More of the same, sir? Why yes please, I think I will. It turns out that there are two more quad-friendly routes I could take on the island, so I rented the ATV for a second day.
Before doing that I went to the tourist office to ask about the festival and what the highlights of it are, and apparently one of them is tomorrow, when the young men of the island compete with each other in various festival games. There are tests of strength and agility and general tough-guy-ness, and it is all held at the site where I was yesterday, Rano Raraku, where there are dozens of statues. So I will go to that. The only slight issue is that it’s probably 15km out of the town and there’s no formal public transport. I could rent the ATV again but that is a rather expensive hobby, or I could rent something motorised but cheaper, like a scooter, or I could just start walking and try and hitch a lift. I am leaning towards the last option.
The young chap in the tourist office was astonishingly well-informed and helpful, and so I asked him if there were any books he would recommend to learn more about history of the island. He suggested one called The Mystery of Easter Island by Katherine Routledge, first published in 1919, and also told me where I could buy it. I went and had a look, and picked it up for the bargain basement price of 18,000 pesos, or a shade under USD40. They were practically giving it away. But it’s a lovely edition, and indeed a lovely addition to the mobile library which has grown back to its original numbers after a temporary fall-off. I find I would rather carry the books than be without anything to read. On that note, from the very volume we have been discussing wherein the author is talking about preparations for her trip:
Our books had of course to be largely scientific, a sovereign’s worth of cheap novels was a boon, but we often yearned unutterably for a new book. Will those who have friends at the ends of the earth remember the godsend to them of a few shillings so invested, as a means of bringing fresh thoughts and a sense of civilised companionship?
Quite.
The route today wound up the west coast and then circled back inland to come back to town. Nominally the second half was paved but I didn’t see any difference in the surface quality, which was rough and rocky all the way, and meant top speed was less than 20km/h. It was very hot again today, and during yesterday’s adventures I somehow managed to get sunburned on the back and sides of my neck; I think I must have wiped off the sunscreen when aiming to remove only sweat, and then forgotten to re-apply. Anyway, the only top I have with a collar is a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, and the only way I could use it to protect my neck was to pop up the collar. So I went around Easter Island today looking like a south-Dublin rugbyist.
Today’s route sees much less traffic than yesterday’s, and often I had the road and the sites to myself. There are five statues in a line at Tahai in various stages of repair and weathering, and there is one on which the eyes have been painted and its hat is in place, so it looks very different to all the others. At Hanga Kio’e I was on my own for a while (and took another sneaky touching-the-rock picture) and then a very nice Belgian lady showed up. She told me she had been to Tahiti, which was similar to Easter Island, but that EI was much better. She was curious about the ATV, but didn’t seem to entirely approve.
I drove on, bumping along the road that gave spectacular views over the black-rock coastline, crashing waves and giant skies. I took a video from the ATV to try and give a sense of what it was like, but it doesn’t come close.
I came to a place called Ana Kakenga  about an hour out, the first of the caves. The guy in the tourist office had said they were easy to visit without a guide as long as ‘you go a little way in the dark’, and I had brought my torch just for the purpose. I initially walked right past the entrance, which looks like a bunch of small rocks in a big hole in the ground. Two people were standing outside it, who emerged to be a guide and a woman who was afraid to go down. The entrance to the cave was a small hole with steps going down inside, giving just enough room for a man of my size to pass without crawling.
I waited for the other people in the group to come back up, and as they did I saw they were wielding torches of the kind that might be used for signalling aliens or projecting the Bat Signal. My keyring-friendly device seemed rather inadequate by comparison. But finally they were all out, and my time had come, and not giving myself too much time to think I ploughed in.
It became silent almost immediately – just a few metres in I could hear nothing of the wind or the sea or the other people outside, and my breathing seemed loud. It was very hot and very dark. I turned on the torch and it cast what seemed a feeble beam. The ground was rough and the going was slow – I had to put my bag down in front of me and go forward a yard, then repeat. The light of the entrance disappeared behind me, and I felt suddenly entirely alone in a way that is difficult to describe but was very intense. I must admit to a shiver of nerves.
And then ahead of me there was light. I made my way carefully forward and found that I could stand up, and around the corner I found that the cave ends in two openings like the top of a Y. Through each I could see clouds and sky. Edging forward I found that each opening was high in the cliff overlooking the ocean, the blue and turquoise of the water crashing over the shore maybe 30m below. It was a beautiful place to sit and stare and think of nothing. Though it was a devil of a spot to photograph and I never managed to get anything that reflected how nice it was.
The dark part on the way back was short and easy and I felt silly for thinking it was hard, and then I was back on the ATV again. The next stop was Ana Te Pora, another cave. This one though was bigger and brighter from the entrance, and much easier to walk through. Both it and Ana Kakgenga are lava tubes, just as we saw on the Galapagos, and in Ana Te Pora you could clearly see where the flow had started and finished. Light burst through a hole in the ceiling at the far end.
Possibly the most notable thing about that second cave was a side-passage which led off just inside the main entrance, and which was as dark and cramped as you could wish for. I crouched down and followed it a little way but it just got smaller and tighter, and I was happy to turn back. My hat is off to anyone willing to go all the way down it. They clearly didn’t grow up reading Stephen King.
One final cave and more statues followed before I got back to town. The northern section of the island, at least a third of the total area, is a national park in which you can either walk or take a horse but you can’t drive. The road I came back on today skirts the edge of it, giving a good sense of what the central part of the island is like. There are rolling hills and big trees and small houses with corrugated iron rooves, but they’re clean and neat and well looked after. When I was in the tourist office today I asked how to get into the national parks, and the long and the short of it is you need a guide, and guides are expensive, so you need a group to hire the guide and it’s STILL expensive, just less so. For a guide to bring just me for eight hours would be the bones of USD200. There is a company that occasionally organises trips and I will talk to them tomorrow – I would like to see the far eastern part of the island, which is also restricted to visitors – but I won’t be heartbroken if I can’t make it happen.
It was after 3pm and I was starving but I dropped back to the hostel to get a book, and while I was there Sarah recommended a place they had eaten which they had enjoyed. When I got there though lunch seemed finished, so I went randomly to a place across the street instead. I was greeted by a seemingly gay barefoot man with long grey hair whose opening words to me were ‘We have meat, chicken and fish, which do you want?’
I asked for the meat, and he told me to take a seat. He spoke perfect English and seemed pleased that I was from Ireland, as if that somehow rounded out a set in his head. The meat turned out to be beef, cooked medium-well, served with rice and salad. I don’t know what they had managed to do to the salad but the entire thing, including the onions, tasted like the pickle in an Eddie Rockets burger. But the rice and steak were perfect. The owner (assuming he was the owner) then came over and gave me a free slice of watermelon for desert, which so cold and liquid and welcome that I had to resist the urge to stick my face in it. The whole thing came to 9,000 pesos, which is about as good as you can do here I think.
One final road on the map lay untaken, and I made for that. It was rather a long run, out past the airport, then I started climbing. After while there were good views out over the town. I was on the only drivable road in another of the restricted zones. Trees towered and spread on the side of the road, and the hills rolled into one another. Everything was green and lush, not like the coast, and very hot. And on we climbed.
Then I saw one of the familiar signs on the roadside to indicate you have reached an attraction of some kind, and I pulled over and stopped the engine and walked up the small incline and was looking out over the crater of the volcano, which was like a smack in the face it was so unexpected. How had I not realised I was driving up one of the volcanoes? But I hadn’t. And now there was the crater. To my intense surprise the bottom of it was wetland, with patches of water and what looked like rushes interspersed, creating a speckled pattern of water and vegetation. And all the way around it were the sloped walls of the volcano itself, just the way you would picture them surrounding lava. But the diameter of the crater is 1.5km, and the distance from the edge where I was standing down to the wetland below is 200m. It was vast. I had no idea of the scale of a volcanic crater. It seemed just too big to be possible, too big to be there. It dwarfs anything manmade I have ever seen. I sat and stared for a long time and laughed to myself occasionally like a crazy person.
The road continued upward, and I followed it to what was once a village of the indigenous people, but they only used it for a few weeks a year. That was when they had the birdman competition, in which they competed to be the first to get an egg from a particular bird species that nested at the period, and then the person who got the egg won special privileges for their tribe. It must have been intense stuff if it was worth building a village for. The last one was held in the mid 1800s, which his more recent than I would have thought. I really need to get reading that book.
From the very top of the crater you have wonderful view over a small island and a standing, jagged rock emerging huge and vicious from the oean, again similar to the Galapagos, so I took far too many pictures of those and then made my way back to the hostel.
I was tired so slept for half an hour or so, then as the sun was setting I found myself once again at a bit of a loose end. I tidied and re-packed all my stuff and had a shower to wash off the grime of the road (my backpack is filthy from being at the back of the ATV), and then I had a solitary dinner of cheese on pita bread, washed down with cold water. It was actually a lot better than it sounds. The Americans came in from somewhere (they didn’t say where they were, so I am going to assume they were apprehending terrorists or in a shoot-out with a drug gang) and I talked with them for a while. Then I wrote this, and now here we are. I am back in my favourite position near the window, and the sounds of the sea are close and reassuring.
[I changed the title of the blog this evening to the Michael Crichton-influenced ‘Travels’; the old title is a nice phrase but made no sense in my context. The new name is duller, but holds out for the long term. – SF]
