This is the last blog post of our South America trip, which sadly concluded about a week ago. With every good trip, there comes the time to return home - which is a lot easier if "home" is a great place like Santa Cruz. for my birthday, my awesome boyfriend had given me a great present. To wind down the trip, we spent our last week on Rapa Nui, a.k.a. Easter Island, Isla Pascua. After all the rain, fierce winds, and fighting off colds, unwinding on a tranquil Polynesian island was just great!
Rapa Nui was first settled by Polynesian explorers, who built the iconic heads. It was annexed by Chile in the mid-1800s, during the War of the Pacific. Along the way, slavery and disease wiped out most of the local population, and a lot of cultural knowledge was lost. Today, no one can say exactly how the heads were transported from quarries miles away, and there was an old written language that no one can read anymore. That adds an interesting degree of mystery to spice up the gorgeous landscape, with the most amazingly clear gin blue ocean water I've ever seen! 
There are no mega-resorts at this time (sadly, there's one under construction now), so even though the island lives on tourism, it doesn't feel tinsely - sort of like how Hawaii must've been a couple generations ago. If you've traveled to Hawaii, the customs of Rapa Nui would seem familiar but a little different. For instance, the traditional dance is similar, but a whole lot more aerobic! Most of the photos I took of dancers came out as blurs of activity. Here is one of the exceptions, where I got a dancer standing still for a rare instant.
The island is tiny, sort of like a right triangle of about 20km on the diagonal, and a population of about 4500 people (with maybe as many stray dogs). Most people live in the one town, which is along the coast. In the interior are a bunch of extinct volcanoes. Nothing is very high, the top elevation of the island is a peak of about 1500 meters in elevation, covered with gentle, grassy slopes. A lot of people ride horses to the top for the panoramic view (we walked, of course). Another of the extinct volcanoes was a quarry for the heads, where you can go today and see heads scattered around in various states of completeness. It's a bit eerie "being watched" by heads in every direction. Another volcano now has a lagoon in the crater full of tortora reeds - an impressive sight in pictures, even more stunning in person. It's easy to see most of the island by bicycle - but it's hard to find a rental beast that you'd want to ride. We finally found a couple, after trying out some with brakes that were, um, cosmetic. We also rented a motorcycle for one day, which allowed us to get out early to watch the famous sunrise over the heads at Ahu Tongariki.
Catching this sunrise view involved being dragged out of bed in pre-dawn hour on Christmas day. When we got there, it was still dark, there was nothing to do but wait, so I decided to wait with my eyes closed. This led to being mocked by my travel companion. Anyone who knows me well knows that it takes me a while to come to my senses in the morning, and before that I stumble around in an incoherent blur. If it was later in the day, Jorge probably wouldn't have grabbed me around the waist and joked that I was so defenseless - but he did. So I kneed him. Not too hard, but enough to make a point. He denies that he "asked for it", claims that he never said "please kick me in the balls". I feel that any jury of my peers (i.e. women) would decide that under the circumstances, this is exactly what "you're so defenseless" translates to. So peers, how do you decide? After all that, the sunrise was nice, but I think I would've been fine looking at photos taken by other people. But that's how I feel about most sunrise views. I think Jorge was more impressed, once he recovered physically. Then the next day, he remarked that he'd decided not to make me do anything I didn't want to do. Why oh why do such great insights come at the very end of the trip?
