A new day of exploration in front of us, since it was coldish yesterday I felt like putting on long pants today…turned out: hot like hell hiking up the volcano! First a few km to get around the airport, then we start a path up the Rano Kau crater and the Orongo national park. The path to the top is kind of steep, but the view of the island from the top of the volcano is pretty nice! The crater is now full of different floating plants and will remain like that until the ocean digs through its edge, turning it into a lagoon. The national park is a conservation of old stone houses the native population used during the final period before colonization, and look quite advanced for that time!
Today we need to get up relatively early in order to make it to our full-day tour of the island. It helps a lot with the great breakfast that Oscar prepares: fresh tropical fruits, avocado, toast, marmalade and, juice blended on the spot. Prepared for a warm and sunny day we instead get a pretty windy and cold one, but the temperature here doesn’t get so extreme and it’s impossible to feel uncomfortable.
La Isla, that is how the local people call their homeland, the most remote populated island on earth. And if it’s true that all islands have that special charm, that sense of being different from the continent, it’s even more true when the continent they belong to is so far away. This is the case of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, as it’s its original name. The island is very small, just 20 Km in length of triangular shape, where the corners, which are long extinct volcanoes, were the first to be formed during the island’s creation. Our plane arrives in Easter Island at 6 in the morning, and as we hadn’t booked accommodation in advance we rely on someone at the airport offering us something. We are sure lucky enough that the someone in question is Oscar which is a super nice and friendly guy with a lovely guesthouse. He drives us the 2-300 meters there, we leave our luggage and immediately walk to the sea to see the sun set. The place is wonderful, simple houses scattered around, nice gardens with plenty of vegetation, mango and avocado trees and few horses here and there.