What? Are You Kidding Me? This Seems Impossible!

Easter Island! 

We have been moving around a lot in the last few days, and skipping between time zones.   In Mexico we were two hours ahead of Oregon, then Bolivia was four hours, then Chile was five hours, and now we are on Easter Island, back to three hours. 

Easter Island is one of those unique places with scenery like nowhere else on earth.   It's a place that has always been fascinating to us.   We arrived a couple days ago from Santiago, Chile (more about that later).

It's a long flight from the west coast of South America far out into the Pacific Ocean, and takes a while to get here.  Easter Island is kind of in the middle of the South Pacific, thousands of miles from anywhere.  

Which makes it all the more amazing when you see what's here.  Giant stone carved human figures with oversize heads.

The heads are shrouded in mystery.  How did they get here?  How old are they?  Who made them?  How did they move them and stand them up?   Why did they do this?  And what does it mean?

Some of these questions were answered, but many remain unknown.  The scale of this blog does not allow for a full explanation, and indeed there is much conjecture and multiple theories about this place.  

There are hundreds of them on this rather small island, and many of them are in ruins, or various states of disrepair.  Archaeologists, such as the late Thor Heyerdahl, have been at work here for sixty or seventy years digging them up and reconstructing them.  

So we made our way around the island visiting several sites and being impressed and indeed astonished at what we saw.  Pictures tell the story best.  It's a bit hard to see how big they are in a photo, but most of them are twenty to thirty feet tall and weigh around 20 tons. 


Early Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen landed here on Easter day in 1722, hence the name, and Captain Cook made it more well known in 1774.  It's part of Chile and they call it Isla de Pascua (Easter Island in Spanish) - of course, the locals have a different name for the place "Rapa Nui".

We have another day and a half here. We won't soon forget this wonderful tropical island in the middle of nowhere, with awe inspiring scenes.

Earlier, in Chile 

After we left Valpariso, on the Chile coast, we headed back to Santiago for a visit and to see a close friend.   Actually she is not physically close, but in some ways almost like a family member.  Our friend Veronica is doing well.

And a personal focus for me is the wine industry (many readers of this blog may be aware that I have a wine business).  We made a special trip to visit a historic winery not too far out of town.  It is the Santa Rita winery and is over 140 years old.  

The wine business goes back a long way in Chile, and they make world class wines.  This particular winery operation was very professional with high standards, in a great setting.  

They make excellent top notch Carmenere (a Chilean flag ship red wine) along with many whites and other reds.   Their "library" of archived wines held in storage goes back over a hundred years.

And their wine cellar, in the true sense of the word, is underground; it's amazing to see and behold.  I want to be like these guys when I grow up!  However, in order to have this kind of establishment, you need to start a long time ago ...

The vast grounds were well kept too, with wonderful gardens for wandering through.  Lovely flowers were everywhere, thriving in the mild sunny climate.

We have enjoyed (that's an understatement!) our time in South America, and tomorrow evening we continue on across the Pacific where we will just keep heading west.