Rapa Nui

Flying to Easter Island

The flight from Papeete to Easter Island took about 5h.  The LAN Chile 767 Business Class seats were like the old Air New Zealand First Class ones.  It had good pitch and seemed very wide.  I had a good but short sleep.  Two snack/breakfast services were offered for the flight.  Neither were very good but it is hard to excel on a short flight like this in the middle of the night.  We landed at Easter Island or Rapa Nui at 1045, on-time.

First glimpse of Easter Island from the air.

Coming in to land at Easter Island.

We were picked up by our hotel, the Vai Moana Cabanas.  Rodger hadn’t booked his accommodation and they assured us that it wouldn’t be a problem.

At the hotel, we had to wait as there was a group ahead of us.  There wasn’t a separate room for Rodger, so the choice was to share with us in a room larger than we had booked (with a small surcharge) or he goes to a nearby sister hotel.  We opted for the former, and were accommodated in a room with a double and single bed.

Initial Exploration

We walked into town and took lunch at Cafe Ra’a run by a German woman.  Everything seemed expensive, but we are in the middle of the Pacific where most things have to be flown/shipped in.  And it is a somewhat touristy place.  We realised later that some places are more expensive but not as good.

We walked back via the Ahu Tahai where there was a small group of moais (Easter Island rock faces).  As these were our first moais, we were somewhat excited and took more photos than they deserved (not that we realised till tomorrow).

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From there we continued to the museum by foot.  There were very good information boards at the museum but few artifacts.  I guess the artifacts were largely in-situ on the ground around the island.

I learnt that the Rapa Nui people have their own writing system known as Rongorongo which is ideograph-based.  It is perculiar in that it wraps around in a different direction each time one gets to the next line.  [Edit:  I didn’t quite get the full workings of this until many years later when I looked up Wikipedia:  ]

Rongorongo glyphs were written in reverse boustrophedon, left to right and bottom to top. That is, the reader begins at the bottom left-hand corner of a tablet, reads a line from left to right, then rotates the tablet 180 degrees to continue on the next line. When reading one line, the lines above and below it would appear upside down, as can be seen in the image at left.

We returned to our room for a rest.  Rodger fell asleep.  Kim and I went to town to get a rental car and ended up with a Daihatsu Terios for two days, priced at USD100.

Dinner

We returned by car to collect Rodger for dinner.  We ate at a place by the coast with somewhat of a Greek feel.  Kim and shared our meals as usual, having a nice seafood on pasta with black squid ink, plus a chicken Caesar.  Kim was a little put-off by the latter, claiming that it had a blue-cheese flavour which I couldn’t detect.

Over dinner, Rodger blurted out that we should pay for dinner because we flew Business Class.  It was an odd comment.  It’s not like we received complimentary upgrades but had paid for the tickets with our points.   I’ll put it down to not having had much sleep sitting in Economy Class.