What they don’t tell you when you sign up for a cruise that includes Easter Island (but the veteran travelers know) is that chances are at best 50-50 as to whether you will actually reach land.  Our cruise director said she’d been to Easter Island twice but attempted it 5 times.  It is a tender port and that requires more cooperation from the sea than a port where you park at a pier.  Getting 800-900 landlubbers from a ship to a tender and from a tender to a dock is…not easy. 

Rain was predicted but only some showers materialized.  The port authorities boarded and cleared the ship to go ashore.  The sea looked reasonably calm to me, but apparently there was a significant swell, and it was too much to risk sending passengers ashore.  You can see from the first photo there were significant waves crashing against the shore.

So, instead we circumnavigated the island.  An islander stayed aboard and narrated (over the speaker system) a bit of the history and what we were seeing.  (I gather he managed to disembark and return to land before we headed for the open sea.)  It was disappointing but…  We saw the most commonly photographed row of moai from the deck but they were too far away to really see—or to get a good picture of with a phone camera though my attempt is shown above.  The photo shows a bit of the volcano nearby from whose lava rock all the moai were carved. I was definitely glad I had seen the one at the Fonck Museum in Valpariso (and photographed it).

Our local guide also talked about the former Birdman competition (this was well after the creation of the lava stone moai.)  The island was populated by several tribes and which tribe provided the overall leader was determined by the competition.  A bird laid eggs every spring on one of the islets offshore and each tribe provided a competitor to dive from the cliffs, swim to the islet, collect an egg and return with it (unbroken) to the top of the cliff.  The tribe of the first to arrive successfully provided the ruler for the coming year.

To be honest, to learn about Easter Island and the moai statues (and to see good photos), you’re better off using the internet than my trying to summarize it.  Or maybe I’m just bummed I didn’t get to see them first hand.

Since we couldn’t go ashore on Easter Island, instead of having 3 sea days, 1 land day, then 5 sea days, we have 9 sea days before Tahiti.  I believe that’s more in a row than scheduled any time on this cruise.  Lots of bridge!