights to the mainland thousands of miles away.
I was met by Elias, my couch-surfing host, who had turned up on his scooter
He presented me with a lei (flower garland), a traditional way of greeting visitors and guests. We actually didn't travel from the airport on the scooter as I had a big bag and there were also two other people on my
flight who were being hosted by him so we bundled into a taxi and headed to his house.
Walking from his house down to the coast, I immediately see my first Moai
The giant stone heads which Rapa Nui is famous for, there are hundreds of them dotted around the island.