As a keen traveller and photographer, I’m always looking for the next opportunity when I can combine the two and so what better way to celebrate my 40th birthday than with a trip-of-a-lifetime to a tiny island in the South Pacific – a journey that has been in the making for 10 years.
In my 30th year, I knew I was going to do this. I love the fact that when I tell people I’m going to Easter Island they have no clue where it is but as soon as I mention the ‘heads’, they instantly know what I’m talking about.
In order to get to my destination, I must fly to Madrid, from here connect and fly to Santiago, Chile, before catching another connecting flight to Easter Island. The journey will take approximately 22-24 hours.
My plan is to travel around the island for four days looking for photo opportunities and soaking up the atmosphere of the island, I’ll also spending several days in the Chilean capital hopefully catching some sweet back drop views of the Andes.
The island’s ‘Moai’ statues – the large stone heads that have become synonymous with the island, have been there for approximately a thousand years, all 887 are dotted all around the island.
“Rapa Nui” as its know is a polynesian island. The name “Easter Island” was given by the island’s first recorded European visitor, the dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered it on Easter Sunday 1722. Easter Island is one of the world’s most isolated inhabited islands. Its closest inhabited neighbour is Pitcairn Island, 1,289 miles to the west, and 2,335 miles to the east from its protecter and territory, Chile.
The average height of the Moai is about 13.3 ft high, with the average width at the base around 5.25 ft across. These massive creations usually weigh in at around 13.8 tons a piece. However! The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 33 ft high and weighed 82 tons, the heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons; and one unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 69 ft tall with a weight of about 270 tons.
Today its population sits at around 5,806 and is a sub-tropical island once covered completely by a forest of trees, this tiny blip in the ocean is now almost bare, due mostly to moving of the heads, all done by mans strength alone, a feet which is very hard to fathom.
The island is about 15.3 miles long by 7.6 miles at its widest point; its overall shape is triangular. It has an area of 63.2 sq miles, and a maximum altitude of 1,663 ft.
Rest assured I will be plotting the next trip in my head even before i’ve arrived! Something I think will be very hard to top. So please stop by a few times in the forth coming months and i’ll do everything I can to bring some awesome images of the famous mighty “Moai” and its people.
