Easter Island—Finally!

Imagine this: in the middle of a cool, Chilean night, a silvery plane pierced the sky. Four hundred feet from a peculiarly-shaped bush, a llama stared at the plane, its eyes blank of emotion. It had seen these entities before, but knew not what they meant—those silver birds that were unforgiving in their paths.


Gretchen and I had a wonderful time in the Atacama, but unfortunately, we had to leave for our next destination, Easter Island. We had booked an early morning plane, hoping to arrive on the island and explore its renowned beaches before it got too chilly. At the airport, we were met with quite a pleasant surprise!

I apologize for the weird picture-ness. I got lazy and simply copied/pasted. For future pictures, I will actually redraw the people so they fit the background better. Or I'll just post pictures cause I'm lazy. Also, look, Air Canada!

Tea came! She bore news that Bruney would also be coming along on our next destination (after Santiago) since I still need to draw her as well to—drum-roll as I whip out random.org's random coordinates generator—Japan! Wow. That would be quite a huge leap from Chile. (Any suggestions to not go to Japan will be considered. That was just a random pick.)

Nonetheless, Tea said she would be coming to Easter Island with us! So we changed our boarding passes so we could sit next to each other (in a row, yay!), and excitedly got on the plane. Well, the plane part was boring, so I won't talk much about it. I did manage to fiddle around on my laptop for a while, and I've managed to memorize a few basic UNIX commands thanks to unixkcd. (Who knew "kill" meant transporting a terminator to 1984?)

Anyway. We got off the plane in the afternoon, before sunset. This really nice guy, Mark, from one of the guest houses on the island, came up to us and asked if we needed a place to stay. We said we were looking for a hotel, and he offered to drive us there. Now, before you get all suspicious about why a perfect stranger would offer to give us a ride in his car to some presumably unknown destination, this is apparently the norm among Easter Island guest hotel guides. So we hopped into his car and arrived at our hotel a short while later.

Here's a picture of our beautiful place that we will be staying in:

Mark told us that the food in "downtown" Hanga Roa, the only major town on the island and where we were right now, was pretty good, and that we should try some of it out—of course, after we go to the beach and check out the gorgeous sunset. I was really excited, because I love, love, love sunsets. They're top on my list of things I love, along with shiny things and sparkly erasers (although Jack says that the blood-red sunset in the mountains are the most beautiful things ever, drawn from his experience living in central Minnesota).

So, of course, we had to pay a visit to the Hanga Roa port. Isn't it coincidental that Hanga Roa faces west, perfect for a sunset? Or maybe it faces west just for the sunset? I guess it's just like the chicken and the egg—we'll never know for sure.

After the sunset, which was absolutely magnificent, I declared that I was hungry, and so we decided to find something good to eat. The most famous restaurant on the island had to be Te Moana, but we had to reserve early to get seats, and in my haste and tiredness, I had completely forgotten to do so. La Taverne du Pêcheur is another good restaurant that specializes in seafood, but it's really expensive. Granted, we had an unlimited budget because I say so and I am omnipotent in this trip, so we decided we would go there last, to treat ourselves to some "gourmet" food.

Mark had told us that there were some places around town that sold cheap empanadas, and so we went around town in searching for such a place. Well, we found one, right next to a market, and those empanadas were really delicious! We were going to take a picture of one of us eating an empanada, but decided we would just share a picture of the actual thing instead.

We went back to the hotel early that night, and woke up really early the next morning (at 6:30, which is very early for me unless I had to go to school, which effectively does not exist right now). Next on our agenda: the Moai!

For those who have not been privy to the Easter Island culture, Moai are those stone face-statues scattered around Easter Island that were used to commemorate the deceased. They are placed upon stands called Ahu, and we should not step on the Ahu because that would be disrespectful towards the dead.

Most of the Moai sites around the island are free to visit, so we rented a Jeep and drove around the island along the major road, oohing and ahhing over all of the Moai. We stopped at a few of them, including the most famous Ahu Tongariki and Ahu Akivi. We reached Ahu Tongariki in the morning, and had a brunch of pescado a la parrilla (I'm sure there are accents somewhere, but since I am not familiar with Spanish, I am not sure where—also, this is grilled fish) and bread prepared by the wonderful cooking staff at the hotel.

When we were about to leave, a crowd of other tourists had arrived, preparing to eat lunch at this famed location. Good thing we were early! We (mostly Tea, who is the only one here who can drive right now) drove on in the Jeep, often staring at the ocean and its glimmering prettiness. By the time we got back to Hanga Roa, it was already late afternoon, and we were starving! I found some leftover tortilla de rescoldo in my backpack (back from Atacama), so we munched on some of that with the pebre, a sauce made with coriander, onions, olive oil, garlic, and ground peppers. It was delicious (I should find a synonym for "delicious"), but not nearly satisfying enough. So of course, we went to another restaurant and had some chanfaina (see below), this traditional soup of beef or lamb with a bunch of other things added to it. I wasn't too big on the blood, but I liked the potatoes. I like potatoes a lot.

We went back to the hotel and caught up on some rest and reading about all the things that happened to our friends back at home. I was really sleepy (since I had woken up so early), so I fell asleep first, and I have no idea what Gretchie or Tea did afterwards. But we woke up pretty early the next day, this time to go to Rano Raraku!

Rano Raraku is a crater volcano, but it's famous because most of those Moai—those things we saw the day before?—were carved from this mountain. Of course, there are tons of half-completed Moai lying around. I don't really know why.

It took us most of the day to climb up the volcano and see the crater and the island all around us and then to climb down again. Some girl who was just climbing down from the crater as we were climbing up complimented our ponchos. She was wearing a really pretty chamanto as well. Anyway, here's a picture at the top:

We had some really good ave pimienta (diced chicken meat sandwich with red peppers) for lunch, and we got back down, we had some pastel de choclo, which is similar to a shepherd's pie. You can tell that I am a huge food fan. Chilean food is absolutely mouth-watering, and I can't believe I've been missing out on so many wonderful dishes all my life.

The next day was planned to be a day of relaxation. We woke up reasonably early (at 7:30, an hour later), and went down to Anakena, which is renowned for its white sand beaches. The water was chilly at this hour, so we just sunbathed on the beach and watched some guys surf. One of the guys kept falling into the water, despite the other guys trying to help him.

After a few hours of nice relaxation on the beach, we went over to Motu Nui, where we picked up the snorkeling gear Mark had reserved for us earlier. I had never been snorkeling before, and I was kind of scared at first, but it was really fun once I got used to the whole thing.

Tea caught a lion-fish in her hands by accident, and after she let it go it would not leave her alone. It was so adorable! Which reminds me, we (Gretch and I) still have to ship Owen his alpaca, but I suppose that can wait for a while.

After a whole day around water, what better place to dine for the evening but the famed seafood place, La Taverne du Pêcheur? After all, I had promised we would come back here on our last day, and we would be departing the next day. So we all indulged ourselves with seafood. Tea ordered the ostiones a la parmesena, scallops with melted butter and grilled Parmesan cheese. Gretchie ordered the congrio frito, deep-fried conger eel, and I ordered the machas a la parmesena, similar to Tea's except mine were clams.

Here are the pictures of our dishes, respectively:

Sadly, we had to leave early next morning to go back to Santiago (without even a chance to visit Rano Kau, which supposedly had a beautiful view). Well, it was certainly a fun time in Easter Island, especially with Mark and the hotel crew, and none of us could wait for the next destination!

Santiago, here we come—hasta luego! Or until whenever the next update comes, which could be a very, very long time away.


OOH*:

As I was walking into my US class today, I realized that I forgot to add a "works cited" to the end of my paper. So I told my US teacher I would hand her a new copy during lunch. I had gym/health right before lunch, and so when I walked out of class to go to the library, I saw Vincent, who was walking the opposite way to go to gym.

"Hey," I waved.

"Hi," Vincent said. "Oh, I have to ask you something."

"Okay, what is it?"

"I know you're not going, but, if you were, would you have gone to prom with me?"

Oh, uh. "Yeah, I would."

"Oh, okay."

"Are you going?" I asked him.

"No, it's right before AP week."

"Oh, right."

The two APs he's taking are in the second week, which was the same problem I have with my chem test. I have no idea who planned prom to be on May 8th, but it makes no sense at all. Unless you're not taking any APs, but I have a feeling a decent percentage the grade is taking some sort of AP test (there are so many of them, after all), so it still makes no sense. At all.

But enough of me ranting.

(I have also noticed that Vincent's hugging period is progressively growing. And to think all of this began with Amanda's hugging spree back when he was reluctant to hug people. Ahh. Life's unpredictable like that.)

*For abbreviation clarifications, see earlier posts relating to the round-the-world trip.

P.S.: All names mentioned in the trip that are not Gretchen, Tea, Bruney, or me are made up by me and have no basis in real life or those mentioned in the nickname spreadsheet or I was too lazy to add them in and stuff. Most of them won't be mentioned again, so I just made stuff up.

P.P.S.: Some of the pictures do not correspond with geographical location, most notably the ones that don't show specific geographical identities. Don't be confused if you see a similar picture elsewhere. Also, none of the pictures really belong to me, except those little people at the top. I would cite sources like I did last time, but it's a long and hard process and I'll probably do it later. For now, everything's just from Google Images, and they're even all from the first page with my keywords.