Recap: Easter Island Travel Guide
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The flight from Santiago to Easter Island takes 5 hours. While going through departure procedures, a customs officer stamped the ticket with a little moai figure on it.
Throughout the journey, I kept imagining what this little island I’d wanted to visit since childhood would be like—until I finally saw that tiny patch of land from the air.
After getting off the plane, it took maybe twenty steps to leave the airport. My host was already waiting and greeted me with a huge flower lei. It’s an island tradition: no matter how expensive or cheap your hotel is, everyone gets one.
My lodging wasn’t far from the airport, so after settling in a bit, I went off to find “the Sea.”
During those few days on the island, my favorite thing was going to “the Sea” for sunset. “The Sea” is a moai standing on the island’s west coast. Its proper name is Ahu Tahai, but its pronunciation sounds a lot like the Chinese words for “the sea,” which made it feel oddly familiar.
A perfect sunset is never guaranteed, but every evening it felt like some invisible signal went out and all the island’s visitors and residents gathered at “the Sea” to drum, barbecue, play music, drink, and sometimes hold various family ceremonies.
People sat or lay down wherever they liked, watching white clouds drift through the glow of dusk. My mood relaxed as much as the clouds themselves.
Relaxation is the theme of life here.
On the path to “the Sea,” you pass a seaside cemetery. Most of the graves are very simple, just a few stones arranged in a circle, filled with little unknown flowers. Day after day, in the sunset, with the waves crashing below the cliff, even death here somehow feels beautiful.
On my first day watching sunset, my phone had no signal and I couldn’t find my friends for a while, so I walked up to a man nearby. He thought I wanted help taking a photo, but I was actually asking to borrow his hotspot. That’s how I ended up meeting Jason.
Jason was from Boston. As a programmer, he can work remotely from anywhere, and this time he took the chance to visit Easter Island for a few days while on a business trip to Chile. When we first met, he seemed oddly excited to meet us. Later I found out he was Chinese-Mexican mixed—so basically, half family!
Chinese guys really do have a certain sharp look.
On the island, sightseeing generally means joining a tour or hiring a guide. Jason had already hired one and invited us to join him the next day, saving us the trouble of finding one ourselves.
After sunset, of course, we had the long walk home. Even passing the cemetery in the dark somehow did not feel like the setup to a horror story.
The next day, our guide Camila picked us up in an old pickup truck. Out jumped a stylish young woman with a lot of personality. She was great in every way except one: her English wasn’t very good, and even Jason, the American, had trouble understanding her.
At the very first stop, we gave up on our Easter Island history-and-culture lesson.
So we started chatting instead. Camila is half French and half Rapa Nui. Her father is French; he came here traveling years ago and met her local mother. As a result, her life is split in two as well: during summer in the Northern Hemisphere, she sells ice cream in France; during summer in the Southern Hemisphere, she works as a guide on Easter Island.
Honestly, it’s enviable.
Camila grew up in France and only returned to Easter Island a few years ago, where she began learning the history of her ancestors and how to become a proud Rapa Nui person.
Like those ancestors of hers who could climb out onto the reefs in the sea to retrieve bird eggs.
Her mother’s side is clearly a major local family. Every time we entered a site, she would introduce herself to the staff as so-and-so’s daughter. It reminded me of going to play basketball at my dad’s school as a kid and telling the security guard whose son I was.
She said her whole family works in tourism on the island. We ran into Camila’s half brother several times—he looked a bit like Aquaman—driving guests around in a Hummer. Clearly, the Rapa Nui people have done pretty well for themselves thanks to their ancestors’ mysterious stone statues.
The darkly ironic part is that, based on current theories about Easter Island’s history, those ancestors may have pushed their stone-statue-building obsession too far, burning through massive natural resources and causing irreversible damage to what had once been a remarkably pristine island—nearly bringing their civilization to ruin for the first time.
There are nearly 900 moai of all sizes on the island. Given the conditions back then, that’s basically like building 900 office towers today—then getting hit by an economic downturn... At the moai factory, unfinished stone figures are everywhere, as if there had been no policy back then to guarantee project delivery.
Inside the moai factory, Rono Raraku, there are “unfinished developments” everywhere...
Not far from the quarry is probably the island’s most famous moai site: Tongariki, the fifteen stone figures. Even my idol, “Kucha Brothers,” has been there.
But my favorite was actually the moai at the entrance to Tongariki, which has a very special name: the “Traveler Moai.” It’s the only stone figure on the island that has a passport and has traveled abroad.
Years ago, a tsunami destroyed many of Easter Island’s relics. Later, with help from Japanese technology, these statues were raised back up again. To show their gratitude, the Rapa Nui people specially sent this moai to Japan for a visit.
The name “Traveler” really makes me feel a kinship with him.
Though calling him the only one to have gone abroad isn’t entirely accurate. Another, even more famous one has practically obtained permanent residency in the UK and has been living long-term in the British Museum.
Hello, my friend. Everything is well in your hometown.
Rapa Nui’s second destruction came with the Europeans of the Age of Exploration, who brought not only smallpox but also slavery. When the British Navy sailed here, they thought the statues looked nice and simply took one back as a birthday gift for Queen Victoria.
So its pedestal still waits in the crater of no Kau for this “lost friend” to come home.
I told the others I wanted to ride in the back of the pickup. The truck sped over the rolling road, with the plants by the roadside flying backward, wide stretches of slightly yellowed grass on both sides, giant clouds hanging unbelievably low, and the sea seeming to wait at the end of the road. The whole island opened before me like an ultra-wide 4D IMAX panorama. From Tongariki to the beach on the island’s north side
I stretched out behind the car like a giant starfish.
Anakena Beach, with its palm trees and sea breeze, was even more comfortable—so comfortable I didn’t want to get up. Under the gaze of the Nau Nau moai, I jumped into the icy South Pacific, then lay back down on the warm sand. Before I knew it, half the day had slipped by in the blink of an eye.
During those few days on the island, I was genuinely surprised by how many fellow Chinese travelers I ran into. I hadn’t expected so many people to make the long journey here too. Unfortunately, many of them came and went in a rush. The most extreme example was an elderly couple I’d met earlier on the cruise: they arrived on a flight at noon one day and left the very next day. A 10-hour round trip, no less. In theory, they should have been the people with the most time to spare.
Easter Island really is not the kind of place you should visit just to check it off a list.
Camila’s fiancé was waiting for us at the beach. One of them was 25, the other 22—so young to be getting married. The wedding was set for next February, right in front of the “great sea”! For the Rapa Nui, could there be a wedding venue with more ceremony and meaning than that?
Apparently, he completely won over her family by catching two huge fish while out at sea with his future father-in-law. He went to bring us drinks, and Camila watched him walk away and said with endless affection, “Other people’s husbands might work in an office. My man can climb trees to pick coconuts and dive into the sea to catch big fish.”
The next day I rented a bicycle from my host. The landlord was clearly well connected locally and ran a diversified operation: besides turning his large courtyard into a guesthouse, he also organized tours and resold performance tickets. He was sharp too—I even tried sneaking over with two other friends to buy discounted tickets, and still didn’t succeed.
I had planned to bike out to see the sunrise, but after pushing the bike 200 meters in the middle of the night, with pitch darkness all around me, I quietly retreated. I waited in the courtyard until the sky started to lighten, then set out again.
It was pure joy.
Pedaling hard in the morning glow, bumping along uneven dirt tracks, I sped all the way down the coast. At one long downhill stretch, I stood up with both hands off the handlebars and almost blurted out Jack’s classic line. Then I stood on the rocks by the sea and watched the sun rise out of the wild waves.
Aside from the occasional passing car, it really felt like this vast world—nature and me, and nothing else.
I rarely take selfies when I travel, so when I look through my photo album later, I usually judge how happy I was that day by the number of selfies I took. On this day, I left myself quite a lot of them.
Easter Island is stingy. She only shares her best side with people willing to appreciate her. I’ve met travelers who felt nothing for this place, and others who fell madly in love with it. On the journeys that followed, I only strongly recommended Easter Island to friends I knew would truly get it.
The small harbor in the center of town often had a whole group of sea turtles playing around, so we all called it Turtle Bay. The water was incredibly clear, and under the sun it sometimes turned into that coveted jelly-like turquoise sea.
Maybe it’s because Easter Island’s mysterious stone statues are so famous that people forget it’s also one of the Pacific’s top-tier islands. It can stand shoulder to shoulder with siblings like Tahiti, Fiji, and Samoa.
Even without luxury resort hotels, simply biking along the coast and watching the ever-changing colors of the sea is worth the trip all by itself.
Going out to fish is still an essential life skill for every Rapa Nui person. Children learn from a young age to play on small boats. These proud islanders have always carried a certain The Old Man and the Sea spirit—something complex and deeply felt in the way they relate to the ocean.
I really hope I can go back someday and become a happy islander like them, if only for a while.
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