eGlobal Education

Hanga Roa, Easter Island

Chilean students often make trips to Easter Island to see one of Chile’s most remote possessions (Easter Islanders—the Rapa Nui—prefer to think of themselves as separate from Chile except when they need something like new roads or health care).  There is only one flight per day to Easter Island right now, a LATAM 787, yesterday packed full of high schoolers enraptured with one another and their upcoming adventure.  Once the plane took off from Santiago, they paraded up and down the aisles and stumbled over our feet in our exit row seats as they passed from side to side chatting with friends.  They must have crossed over us at least 250 times during the 5 hour flight.  I love the exit row, but this was not my favorite opportunity.

moai overlooking Hanga Roa

Nonetheless, we eventually arrived at the tiny airport on Easter Island, 2000 miles from the mainland and nearly that far from anywhere else above water.  French Polynesia is about 1500 miles away and Pitcairn Island, the nearest speck of land, and the place the Bounty mutineers landed, is about 1200 miles away.  There is one small town here, Hanga Roa, with about 7000 inhabitants living along the cliffs above the Pacific.

We rented a car, which we’re very happy we did, so we are free to meander wherever we want along the 40 or so miles of badly potholed roads.  Four extinct and now heavily eroded volcanoes formed the island, which is about 30 miles long and 6 miles wide.  We watched huge waves of Hawaiian proportions pound the black cliffs and lava rocks that surround the island.  They came 3 or 4 at a time before falling to small swells and then rising again to 15 to 20 foot breakers.  Islanders tell us that they rarely have big storms, but they did have one tsunami hit decades ago that toppled a long row of moai (the giant stone sculptures for which the island is known) in a bay on the far side of the island from Hanga Roa.  Global warming and rising oceans will certainly be a problem even though the island is hilly and relatively high above the water.

waves crash on lava rocks surrounding Easter Island

There is one small hospital here with several general practitioners providing care to the inhabitants.  But, they do not have any specialists or high tech equipment for treating major diseases or accidents.  You could get a broken leg set here, but not have a titanium rod inserted to hold together a bad fracture.  Islanders fly to Santiago for major health problems and women are even choosing to have their babies in Santiago in case they have a difficult delivery or baby in need of specialized care.

Mostly, there are tourist shops and lots of very casual restaurants plus a couple of small grocery stores and one gas station.  Most of the hotels are small, very pleasant, but far from luxurious.  They are appropriate for the place.  It is incongruous to see the enormous 787 airplane arrive each day, landing on a single runway with no taxiway, turning around at the end of the runway to taxi to the tiny terminal.

Don and Gail with the moai at Tongariki

Easter Island is now treated as a restricted area.  Outsiders can only come for a maximum of 30 days and must show a return plane ticket and a confirmed hotel reservation to be permitted on the airplane.  There are lots of “foreigners”, mostly Chileans, working in the hotels and restaurants, often resented by locals, but they have special permits to work here. 

Visitors come to Easter Island to see the huge stone sculptures called moai.  More about them in my next blog.  They symbolize the Polynesian culture that one can find from Tahiti to Easter Island to the Maori of New Zealand to the Hawaiian Islands.  How they crossed such vast stretches of open ocean is miraculous, on large catamarans that were really wooden rafts.  Amazing sailors and navigators even before they left their overcrowded home islands to seek an uninhabited island more than a thousand miles away where they could start anew.