Postcards from Kevin: Easter Island

One of the last frontiers on the global travel map

By Kevin Raub
Published: Jun 03, 2008

I'm not one to get swept away. Being a travel writer is glamorous, yes…but it's still a job. And like any job, you get jaded quickly. Think you want to be a restaurant reviewer? Try knocking back decadent nine-course meals four nights week and get back to me in a month. Think you want to be a music critic? Try live concerts and requisite partying five night’s a week and get back to me in…well….a week. Same goes for travel writing. If you think TSA got on your nerves on your recent Bahamian weekend escape, try dealing with them on 20 flights a month, and every other country's security (including those in which you can't say word one in the native language) on the 20 flights back and get back to me. It's irritating.

But I'm not complaining. It's a cush job, no doubt. All I'm saying is that deserted island cove bookended by gorgeous palm trees and shrouded in sugary sands does indeed look a lot like the other 15 we sunk our toes into this past year. My point to all of this is that it's rare that we find a place that still shakes our foundations. But here I find myself in Easter Island, one of the most isolated pieces of real estate in the world (1180 miles from the next nearest anything) and one of the last frontiers on the global travel map (only 40,000 or so visit here per year) and the island has sunk it's nails deep into my soul. Easter Island is, in fact, so fascinating, you don’t even have to get caught up in the mysterious history (the history that has left the iconic stone moai statues peppered around the island like fallen soldiers left behind) to find yourself being swept away by the place.

Easter Island is a collision of two of my most favorite cultures – the sultry Latin swagger of Chile, to which the island belongs, and Polynesia, to which it identifies with. Everything from the burning eyes of the locals to the swing in their hips to the hybrid cuisine is a marriage of the two, but at the same time, it feels oddly like neither one. I have no explanation why, and that fascinates me.

Take Ovahe, for instance, my guide on the island, who works for explora in Rapa Nui, the third installment of Chilean entrepreneur Pedro Ibáñez's remote hotel concept that began with a solitary Patagonian property in Torres del Paine National Park in 1993, followed in 1998 by his second property in the deadly dry Atacama Desert. Her sad eyes pierce through me as she teaches me about the windswept landscapes here, how the strange Birdman Cult that flourished in the 1800's built the ceremonial village of Orongo on the sides of Rano Kau, a massive volcanic crater; her theories as to why nearly all the trees here up and disappeared in the 20th Century; or why horses outnumber people here four-to-one.

She is the daughter of a well-known French deep-sea diver who has worked with Jacques Cousteau, and a simple local woman not unlike her. Clearly, her father was swept away here, too, falling instantly in love with her mother, a woman who lived in isolation on a tiny Polynesian Island miles from nowhere. Ovahe speaks English, French, Spanish and Rapa Nui (that I know of), but it's her sad eyes that hide her story, just another of the island's mysterious secrets (you can see her in this commercial for Ventisquero wine.) She is by far the most un-pindownable and un-readable woman I have ever met; and therefore one of the most captivating (though I won’t be walking away here a father, too - I'm married, people!). I feel the exact same way about Easter Island.

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