Rano Kau

I crawled out of bed at 5:45 this morning to make a second attempt at catching the sunrise at Ahu Tongariki. Driving along the south coast of the island in the pitch black night was thrilling and intimidating at the same time. It’s a thrill to me to be half-way around the world exploring an obscure island on my own, and it’s liberating at the same time to feel like I can go anywhere I want, anytime, and do whatever I want, but part of me just doesn’t trust that scooter and I felt uncomfortable cruising on a dark, pothole-filled road with only a dim headlight to guide me. After a half-hour of driving alone through the darkness, I finally arrived at Tongariki, and might have missed it if I hadn’t spotted the small dirt parking lot to the side of the road.

It turned out that 6:30 was the perfect time to arrive at Tongariki. While driving towards the East end of the island I noticed the sky slowly grow lighter, and I was afraid that I might miss the sunrise, but fortunately I arrived just as the sun began to create an orange glow from below the horizon. I love sunrises, especially when they’re at the incredible places I’ve visited while traveling. Some of my favorite moments while traveling have been catching the sunrise in Venice; Borobudur, Indonesia; the Taj Mahal; Petra; Machu Picchu; Ayers Rock; and Mount Everest. I think I’ll have to add Ahu Tongariki to that list. As the sun slowly rose towards the horizon, the sky turned into a bright orange, that faded into yellow and blue. The clouds above the horizon were lit up with pink light, and as the sun rose over some cliffs behind Tongariki, the moai cast long shadows. I got some great photos of the moai silhouetted against the colorful sky, as well as a few of the bright landscape and long shadows.

Since Rano Raraku is so close to Tongariki, I decided I had to catch it in the favorable morning light. The site was apparently closed and nobody was at the entrance to welcome visitors, but I noticed a couple people wandering through the moai on the hillside, so I went ahead and enjoyed the scenery with them. The couple, two French travelers, helped me get some great pictures of myself with the moai as a backdrop, and I enjoyed spending an hour or so wandering through the deserted place. Again, some of my favorite moments while traveling are the times I’ve been able to visit some of the most phenomenal sites in the world when they are completely deserted. Conveniently enough, those times usually happen to coincide with the sunrise (am I the only traveler who’s willing to wake up a little earlier for a much more incredible experience!?) Wandering through the moai along the deserted hillside was otherworldly. As I snapped a few pictures of the bright green grass, perfectly blue sky, and the gigantic, mysterious moai, I was reminded of ‘Alice in Wonderland’, and felt like I could have been wandering through the movie.

On my way back to the South end of the island, I stopped at a site called Ahu Vinapu, where several moai on the coast lay toppled onto the grass. Ahu Vinapu is well known for the way its builders constructed the ahu; the stones fit together perfectly just like ancient Incan architecture. According to my Lonely Planet book, some anthropologists speculated that islanders sailed East from Easter Island to mainland South America, where they influenced the cultures of the people there. It’s interesting to consider that the Incan stone structures in Peru that fit together so perfectly may have been inspired by the indigenous people of Easter Island.

As the morning wound down I became very conscious of the fact that I only had my scooter rental until 1:00, and made sure to visit the most distant, inaccessible places around town before turning it back in. I headed straight for Orongo, the ceremonial village that sits at the very top of the Ranu Kau volcanic crater (walking up the dirt switchbacks that lead to the top of the towering volcano would have been a death march). Orongo was interesting, and contained a few stone structures representing what the ancient homes of the indigenous people would have looked like, but my favorite part of the visit was the end of the trail around the village, which offered an incredible view of the ocean and two small islands to the West, the gigantic crater to the East, and a few intricate petroglyphs carved on nearby rocks. The Rano Kau crater must be one of the most scenic natural landscapes I’ve ever seen, and watching the sun set over the crater yesterday was nice, but seeing the bright colors of the grass and ponds down below was probably even better. I snapped a few photos side by side so that I can stitch them into a panorama in Photoshop… I’ve never done that before, but it’ll be interesting to experiment with.

The last site I visited on my cherished scooter was a couple of moai on the far end of town. The moai were impressive, but compared to what I’ve already seen at Ahu Tongariki and Ranu Raraku, they weren’t anything mind-blowing. The scenery was nice though, with the wide expanse of ocean as a backdrop, and I enjoyed snapping a few more photos of the landscape. One of the moai had giant inlaid eyes made out of coral; the only such moai I’ve seen on the island. Archeologists speculate that all the moai once had such eyes… but to be honest, I like the look of the ‘blind’ moai much better.

I returned my scooter exactly at 1:00, then collapsed on my bed, exhausted from a day that was already filled with exploring the greatest sites of Easter Island. After napping for a few hours I woke up and began to catch up in my travel journal, but was pleasantly interrupted by a man from Orange County who invited me to go to dinner with him and his wife.

The couple was named Linda and Braulio, and are originally from Shanghai and Mexico City, respectively. We wandered down to a restaurant overlooking the coast, and as the sun set outside the windows behind us the conversation quickly turned to our favorite travel stories. I told Braulio all about nearly getting scammed by an angry taxi driver in Lima, riding a dilapidated train in the outskirts of Mumbai and getting fined and (I believe) scammed by the staff patrolling the cars, and meeting a scammer in Bangkok who approached me and attempted a scam word-for-word that I had already read about in my Lonely Planet book, among many other stories. Braulio told me about going to a pub crawl in Rome, getting lost on the way home, then wandering through the city looking for his hotel until 6:30 in the morning; and getting invited to a bar in Athens and enticed to buy drinks for some pretty girls… only to find that the staff of the bar demanded an exorbitant amount of money for the alcohol and the company. After hearing those stories I’ve realized that it probably does me a lot of good that I don’t visit bars while traveling. Linda and Braulio were great company, and made for intelligent, interesting conversation. It’s always great to meet up with fascinating people while traveling, and that dinner was a perfect way to round out the day.