Hanga Roa has its charms, but you're not there to see the town. To get to the moai, which are all over the island, you can rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle for about $60 a day or take the many guided half- or full-day tours. With our tight schedule, we opted for the tours. It's not a setup that allows much flexibility or privacy, but someone else is navigating the unpaved roads and making sure you get at least the basics.
Our days started early, because the most common of the island's four or five bird species is the chicken. And no matter what you have been led to believe, roosters don't all crow at dawn. Some like to get a jump on a hard day's crowing while it's still dark.
Giant sculptures dominate the landscape and add some unsolved mystery to Easter Island, Chile.
(Walter Bibikow - Taxi/Getty Images)
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Our first morning's drive was a sampling of sites -- a few standing moai, a few fallen ones, some caves and pictographs -- a taste of the dead civilization, and a chance for our guide, Tina, to bring everyone up to speed on the basic story, in English and Spanish.
The next day, we were up with the chickens for the most spectacular reminders of the old civilization -- a morning spent largely at Rano Raraku, the quarry from which the moai were carved.
Inside the crater of that extinct volcano, and along its slopes, are hundreds of statues in all stages of creation, each with a somber face, stylized ears and hands held to its sides. No photograph can capture the scale of it, although every visitor had to try. Some statues still lie on their backs, part of the rock. Others were abandoned as they were being moved down the hill. This procession of stone heads explains why, in Rapa Nui legend, the moai walked from their birthplaces to their ahus, or platforms.
However, inescapably, real life overtook legend. On Rano Raraku, the moai stopped walking. The details are cloudy, but it's easy to speculate. There came a time when the islanders could no longer support the artisans. In the aftermath of ecological disaster, in a world with no trees and little food, who needed more statues?
If Rano Raraku stuns with its otherworldly beauty and its sobering message, Ahu Tongariki tells another story.
The 15 moai of Ahu Tongariki stand at Easter Island's edge, their weather-beaten gray backs turned to the sea. They keep watch on an empty, wind-swept plain beneath an endless sky.
With so many of the old ancestors lined up on one platform, it's easy to see that they are all different. Stylized, yes, but different. There's one with a pot belly. There's one with an upturned nose, another with a long chin. Some of the looniest Easter Island theorists say space aliens made the statues. But here, it's obvious that, like those who created them and destroyed them and then, many years later, restored them, they were all human.
It was summer south of the equator, and sunset came late, but tours still ended before 5 p.m. Easter Island is on its own offbeat version of daylight saving time, which makes sunset even later. That meant we had several hours of daylight each evening in Hanga Roa.
