First day in Rapa Nui

Today is our full day tour. We were woken by roosters quite early but lazed around in bed until 7:30a. After a nice breakfast of fried egg, local bread with cheese and cold cuts and fruit juice, our guide came to pick us up. We were on a bus with maybe 20 people by the time we picked everyone up. Our guides are Mateo (?) who speaks French and English, and Nico who speaks Spanish and English. We end up in Mateo's group for the duration. Our first stop is at Akahanga, where the kings lived. The moai are not restored on the platform so we see them lying down, many face first. There are remnants of a small village, crematoria where they burned their dead and a small cave for protection from rain. Mateo gives us a little history of the people and the place.

Our second stop is Tongariki, where they have set 15 moai back on their platform. Only one has his pukao, or hair stone. The statues have their backs to the ocean, facing what was their village. The site is beautiful and quite dramatic. We have quite a bit of time to take pictures from various angles and locations. After this, our next stop is Ranu raraku, which was a quarry for the moai as well as an extinct volcano. There are moai of various sizes and shapes scattered all over the hill in various stages of completion. Some of them are buried up to their necks so their faces could be completed more easily. Walking the trail takes us quite close to many of them. The view from the hill is amazing. At this site are also stone chicken houses. There are actually a lot of chickens on this island! We had them running around us at lunch, freaking out Tricia who has a phobia of them. Meanwhile our lunch was a delicious bbq chicken. The small bananas they gave us were delicious, much better than the standard Cavendish bananas we get here.

On the way to our next stop after lunch, the bus does a brief stop at a photo site so we can take a photo of the Tongariki ahu with the sun facing them.

Our next stop is a location with an unrestored giant moai as well as a special magnetic rock. The large rock is surrounded by smaller ones set at the cardinal compass points. We aren't allowed to touch the rock any more so there's no way to demonstrate the magnetic effect.

On our final stop of the day, the beach at Anakena has a few moai on a platform and a beautiful sand beach. The water is quite cold so I only dipped my feet in. It was a nice relaxing stop for an hour nonetheless.

In the evening, we hooked up with a group doing stargazing tours. They showed a short presentation about how the Polynesian people navigated via the stars and about some of the constellations we will see. In our group were several eclipse chasers, including a honeymoon couple. There was also a young Yale graduate doing some traveling before moving to Texas for a new job. The group is split into two vehicles to first go to Anakena beach. One of the guides sings a special Rapa Nui song for us in the pitch dark. They then set up cameras to do light painting photos with the moai. The sky is quite overcast but the photos are pretty neat. They then take us to another site where we can see the sky clearly with the Milky Way, Southern Cross, Jupiter and Saturn, several star clusters, all visible through telescope, high power binoculars or with the naked eyes. They provide hot chocolate, cake and a legend about how the god Maui made the stars with a net of pearls. It was a really fun evening with us getting back at midnight.