Gone but not forgotten

The itinerary of our third day on Easter Island was focused on the island's most globally recognised locations including the enigmatic Rano Raraku and the iconic Ahu Tongariki. It's fair to say that Garry loved every moment of it. The tour also featured a few additional, less well-known, highlights that were special for me. 

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I first visited Rapa Nui in November 1998. I spent 2.5 days on the island and got to see its most popular sights. However, I missed several locations including the lava tube caves at Ana Te Pahu and abandoned quarry at Puna Pau. I got to see both during this second visit.

Puna Pau supplied the crowning "topknot" or pukao stones that adorn the island's moai. Each pukao is carved from red scoria stone, a soft volcanic rock. While intuitively, these stones look like a hat for the moai, they were in fact carved to represent how men once tied their long hair in a topknot bun. These days the quarry is little more than a grassy depression on a hill overlooking Hanga Roa township. However, its original purpose is still clear thanks to more than a dozen decaying pukao scattered around its rim and within its grassy bowl.

Our next stop was Ahu Akivi, an ahu platform located further inland than most of the others on the island. It was our first real taste of the majesty of Rapa Nui's moai culture. This 38-metre-long platform, restored in 1960, has seven moai statues, all of a similar height, around four metres tall.  

Unusually, the statues look towards the sea. Elsewhere on the island, the moai traditionally face inland. According to oral tradition, these seven figures represent seven explorers who surveyed the island for King Hotu Matua, before it was formally settled.

We then visited nearby Ana Te Pahu, a lava tube formed thousands of years ago. This shallow cave system includes sections open to the air. These grassy hollows were repurposed by previous generations as sheltered micro-climate greenhouses. The main cave entrance includes remnants of their ancient field walls and a lush banana tree plantation. It’s said the cave system extends for almost 7 km. However, we walked less than a hundred metres into the gloom.

Our tour then headed for Rano Raraku, the volcanic hillside quarry where all of the island's moai were crafted. It's impossible to fathom how remarkable the moai culture is until you visit this site. The volcano's eastern rim was home to a bustling quarry where more than one thousand giant statues were carved and transported up to 18 km across the island, all without modern tools and transportation.

When I first visited in 1999, tourists were free to wander among its remains without restriction. I recall we even climbed onto one of the incomplete, partially carved statues resting in the quarry. I'm pleased to say that sealed paths have now been introduced, and tourists are forbidden to venture from them at any time. However, you can still wander freely along the shore of the reed-lined lake that fills the volcano's crater.

Rano Raraku is a fascinating place. Towards the top of the quarry site, you encounter large, empty spaces in the rock wall. These are the remaining shells from which moai have been carved, extracted, and moved away. Surprisingly, not all of the statues have been carried away. Two unfinished statues are visible within the quarry site, each still attached to the mountain.

The guided path then takes you past Te Tokonga, the largest statue ever built. This monster made by an optimistic group of carvers has a height of 21.75 meters and an estimated weight of 200 tons. It was never finished. When it was abandoned, the carvers were still working on carving trenches along its sides to detach it from the surrounding rock face. It's unclear whether this statue was abandoned because the Moai era ended or because the workers simply thought it would be too hard to transport.

However, Rano Raraku's most iconic sight is its "forest" of partially buried moai. These giant heads protrude from the ground, awaiting transportation that ultimately never came. The islanders originally buried them as part of their non-mechanical erection process.

Once detached from the volcano's elevated rock face, each statue was slid down the hill onto the soil-filled lower slopes of Rano Raraku. Here, a great pit was dug. As the statue reached its designated pit, gravity was used to tilt it until it was fully erected. The moai was then transported in a vertical position across the island to its final resting place.

Our final stop before lunch was Ahu Tongariki. Without a doubt, this sight is one of the most enduring and instantly recognisable images of Easter Island. Ahu Tongariki is the biggest stone ahu on the island. It consists of 15 moai statues, including the island's tallest and heaviest moai. Ahu Tongariki is located on the east side of Rapa Nui, about 1km away from Rano Raraku.

This impressive ahu was restored in the 1990s, funded by a $2 million donation from the Government of Japan and the donation of a crane by Tadano, a Japanese crane company. Its tallest moai, measuring 9 metres, is also the heaviest statue successfully transported and placed on an ahu anywhere on the island. Its weight of 86 tons was verified by the crane used in the platform's restoration.

The remainder of our day was spent visiting what I'd consider some of Rapa Nui's more kitsch sights. This included the navel of the world, Anakena Beach, and Ahu Nau-Nau. The navel, or Te Pito o te Henua, sits just above the high tide mark on the island's west coast. It consists of a large stone sphere, framed by four smaller spheres and encircled by a low rock wall. 

Archeologists believe it is a symbolic navel, denoting the island's location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I must admit that despite seeing it twice, I still struggle to believe these seamless spheres really are an ancient structure rather than some more recently installed kitsch tourist attraction.

Anakena is the island's only real sand beach. Tour guides always take you here. Someone, somewhere, at some point in time, has clearly convinced the local tour operators that all tourists want to swim. I suspect it's a tradition encouraged by backpackers over the years. However, aside from a small plantation of shady palm trees, the beach does have two other redeeming attributes - a pair of ahu platforms.  

The first of these is Ahu Nau-Nau which has seven restored moai statues, two of which are broken. The platform sits just above the sand line making for an interesting juxtaposition with the beach's modern palm plantation, picnic tables, and body-surfing tourists.

The second platform, called Ahu Ature Huke, contains one forlorn moai. This lonely figure is the first moai statue ever to be restored and raised. Its restoration was undertaken by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl in 1956. He successfully raised the moai using only rocks, logs, and rope. The logs were used as levers to lift the statue and rocks were put underneath, raising the statue little by little.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of Ahu Ature Huke. However, I did capture an image of Ahu Te Pito Kura while on our way to Anakena. This is the resting place for the island's largest successfully transported moai configuration, i.e. it's the largest if you include its pukao topknot stone in the final calculation. The pukao alone reputably weighs 12 tons and is the largest of its kind successfully relocated and erected anywhere on Rapa Nui.

The following morning we caught a flight back to the mainland arriving shortly before 7:00pm. I booked us into the nearby Sheraton using loyalty points, ready for another early morning departure at 7:15am to Calama and the next sector of our Chilean adventure.

Isle de Pascua

Garry and I are back in Santiago this evening after an inspiring two and a half days on Easter Island (known to the Chileans as Isle de Pascua). The weather was warm and sunny much of the time making our daily excursions all the more enjoyable. I'll post more details shortly, but here are a couple of photos from our time on the island. Tomorrow morning we fly north to Calama to join a four-day tour of the Atacama Desert.

UPDATE
I've now expanded this post to include more about our time on Easter Island. Scroll down and enjoy!

Where do I begin?  Our unexpected stranding in Antarctica threw a spanner in the works for the next leg of our Chilean tour. We'd originally booked three nights in Santiago, followed by three nights on Easter Island. As I've shared in earlier posts, I managed to salvage our itinerary by rescheduling flights to Easter Island two days later than planned and rebooking a room in the same hotel. 

Our luck continued when we landed on Easter Island. We ran into the local guide we’d originally booked for tours around the island. She was collecting another couple from our flight. Upon hearing of our polar plight, she renewed our original tour itinerary at no additional cost. Even better, she gave us a ride to our hotel and confirmed a pickup for the following day.

This left us out of pocket for just the rebooked hotel room. However, shortly after returning to Sydney, the UK travel agent who’d processed our room booking made contact. She’d heard we never checked in. I duly shared our stranding and rebooking experience. To my surprise, the agent contacted the hotel and secured a refund for our duplicate booking.

How remarkable is that?  We’d arrived on Easter Island on 2 January, convinced we'd blown our money on a series of "no-shows". In the end, the entire sector was rescheduled at no additional cost. Although, despite the eleventh-hour reprieve, we came perilously close to losing it all a second time. 

Our rescheduled flight to Easter Island departed early morning. Hence, we sensibly booked ourselves into the Airport Holiday Inn directly opposite the airport terminal. However, after an exhausting day flying from the South Shetland Islands and onwards to Santiago, I forgot to set my alarm. We woke the following morning, 40 minutes before our flight closed. 

A quick flurry of activity saw us present ourselves at the LAN Chile counter with minutes to spare. The check-in hall was all but empty, with barely a person in sight. The staff behind the desk looked at us long and hard, examined our tickets, and then huddled among themselves before eventually checking us in.

Our first afternoon on Easter Island was spent exploring the township of Ranga Hoa. This is the only permanently inhabited settlement on Rapa Nui (the islander's native name for Easter Island). We walked as far as a small cove that provides the island's only sheltered port. It was here we caught a glimpse of our first moai statue, Ahu Hotake, standing guard over the harbour's entrance.

The following morning, we spent a half day touring sights along the island’s southern coast. This included the Orongo ceremonial village and Ahu Vinapu. Surprisingly, neither has anything to do with the island's iconic carved stone heads. Instead, like most visitors, we were intrigued to learn that Rapa Nui, despite its compact size and remote location, is home to more than one awe-inspiring ancestral culture.

Orongo sits on the southernmost cliff tops of Easter Island overlooking the flooded volcanic crater of Rano Kau. Here, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the island's unique birdman culture flourished. Youths would compete in a ritual each spring to secure the season's first Sooty Tern egg. These birds nest annually on a small pinnacle of rock several hundred metres offshore.

Securing the egg required scrambling down a near-vertical cliff, swimming through heavy ocean swells, climbing the jagged pinnacle, and finally returning to the top of the cliff. Whichever returned first with their egg intact was crowned ceremonial chief for another year.

The night before the big event, these young men spent the night resting in a series of low-profile stone huts built along the cliff top. In reality, these huts are little more than open-faced rock shelters with a compressed mud floor and an internal ceiling no higher than a dog kennel. Our guide let us crawl in and carefully explore one of the preserved hut’s cramped confines. 

A most remarkable view lies just beyond the stone huts. In one direction, the ground slopes towards spectacular sea cliffs. In the opposite direction, the broad volcanic rim of Rano Kau towers over a permanent crater lake. The crater is almost two kilometres wide and unlike much of the island, it's a green oasis of plant life. I've visited this location on two separate occasions. However, I still marvel at the weed-covered waters sitting on the crater floor more than a hundred metres below.

The next stop on our tour was Ahu Vinapu. This extraordinary stone platform sits on a slope beyond the eastern threshold of the airport runway. The craftsmanship displayed in the assembly of its stonework is unique on the island. The precision and style are almost identical to those seen in the likes of Cusco, more than 3000km to the east. Researchers are divided as to whether this platform proves that the islanders were influenced by Incan culture.

Our next stop was Ahu Akahanga. This is one of the island's largest unrestored ceremonial platforms. The platform is 18 meters in length and once supported a total of 13 moai varying between five and seven metres in height.  All these statues have long since been toppled.  

However, in most destroyed platforms, the statues lie face down with their iconic features hidden from view. The opposite is true at Ahu Akahanga. Its moai were knocked down, lying both face-up and face-down. It's awe-inspiring to see these stone giants in such a vulnerable position when once they stood proudly on a pedestal.

Our final stop of the day was Ana Kai Tangata, the island's popular coastal cave. The cave itself has been carved from volcanic rock, which is being slowly eroded by the sea. It's 10 meters high, 5 meters wide, and 15 meters deep. The ceiling of the cave is domed and has excellent acoustic properties. However, its most impressive attraction is a series of cave paintings. These mainly depict the sooty tern, the seabirds once revered by the island's birdman culture. 

Follow this link for more about our tour of Easter Island, including a visit to the island's two most iconic locations, Rano Raraku, and Ahu Tongariki.

We've done our seventh continent

We’ve completed our Antarctic Christmas cruise. What an incredible experience. Every account you’ve ever read about the white continent’s beauty and serenity honestly doesn’t do it justice. Antarctica really is the world’s most pristine, untouched wilderness. Nature is definitely master of this domain as we discovered when inclement weather delayed our flight from King George Island to Punta Arenas for three days.

This delay meant that Garry and I were lucky enough to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Antarctica; all at no additional cost. I use to fantasize about celebrating the start of the new millennium in Antarctica but ultimately never booked a cruise. In my wildest dreams I never imagined ten years later my youthful fantasy would become reality.

In the end we spent eight nights and nine days cruising around the South Shetland Islands and along the Antarctic peninsula. We travelled as far south as 65.05 degrees before pack ice finally blocked our route. Along the way we enjoyed up to three daily excursions, each offering something new and unique. Day after day the polar scenery never failed to amaze, while the wildlife proved more numerous and accessible than I’d ever imagined.  The photo below is just one example.  It's now used by the cruise company on its home page to promote the very cruise we enjoyed.

Highlights include watching penguins mate, build nests and feed new born chicks. We also saw Humpback whales, Fin whales and Killer whales feeding and frolicking; often several times a day. Seals were found basking on ice flows and beaches almost every day. We spotted Crabeater seals, Leopard seals, Weddell seals and juvenile Elephant seals. The bird life was equally abundant. We saw Cormorants feeding chicks on their nests and encountered more than one curious Skua (that’s a large, dull brown scavenger bird).

With so much to share I’ve drafted a separate post covering each day of our cruise. Enjoy these summaries of our incredible experience:

• A brief stopover in lonely Punta Arenas
• Flying across the Drake Passage
• Our first whale sighting
• The ultimate White Christmas
• Standing on an ice flow 65.05 degrees south
• The day we finally stood on our seventh continent - the view and weather were spectacular
• Deception Island's battered, abandoned whaling station
• Stranded on New Year's Eve.

Finally, enjoy the best of more than two thousands photos I’ve taken along the way. Choosing which to upload has been hard work. Everything in the polar regions is a photo opportunity to die for. Without a doubt Antarctica was well worth the wait. Go if you can!

EDITING NOTE
As of January 5, I've posted detailed summaries of entire Antarctic cruise. I'll continue to upload more photos for each post as time and Internet access allows. Check back every few days for more great images of our polar experience.

You can also download a daily logbook prepared by our cruise director.

Introducing the instant travel agent

Our unprecedented stranding in Antarctica meant we missed two scheduled flight connections and a pre-paid tour of Easter Island. As a result, when we finally touched down in Mainland Chile shortly before 5pm on January 1 we had no idea if our itinerary could be salvaged.  I had called the travel agent before boarding our flight from the South Shetlands (apparently this is the only place in Antarctica with mobile coverage).  He'd confirmed that an alternative itinerary was available and suggested we call back after landing in Punta Arenas. I'll never forget his shock after explaining that I was calling from Antarctica.

Upon landing, I spent the next two hours making frantic calls to hotels, airlines and travel agents. We established we could catch a flight to Santiago in time for a connecting flight to Easter Island the following morning if we could get everything reticketed in the time available. The travel agent finally confirmed everything was in place shortly after we reached our hotel in Punta Arenas – provided we immediately dashed back to Punta Arenas airport

In addition to the tight departure time, we grabbed the last two seats on a flight from Easter Island to Santiago three days later, and the only room still available at the island hotel we’d originally booked. Incredibly, we checked-in at Punta Arenas less than 25 minutes before our flight departed. By the narrowest of margins, our original itinerary was back on track, minus a three-day layover previously scheduled for Santiago. We also had to forfeit our business class ticket to secure seats on the January 2 flight to Easter Island.

I suspect everyone reading this post will have little sympathy for our cattle class plight. Garry and I totally agree that one Economy class leg won’t kill us and one city looks much like another when it comes to keeping Easter Island on our itinerary. We’ll still manage to squeeze in 1.5 days in Santiago before we leave South America so all is not lost. Of course, we’ve lost hundreds of dollars in tour bookings which Garry is already committed to claiming back on insurance. Fingers crossed he’ll be successful.

Regardless, we count ourselves lucky. Our extra three days in Antarctica came at a painful cost for the tour group that followed us. They lost these extra days and were forced to accept a highly truncated three-day tour. They also suffered the indignity of boarding their flight south on the second day of delay only to have it turn back an hour into the journey. Worse still, the small print in our cruise contract makes it very clear that no refund will be offered if the cruise is curtailed. If they get you to Antarctica, they've delivered their end of the deal. A partial refund is only available if the entire cruise is cancelled.

However, the experience is still worth every cent.  Antarctica really is the final frontier. It's a pristine, untouched wilderness where people are clearly just the visitors. The only crowds you'll encounter are captured in the video below. Go if you can!

The waiting game

We travelled to Antarctica with an organisation called Antarctica XXI. The company promotes itself as the “First Air Cruise to Antarctica.” To date, it’s still the only company offering scheduled cruises that begin and end with a flight over the notoriously rough seas of the Drake Passage. These charter flights save you almost two full days of sailing in each direction – and the sea sickness that often accompanies the voyage.

Antarctica XXI has been organising fly-in cruise tours for more than eight years. During this period no tour group has ever been delayed by inclement weather for more than 24 hours. However, the company very clearly warns passengers that weather can cause serious delays. This disclaimer concerned me enough to do additional research before finally booking our Christmas cruise. However, I read that most flights are only delayed a few hours; half a day at most.

However, the Polar Regions are a fickle place. As fate would have it, Garry and I, along with 57 other passengers, found ourselves proving an exception to the rule. After six breathtaking days of cruising, we sailed back into Maxwell Bay, King George Island, ready to join our flight back to Mainland Chile on December 29. However, low clouds and poor visibility kept the charter plane waiting in Punta Arenas. A single day’s delay soon turned into a second day followed by a third before the seasonal winds finally returned. Yes, you read that correctly, an unprecedented three days passed before the cloud ceiling lifted enough for our plane to land.

Garry and I couldn’t believe our luck. We gained three extra days of cruising Antarctic waters at no extra cost and much to our delight celebrated New Year's Eve in Antarctica. We were effectively stranded. Apparently, the Brazilian President suffered a similar fate when he visited King George Island in 2005. He was stranded on the island by poor weather for five days.

As each delay mounted our cruise director worked with the ship’s captain to arrange unscheduled excursions to scenic locations within two hours of sailing time from the airstrip. This time window reflected the minimum period required for the cruise company to file a flight plan, assemble the next tour group, load the plane, and take to the air thus giving us enough time to terminate an impromptu excursion and return to base.

Our first additional day saw us anchored offshore by the airfield. We ventured onto shore once to visit the local Russian research base and its incredibly quaint Russian Orthodox Church. By chance, I’d come across references to this church before our cruise. I never imagined I’d actually get to see it as the building wasn’t listed as an excursion destination for our cruise.

The church was built in Siberia in 2002 entirely from cedar wood and hefty spruce logs. It consists of three small rooms; an entrance annexe, a high-ceiling nave, and a small back chapel. Outside, the roof of each room is topped by a classic onion dome. It was then disassembled and shipped to Antarctica. The structure was reassembled on a low hill overlooking Maxwell Bay on King George Island. To ensure that the gale-force polar winds can't sweep it away, the building is firmly bolded to bedrock by six impressive yellow chains.

Day Two of our unscheduled extension saw us lift anchor and sail off to neighbouring Admiralty Bay. Here we took to the zodiac boats and spent several hours cruising along the five-kilometre-long face of an impressive glacier. Highlights of our time on the water included an encounter with a rather menacing leopard seal that repeatedly yawned on request resulting in numerous iconic photos. We also witnessed the glacier carving several times. Some ice chunks were large enough to send wave after wave of powerful rolling swells across the bay.

Our third and final extension day took us to a nearby cove where Argentina has established a large research base. It’s inhabited all year round; hosting more than 100 people in Summer and 30 in Winter. It’s currently home to eight women which must make for an interesting social dynamic. The base commander took us along the shore to observe juvenile elephant seals before we ventured inside for a short lecture on the base’s research program.

It’s an impressive complex, complete with its own polar diving team that dives all year round including excursions under the ice in Winter. It also hosts one of only two barometric pressure chambers along the Antarctic Peninsula. This facility is used to help divers decompress after lengthy dives or save divers suffering life-threatening bends. This excursion was easily our most insightful research base visit of the entire cruise. Previous base tours had involved little more than securing a stamp in our passports (I have three such stamps now) and shopping for the odd souvenir.

Upon our return to Maxwell Bay, we were advised that we’d be forced to spend New Year’s Eve in Antarctica. Some of our tour group were initially angry at the prospect of spending a third unscheduled night on board. However, Garry and I teamed up with a friendly bunch of Australians to organise an impromptu New Year’s Eve concert. The crew responded by organising a trivia quiz and the hospitality manager called on the ship’s engineers to unbolt tables in its panorama lounge, forming a temporary dance floor.

I designed an invitation that the ship circulated during dinner and our Australian companions organised four national choirs who each wrote a song about our dilemma. The Australians (and Kiwis) sang a song about watching ice flows to the tune of Waltzing Matilda, the Americans rewrote the theme song to Gilligan’s Island (a 70’s sitcom), and the British reworked Twelve Days of Christmas, earning some of the largest laughs of the night.

As midnight neared, we then surprised the crew with a renaming ceremony. We gave each crew member a new nickname while sharing an anecdote that captured the history of their name. Several of the crew told us afterwards they’d never had a tour group honour them so warmly. Finally, I pulled up a copy of Auld Lang Syne I just so happened to have loaded into my iPhone as we counted down to midnight.

In the end, a determined group of us successfully transformed an initially hostile situation into an evening filled with laughter, singing, dancing, and memories everyone will treasure for years to come. For me, the ultimate personal highlight came shortly after midnight. I found myself standing alone on the top deck looking out across a perfectly calm bay as snow gently fell around me. At the moment, in the perpetual summer twilight of the polar region (that's the image above), I truly felt I was in Antarctica celebrating the beginning of a new decade. Happy New Year everyone!