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Trip Overview |
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Walk among mysterious statues An illustrated itinerary of one of our many gay travel adventures. This information supplements our Easter Island is for the truly adventurous. This remote island is one of the least visited but most fascinating archeological sites in the world. Hanns Ebensten conducted the first tourist expedition there 40 years ago, and wrote about it in his book Trespassers on Easter Island. It still remains an enigma of history and culture today.
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1: Arrival on Easter Island
Unless spending some time in Chile enroute to Easter Island, most travelers will depart from home the day before the first tour day, and take an overnight flight via Miami, New York or Los Angeles to Santiago. These flights have a convenient connection to a LanChile non-stop flight to Easter Island (about five and a half hours), arriving in the early afternoon. After landing at the large airstrip on Easter Island, Chile's most remote outpost - we check in at the small Aloha Nui Hotel, where the Rapahango-Edmunds family has welcomed Hanns Ebensten Travel groups for over three decades. Following is a tentative itinerary for exploring the island. The daily agenda will depend on weather and the interests of the group, but we will visit each of the locations described here. In the afternoon, we visit the ceremonial village of Orongo and inspect its large basalt rocks with petroglyphs of birdmen and the god Make-Make. This is a famous site for the cult of the birdmen. Each July until 1866, men raced down the steep cliffs and across the rough seas to the islets of Motu Nui, Motu Iti and Motu Kao in a quest to secure the first egg laid each year by the sooty tern.
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2: Easter Island Discovery
We begin with a trip to the Ahu Tahai, an excellent introduction to the island's archeological sites, exhibiting five statues restored by Dr. William Mulloy and Mr. Gonzalo Figueroa in the early 1960s. An ahu is a large outdoor altar, usually bearing statues, and often used for burials with rubble-filled platforms containing tombs. We will visit the fascinating museum of Father Sebastian Englert, the island's parish priest from 1935-1969, and an inspiration to Hanns Ebensten when Hanns escorted the first group of American travelers to Easter Island in the 1960s. Lunch is a special picnic served at Anakena Beach, where it is believed that the first Polynesian settlers arrived on the island over 1000 years ago. In the afternoon we drive to Puna Pau to see the slopes from which dark red cylinders of stone were quarried. They were placed on top of the statues either to resemble the tuft of hair that ancient Easter Islanders knotted at the top of their heads, or as ceremonial hats. Our tour continues to the island's south coast to view the Ahu Vinapu. Time permitting, we will then explore the Ana Kai Tangata, "the cave where men are eaten." With the surf breaking below, it is a forbidding place and a reminder of the period when islanders practiced cannibalism.
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3: Free Day on Easter Island
Today offers a chance to leisurely explore Easter Island's only village, or perhaps to take an optional horseback ride across the island's rugged meadows or a guided hike to a remote headland. Late this evening, we are likely to be able to watch a cultural performance, complete with pageantry, musicians singing both Rapa Nui and Spanish songs, and amazingly energetic dances, performed by young men and women wearing primarily body paint. 
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4-5: Ahu Akivi, Faces to the Sea
During the next two days, we will enjoy two more leisurely half-day tours, as well as have time to try individual activities. Our touring will include a trip to see Ahu Akivi, the seven statues facing the sea. Legend says they represent the seven princes who came to Easter Island from mythical Hiva, to prepare the island for the arrival of King Hotu Matu'a. We continue to Ahu Tongariki, where fifteen moai have been re-erected along a dramatic coastline with deep blue waves crashing against a stark cliff and the rocks below. Later, we explore Rano Raraku, the most fascinating and dramatic site on the island with hundreds of stone figures, many unfinished, on the outer and inner rims of the extinct volcano. Its bowl-shaped crater is filled with water and tortora reeds, and is often used as a watering hole by wild horses. A picnic lunch will be served nearby. On our last evening, we will have our farewell dinner.
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6: Homeward Bound
The morning is free to rest until our early afternoon flight back to Santiago. It arrives in time to connect to overnight flights home, via Miami, New York or Los Angeles. Most North American and European travelers will arrive home on Day 7 of this tour, with Day 1 being the day we arrive on Easter Island. Please see our FAQs for this tour for details about our post-trip 4-night tour of Santiago, Valparaiso, Vina del Mar and the Andean foothills, including stops at a couple of Chile's most thriving vineyards!
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