A breeze is blowing across Easter Island, moving the leaves of the palm trees outside the window beside me and rippling the sea. It’s 9.30pm and the sun has finally and reluctantly dropped out of sight. Bluish clouds cluster not far above the horizon, and darker clouds are higher in the sky. The waves on the water are shadowed, breaking in white foam and smacking against the black volcanic rocks when they reach the shore.
All day it has been very hot, far hotter than I find comfortable. Each time I have ventured out I have come back wet with sweat. Even when in my room my skin has been damp. There is no air conditioning or fan or any other concession to the heat, and indeed no one seems to find it out of the ordinary except me. These few days will be an educational experience. The last time I remember dealing with this kind of heat without mechanical assistance was in New York in ’99, when we used to take turns in the cold shower and sprinkle our beds with cold water and try and fall asleep quickly.
I am missing Katie terribly. To talk about it further in this forum I would need to have that Californian gift for public self-analysis, which I most certainly do not. So let it be enough to say that it has shadowed the day heavily. But I am of course happy to be here, and there is the frisson of a new place and new things to see.
From the air the island was visible out of the left side of the plane as we approached for landing, but I was on the right.  By straining to see out past a staggered row of heads I got a glimpse of greyness and water.  The airport is small, similar to the Galapagos, though it does have one luggage belt. A nice woman turned up with a sign with my name on it, and she also had a gift for me: the likeness of the famous statues on a string necklace. I took off my hat and she put the necklace on for me, and then introduced herself as phonetically ’Two-e’. Other people in the airport got similar treatment with garlands of flowers rather than a necklace, but I was much happier with my present.
The airport is on the edge of the town, and the town is not very big. As we drove to the hostel our hostess pointed out useful places like the bank and the tourist office to myself and an American couple who are also staying here. Â There is one main street, and the hostel is about a ten-minute walk from it.
The hostel is grand, in the Irish sense – there is no air conditioning, as mentioned, and most things look like they could use a scrub and a bit of paint, but I like it. There is a large garden with the palm trees, and it’s close enough to the ocean that you can hear the sounds of the water. There are two dogs which are large and look ferocious but are actually friendly and playful. Inside the main door is a table on which there are four or five large trophies, all of them a bit rusty and unkempt, and in the cup of one of them there are several Christmas decorations. The hostel is the kind of place where that doesn’t seem so weird. On the ceiling is a wooden board about a metre square cut with a hole in the centre and give narrow channels running from it, allowing you to hang five wine glasses by the stem. Only one is in place, and it looks as though it has been there for years. The board is fastened in place with nails that look big though to have previously been used in shipbuilding, and oddest of all to me is that there is a smaller board beside the main one which only has one hole and one channel, and therefore could only hold one glass.
When we got here I was tired from the overnight flight but wanted to have a look around, so I resisted the temptation to rest and went for a walk instead. First stop was to drop my clothes at the laundrette, solving a problem which had been developing into a crisis, and then I went to the bank. The first screen of the ATM was in English but the second was only in Spanish and had eight options. There was a long queue behind me so I decided discretion was the better part of valour, cancelled the transaction, and went for a look around the rest of the town instead.
The main streets are paved but many of the side streets are dirt roads. The street names are hand-written in paint on the side of the footpath at each end. On each edge of the main streets are drains, V-shaped, about a metre wide and deep, meaning you don’t want to fall into them. They must get pretty significant rain here to make that construction worthwhile.
While I was out I priced rentals of various mechanised transports in a few places – I have managed with Paul’s help to get a document from the occasionally effective Irish civil service explaining that I am a licenced driver, which should allow me to rent a car here. As well as cars and 4X4s everywhere offered me prices on motorbikes and quads also. I am currently tempted by the former but leaning towards the latter; given I have zero experience with either, four wheels might be more prudent. Cost is high but bearable.
After that I went by for another swing at the bank and found a bunch of Japanese tourists in the same confused position as myself. I withdrew for a second time.
From there I went to the other end of the town where on the coast sits one of the famous statues. It is faced inland, away from the blinding sea, watching over a village that has long since disappeared. It had been knocked over since originally ‘discovered’ by European civilisation in a standing position, but about 30 years ago they put it back up. While excavating, they found the remains of human sacrifices. Odd how prevalent that idea was back in the day.
Inspiration then struck on my banking problem and I went to the tourist office to see if they could help, and the very nice woman there actually walked the hundred yards or so with me to the ATM and translated. Once you chose the right option from the eight, everything from that point on was in English.
By then it was after midday and I was finding it hard to handle the heat. It was perfectly still, and the air was heated and dry, oven-door air. I came back and slept for a few hours and when I woke up I found it was just as hot as ever. But I went out again, this time to get food and go for a longer walk around the edges of the town. I ate at a place that overlooked the ocean, and watched the surfers. I had fish and chips and a local beer, and then I ordered a second beer as the first one went down so well. The waitress said ‘Another beer!’ as though she didn’t approve of that at all, but brought it out nonetheless.
After that I wandered through the suburbs, which are not very large. There are nice houses there, much more solidly built and city-planned than the edges of Lima or Quito. I also learned there is a short-cut from the hostel to the main street on a dirt path that leads through someone’s back garden. The garden owners were sitting outside as I went through, but they didn’t seem to mind. The two dogs flanked me all the way like Secret Service agents, turning back only at the main street.
I retreated back to my room again and read for a while, and then went out one final time to get the laundry. The pleasures of having clean clothes to wear are something that I will never take for granted again thanks to this trip.
Aside from the heat, the thing that has most struck me is how much everything costs. A 1.5-litre bottle of water is 1,700 pesos, or roughly USD3.50. The laundry was 13,000, USD26. Dinner was an eye-watering 23,000, almost USD50 for fish and chips and two beers. I won’t be going back there. A bottle of sunscreen was 10,000 or so, USD 20. The money that I eventually took out of the ATM that I thought would last for a few days is almost gone. It’s an expensive place.
After that I was at a bit of a loose end, and so I read the Michael Palin book I got in Quito for quite a while. It’s called 80 Days Around the World, in which he replicates as closely as he can the famous fictional journey mostly by taken freight ships around the world. Palin is on the road in 1989, and some of the lines really stick out from that time, like when he describes the economic pre-eminence of Japan over the US or the view of Manhattan crowned by the World Trade Centre.
By 8pm the heat was still much the same as ever, and I guess with the tiredness from the flight and the discomfort of the heat and missing Katie, things didn’t seem to be in any way as good as they actually are. But all is back on even keel now. I finished the rest of Palin, even though I should really be trying to spread it out a bit better, and now I’m sitting on the couch outside my room typing this in the common area. No-one else is around. Since I started writing it has become pitch black outside, and only one bulb burns in here. There must be no streetlights in this area, which is worth keeping in mind.
Tomorrow I’ll have a better look around and take the heat as it comes and see more of the statues I have wondered about since I was a little boy. What a strange thing it is that there should be anything on this island at all. For now, though, the sounds of the night are restful and soothing, and my bed is close, and I am tired. Goodnight to all. Katie is on the plane to Ireland as I write these words, and most especially of all, I say goodnight to her.
