Bike Tour of the Island

Because Easter Island is only about 25 miles long, it's the perfect size for an all-day bike tour. The two main roads on the island pretty much make a circuit, starting off on the southern coast, then cutting north to the beaches, and then back across the rolling volcanic hills of the interior. You pretty much see it all, with plenty of opportunities for historical stops and rainbows along the way. Most of the moai sites on the island remain toppled, and we passed several of them along the coast in the morning. We then reached Rano Raraku, and since I still hadn't been inside the crater (the shots in the previous post are only from the hill outside the volcano), we went in again. We then went to Tongariki and cut north to the beaches, where I left my friend Daniela, who wanted to do some swimming. But it looked like rain, so I headed back up the central volcano and across the interior. For most of my ride back, I was accompanied by drizzle and then a magnificent rainbow. Unfortunately for you, I had seen so many rainbows by this point that they had actually become unremarkable (!), so there's no record of it here. When I returned to Hanga Roa, I went back to the Church, where I had attended a service on Sunday morning. More on that in a future post, once I upload the video...

Rano Raraku, the quarry for all the moai on the island, sits on the side of a volcano. All the pictures of Rano Raraku in my previous post (below) were taken on the left flank of this hill. Click to enlarge it and see the moai. They were carved out of the stone at the top and then rolled down for further work.

This is the inside of the crater, distinguished by the vegetation growth from a fresh water supply (one of only two substantial supplies on the island, the other being at Orongo).

Inside the crater, you can see archaeologically preserved sites where researchers are actually digging the moai out of their pits to understand the carving process. You can see that about two-thirds of the moai was actually under ground. Carvers would stand around it etching patterns into its back.

Again, moai rest in various stages of being carved -- this one is in the very beginnings, not even dislodged from the hill yet. Its face is in the center, pointing up.

Daniela admires the moai inside the crater.

Can you imagine smelling grass for eternity? And wouldn't it tickle your nose?

A panorama of the crater lake at Rano Raraku

Back outside the crater, I took a few extra shots that I couldn't get on my previous visit because of lighting. This is actually the largest moai ever carved, though it was never dislodged from the mountain, and probably would have broken somewhere along the way. Once a moai broke, it lost its mana (spirit) and was abandoned. Over a year's worth of work, gone.

The various reposes of moai at Rano Raraku

Two here -- one with its face on the top left, and the other in the ground, face to the right.

Back down in Tongariki, you could look inland toward the volcano of Rano Raraku.

Daniela, in the lower right, gives you a good sense of the scale of Tongariki.

Click to enlarge.

Some of the topknots that were washed inland have been lined up at the site. The topknots, a red pumice, were actually carved at a different quarry, further west on the island -- not Rano Raraku in the background.

A petroglyph of a turtle animates the site at Tongariki.

The only church on the island -- more on this to come.