4 June – Los Angeles

We eventually got to Easter Island at 9pm on 31st May to be met by the people that Gerry had arranged our stay with. They had revamped our programme to fit the 2 days we had on the Island and quickly whisked us off to our Residencial (bed and breakfast). After settling in, we decided to go for a walk and found a restaurant/bar with live local music. We sat down intending to have just a drink but ended up staying for over an hour and having something to eat. It was truly a magical session. The next morning we were taken to visit Orongo at the southern end of the island and the site of bird man ceremonies. It was fascinating and quite awesome as we climbed to the top of a volcanic crater and looked over the edge into an almost perfectly circular fresh water lake. Our guide was an Easter Islander who had spent part of his education in California and lived a couple of miles from where Jo and Todd live now (small world). He was passionate about his island and gave us a far greater insight into the history and culture than we could have got from any guide book. After our tour, we spent the afternoon walking to the brilliant museum a couple of kilometres out of the only town on the island. We saw quite a few of the Moai en route but nothing to compare with what we saw the next day when we had a full day tour of the rest of the island again with our guide Tommy. It is hard to explain the magnificence of all we saw but seeing the islanders’ shelters and learning how, as well as seeing where, the statues were carved out of the side of the quarry and then transported to the coastal sites made us realise just how ingenious the people were. When the religion based on the Moai had been superseded in the 17th century, after some 800 years, by a religion based on the birdman, all of the statues had been knocked over. Although we had seen some statues that had been re-erected, we were quite amazed by the final site we visited. Here, 15 Moai that had survived their ‘toppling’ some 400 years ago as well as being swept several tens of metres in land by a tsunami last century and now stood again on their platform regally facing inland (they always had their backs to the sea). What a sight!!!

And so our 2 days on Easter Island ended at noon on 3rd June with a flight back to Santiago and then on to Los Angeles via Lima. We arrived at LAX at 0740 the next morning to be met by Jo and whisked off to Alma Avenue for a reunion with Todd and of course Oliver and Alexander. Wow! both of the boys had changed so much since we saw them last in January.