Easter Island just may be “the eeriest and most extraordinary speck of land on the face of the planet,” said Jon Bowermaster in National Geographic Adventure. Nowhere in the world is there a more compelling sight than the massive stone figures, or moai, that stand like chess pieces on the side of Rano Raraku, a dormant volcano crater. Half-finished statues of all sizes and empty niches for hundreds more litter the grassy hillside overlooking the blue waters of the South Pacific. Inevitably, every visitor ponders an unanswerable question: What caused the civilization able to transport these sublimely spooky sculptures across miles of difficult terrain “simply to vanish”?
Easter Island, “one of the more isolated habitable spots in the world,” is owned and governed by Chile, more than 2,200 miles away. Measuring only 14 miles across, the island sits hidden amid the plethora of atolls that loosely comprise Polynesia. But near-daily flights now leave from Santiago and Tahiti, and Easter Island has become a popular tourist destination for those willing to make the five-hour journey. Along the main street in Hanga Roa, visitors can rent cars or houses and hire guides for archaeological tours. Surfers relish the nearby beaches where swells come “hurtling out of Antarctica,” and some divers think the world’s clearest waters, with visibility of up to 200 feet, can be found beneath the coastal surface. Orongo, one of the island’s “archaeological centerpieces,” contains the ruins of a dozen stone buildings dug into the earth on the edge of a lake. “It is a site of such beauty, it literally draws the air from your lungs.”
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