Greetings, fellow gringo traveler!  In this article, I’m going to tell you everything you know you need to know to get your whitebread self, to and from Easter Island; and you will not only come home safe, but happy and entertained, from your vacation. 

Critically, I’m not going to tell you anything that you can’t read elsewhere. Easter Island, and Chile in general, will reward every single minute that you spend researching your destination, before you travel. I did read every single travel manual and guide before travelling, and I read every single hotel and attraction review as well, though it was thirsty work. So, if you are lazy, I will save you the trouble of reading those. Reading is hard, and it may be dangerous, so delegate the task whenever possible.

Background

Basics first. The history of Easter Island, is a history of exploitation.  Polynesians, with their fantastic ocean orienteering, got here first, over a millennium ago. Polynesians consistently tried to outdo one another by building larger and more bodacious moai.  They then began knocking one another’s moai down, because it’s just rude to have any moai standing that are taller than your own moai.  The Spanish arrived after them, promptly infecting the Polynesians, enslaving them, and deporting them from the island.  The Spaniards then tried to infest the island with sheep, but the sheep didn’t like it.  So instead, they infested the island with tourists, but the tourists were evil and threw too much trash everywhere, destroying the island for a third time. Then Pinochet came, and said the island was to be owned by the natives, but nearly all the natives have been sold as slaves some centuries earlier.  And lo, it came to pass that Easter Island was a stunningly beautiful bastion, with money and poverty and a thousand conflicting origin stories, all living right on top one another.

Anyway, that’s enough history for now, let’s get to travel details.

Before you travel

Before you leave on your trip, you’ll need to print out details of your hotel reservation on the island, because those details will be checked by customs, before you’re allowed to board the flight from Santiago to Easter Island.  Yes, it’s much easier to print this out before you leave home.

Also, while you’re at home, choose and reserve a tour guide for the island.  You’re not allowed to simply wander into any of the National Park areas without a local, licensed guide.  After going back and forth with a few Rapa Nui tour companies, we finally settled on Rapa Nui Dream, which seems to have an excellent relationship with its local guides. Remember that anytime you’re hiring a tour company, they’re actually farming out the work to a local, so you want to work with the tour company that has great respect for those locals and for the sanctity of the moai.  Rapa Nui Dream was also able to hook us up with some gentle spelunking and horseriding experiences.  We loved our guides and they did a fantastic job taking care of us – highest recommendation for Rapa Nui Dream.

Also also, while you’re at home, buy your tickets to the Rapa Nui National Park online.  If it’s a moai and it’s somewhere on the island, then it’s almost certainly within the Rapa Nui National Park system, and you will need a licensed guide to take you there.  Make sure you enter your passport information perfectly into the National Park form.  My girlfriend messed up one measly digit on the passport number in this form, and one of the park rangers got pissy about it.  

Make sure that your cell phone, and your service, works in Chile. I use Google Fi, and it worked fine, in Santiago at least — but see below for more advice on Google Fi on Easter Island. Oh, and your stateside power plugs won’t work here: Chile uses types C and L power plugs, so be sure to get some plug type converters, ideally ones that have USB charging compatibility built in; and make sure your electrical devices are cool with 220V at 50 Hz.

Anytime you travel anywhere in the world, it’s always polite to know some of the local language, for getting directions, buying things, and making new friends.  I used the Duolingo app to refresh my Spanish, and once I was in immersion mode in Chile, I was pleased to find that I could carry on extended conversations with patient locals.  Only a tiny minority of people in Chile speak English, so you should at least learn a few survival phrases before you go there.

For most places in the northern hemisphere, Easter Island is at least an 11-hour flight from wherever you are to Santiago, and then an additional 5-hour flight from Santiago to Easter Island.  Now if you are broke or insane or both, you will probably try to fly through this Santiago connection to Easter Island. Don’t do this, if you can help it. An 11-hour flight is unpleasant enough, and you will need a little break before that additional flight and the additional customs difficulties required. Instead, have the wisdom to break up your flight into multiple pieces, with one round trip to Santiago, and an additional embedded round trip from Santiago to Easter Island.  This will give you a chance to experience Santiago, which is absolutely worth a visit in its own right, and which will also permit you to get more or less adjusted to the time zone.

Santiago 

So, we will take a short detour to Santiago for a long stopover.  Santiago is the most advanced city in South America, and the nicer parts are just as witty and urbane as the best of San Francisco or Los Angeles.  Santiago is a big city though, and it has many of the problems that every other big city on the planet has. If you’re a jet-lagged gringo coming into Santiago for the first time, you’ll want to stay towards the safer northeastern zone of Santiago, which are the pricey and touristy bits that you see in all the travel magazines.

If you do decide to stay in Santiago, I can’t say enough good things about the Hotel Boutique Le Reve as a base of operations in the city.  Staff members are multilingual, friendly, and fantastically helpful – they are the ace in the hole of this small but elegant hotel.  The rooms are small but exquisite.

Other cards in this winning hand include the hotel’s facade, which is a great place to get your profile picture taken if you’re a local:

Also wonderful is the hotel’s location, which is smack in the middle of the nicest part of Santiago, and offers lots of pleasant and safe walking exploration in all directions from its central point.

Getting from the Santiago airport to your hotel can be tricky.  When you get out of a passport control at the airport, there’s a very small area where you can rent “oficial” taxi and rideshare services to your Santiago destination.  Don’t use them; just go to the Transvip counter in this secure area, which you can see in this helpful video.  You can rent a shared bus or a private one to get you where you’re going.  Be aware that there are multiple other taxi companies in Santiago that refer to themselves as “oficial”; I don’t trust any of them.  If you wander out into the main terminal and oficial-looking people demand that you get in their taxi, you’re about to oficialy get swindled.  Nothing you’ve never seen before, if you’ve ever been through LaGuardia.  If you were smart and went with Transvip, look for their particular orange vests. Although it’s tempting to try to use Uber from the airport, I don’t recommend it — there’s no official Uber pickup point at the airport, and Uber is not technically legal here, though everyone uses it.

Don’t rent a car in Santiago.  There’s an incredibly complicated system of paying off the locals, in order to get preferred spots, and you’re not ready for that yet.  Moreover, even the locals don’t trust the official taxis of Santiago; the taxis like to cadge extra money off those who are unfamiliar with the area.  By all means, use the Uber app to get from place to place, once you’re established in Santiago.

In Santiago, we happened randomly on Giratorio, which is a Seattle Space-Needle style rotating restaurant near the Boutique Le Reve. I was expecting tourist quality food from a restaurant that spins, but the seafood dishes were brilliant.  Another solid base hit was Bocanariz, another restaurant focusing on Chilean seafood and Chilean wines.  As a general rule, Chileans themselves don’t give a shit about wine; they prefer the hard stuff, and the vast majority of Chile and wine is grown, made, and shipped overseas to the gringos.  And that’s a damn shame, because there is a beautiful winery in the eastern part of Santiago called Cousiño Macul that is absolutely worth a few of your hours.  You’ll need reservations for that winery, but the high-end tasting tour is worth its price:

A standard touristy thing to do in Santiago is to go to the top of the Sky Costanera, the tallest building in South America, from which you can see the snowcapped Andes:

And another standard touristy thing to do in Santiago is to see the Catedral Metropolitana de Santiago, just off of the Plaza de Armas:

At some point, you’ll be offered the opportunity to eat a completo, which is the Chilean national dish. This is basically a hot dog with horrifying quantities of avocado and mayonnaise slathered all over it.  The locals swear by it, but I tried to eat one and almost died in the attempt. I had a much better experience with the pisco sour, which the Chileans and the Peruvians both claim as their own national cocktail, and happily fight with each other over.  French fries are also considered to be a vegetable here, and available in mass quantities at meals.  Chile is not a place for vegans, or for people of slight or fading constitutions generally:

Tipping in Chile is a straight 10%, automatically added by the credit card machine at the end of the meal. The credit card machine will be brought to your table; if the card ever leaves your sight, it’s generally because the cardholder wants to put a few extralegal charges onto it, so keep an eye open.  American style tipping of higher amounts is appreciated, if the service warrants it, but is not required.

While you’re in Santiago, stop into one of the many pharmacy or technology stores, and pick up an Entel SIM card for your trip to Easter Island.  You can’t get these without being in Chile, so don’t bother trying in advance. On my trip, Entel was selling a SIM card with a one-week subscription and 1 GB of data, for 300 CLP, which is dirt cheap.  When you get to the island, you will discover that the two major carriers working there are Entel, which is the big huge Chilean cellular carrier, and Movistar, which is the smaller startup with fewer cellular towers and poorer quality service.  Activate the card, the day before you leave for the island.  In the States, I have cellular service with Google Fi, which has a deal with Movistar, and thus Fi has occasional service in Hanga Roa; but you’ll find that Entel has much better service in more places on the island. Still, keep in mind that the great majority of the island has no cellular service. In Hanga Roa, you’re covered, but if your car breaks down on the far side of the island, you ain’t calling for help.

Valparaiso

Santiago doesn’t actually sit on the coast; it’s about an hour inland.  However, its equivalent coastal city, Valparaiso, is an hour drive away by a tour bus or car.  And Valparaiso is absolutely worth a single day of touring, if you can afford the time.

Chile’s association with street art is a long and complicated one. It was the preferred method of rebellion against a militaristic government in the 1960s and ’70s, and the method of expression stuck, especially in Valparaiso, where the quality of the art is jaw-dropping:

Rather than driving out to Valparaiso yourself, you’ll get more bang for your buck if you hop one of the Viator tour buses, and let someone else ferry you about to see the sights.

Some massive, exceptionally local, South American sea lions in Valparaiso:

Easter Island

Easter Island subsists entirely on tourist money.  I chose to spread my money liberally around the island, giving out lots of tips to the locals. Please do similarly, whenever warranted; the locals depend on you, as much as you depend on them.

Only native Rapa Nui people are permitted to own land here.  This is one of the few positive legacies of Pinochet, whose influence can still be felt throughout Chile.  The roads and many of the houses are in rough shape. Practically everything that you live in, or eat here, needs to be brought from the mainland, at considerable cost.

Once you board the flight to Easter Island, you’ll need to make a couple mental adjustments.  All of Chile exists on the same time zone, but on the island, time moves at a vague and unpredictable pace; so you must get out of thinking of time in the Western sense.  Tour buses and guides will show up when they show up, and you’ll be served or helped when they get around to it, and rather than get all scrofulated about it, you had best realize that that’s the pace of things on Rapa Nui.

A gorgeous base of operations for Easter Island, if you can foot the bill, is Hotel Ohana.  They’ll get you started in your day with coffee and an omellette or other Continental type breakfasts. If you’re feeling like hiding at the end of the day, they’ll make you a dinner with pizza or something like.  The rooms are not huge, but they’re pretty, and they’re the biggest on the island.

If you have free minutes at night, download a free astronomy app like Stellarium, and wander out into the hotel’s large yard to explore the new stars. Here are many galaxies that you have never explored before; and, depending on the time you go out, you may be able to see the Southern Cross with your own eyes.

You could probably survive on Rapa Nui without a car, but renting one is recommended.  There’s no such thing as Uber on the island, and the taxi services are practically non-existent.  Renting a car on Easter Island will be a small adventure in and of itself.  You’re not familiar with any of the car rental companies, and none of them have great reviews.  Eventually, I held my nose and went with Oceanic.  Toki, on the other end of the WhatsApp conversation for Oceanic, was extremely friendly and polite, but he didn’t send any written quote or confirmation of the exact amount I pay, other than saying I would spend 120 USD per day.  Everything on the island is extremely informal, so I went with it.  When I got to the island, I was picked up by Oceanic and brought to their main office.  My particular car – a Grand Vitara – looked fine and was in good condition, though many of the cars were in rough shape.  It wasn’t until the credit card came out, that I deduced the scam.  The company quoted me at a rate of 120 USD per day.  They then converted that amount to Chilean pesos, at a rate of 1 USD equals 100 CLP, which is an absurdly expensive conversion rate.  That, in turn, jacked up my rate to about 160 USD per day.  Perhaps I should have fought it on the spot, but I didn’t feel like it after the flight, and you won’t feel like it either.  I get the sense that the car rental companies are used to being yelled at a lot, around Easter Island.  To avoid this particular scam, negotiate all rates with car rental companies in Chilean pesos, and make sure that they accept your particular credit card, before you agree to the rental.

To make things even more exciting, there’s no such thing as car rental insurance anywhere on the island, and the car insurance you currently own doesn’t work here. Don’t crash into anything or anyone while you’re here.

Anyway, you’re probably on Easter Island to see the moai, and you definitely should, but as mentioned above, you are legally required to have a local guide and a park ticket in order to see those moai.  If park rangers catch you trying to sneak in, they will generally find you and chase you off.

The moai are incredible and wonderful, but rather than rewrite their history here, I’ll summarize the important bits for your guided tour.  Bring hiking boots.  It rains at odd times on the island, and there’s plenty of mud and unstable ground everywhere.  Don’t listen if your tour agency tells you that tennis shoes are fine.  It’s difficult to convey the size of the moai in a photograph, so try to get human beings in the frame with moai as well, to establish size.  Bring a bottle of water and sunblock along with you.  It can get fantastically windy or rainy on the island at a moment’s notice, so be ready for any type of weather.

If you have some time when you’re not on a guided tour, head over to Plaza Hotu Matu’a, and witness the scintillating blue harbor.  It’s a great place to chat with the local sea turtles:

Stop into the Sernatur office there, ask if there’s anything fun going on, and get your passport stamped with an adorable stamp.  Your lawful neutral girlfriend may be concerned that it is not an official passport stamp, and that miserable countries like Niger and Chad may reject your entry upon seeing your adorable unofficial Rapa Nui stamp in your passport, but generally you can bribe your girlfriend off with more pisco sour.  You may purchase said pisco sour at Oheho Surf Cafe, a few steps from Sernatur.  Oheho is an ideal place to get drunk and watch the brilliant ocean with the other gringos.  The seafood is excellent, but they offer gringo burgers as well.  If you do order a gringo burger, do not order french fries separately; just take the default fries that go with the meal.  If you order additional fries, they will provide you with approximately 80 kg of fried potatoes, and you will have to carry them all out yourself, and you will probably break something.

At some point on the island, you’ll be encouraged to go see a local theatrical show, which will be billed to you as a truly authentic Rapa Nui experience.  The biggest show is Te Ra’ai, which will serve you plenty of indifferently seasoned seafood, anesthetic drinks, Hispanic musicians playing Western instruments, and a high energy, low clothing dance show.  Like so many other things on the island, this particular style of music and dance was imported by Hispanic migrants, who brought their own musical stylings and their own fevered imaginations of what native dance might have been like.  It’s merely happy bullshit, just a good old fashioned bikini cheesecake show, of a style that became politically incorrect in the United States about 40 years ago. But it’s still running strong here, and it’s suckering in the wide-eyed rubes by the busload. My Gen-X ironic self absolutely loved every single instant of it:

Many of the mercados on Easter Island are a little rough around the edges. If you need snacks or drinks for the room, stop by Henua Market, which is an entirely cute market that caters to well heeled tourists like yourself.  Plenty of fancy chocolate, nice bread, and pisco sour mix.

Do not bring your dog to Easter Island. There are plenty of dogs on Easter Island, and you will be supplied with one wherever you go:

Generally, said dogs are friendly and good at convincing you to pet them and give them food. Chile believes in the viability of communal dogs, who are simultaneously owned and unowned by everyone. Do not attempt to take communal dogs home from Easter Island in your luggage or carryon. Actually, don’t attempt to bring anything at all home from Easter Island, including those pretty volcanic rocks. Customs will find them when they search your luggage at the airport, and they will take those rocks back from you. Tourist stuff is fine to buy, of course; just don’t steal rocks, or dogs:

And there’s horseys, my girlfriend reminds me; did you forget about the horseys? Yes, there are plenty of wild horseys about on Rapa Nui; approach them only if you speak horsey fluently.

And there are chickens too, did you forget about those? Well, yes, I did forget about them. Nevertheless, the advice against bringing them home in luggage, applies doubly for horsies and trebly for chickens.

Thesis

Since I cannot come up with a proper thesis for this article, and I am lazy, I asked my girlfriend to do so. The thesis for this article is, therefore, that Easter Island is “topknots up“. She conveyed the phrase simultaneously with raising both thumbs.

They say that when Carl Friedrich Gauss was eight, he discovered a secret for quickly adding all the numbers from 1 to 100.

Now, I’m going to teach you a trick I discovered, for adding up all the numbers from 1 to a number, where said number starts with 1, followed by one or more zeros.

So, for example, this cute trick only works for 10, or 1000, or 1000000000000, but not 13040.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Start with the number that you want to add up to. We’ll call it N.
2. Count the number of trailing zeros in it.
3. Subtract one from that number.
4. Let’s call that result K.
5. Now, to start writing the answer, write down a 5.
6. Write K zeros after it.
7. Now, write down a 5.
8. Now, write K zeros after it.
9. You’re done!

Let’s do an example with 10000.

1. Start with the number that you want to add up to. We’ll call it N. (N is 10000)
2. Count the number of trailing zeros in it. (4)
3. Subtract one from that number. (3)
4. Let’s call that result K. (K = 3)
5. Now, to start writing the answer, write down a 5. (5)
6. Write K zeros after it. (5000)
7. Now, write down a 5. (50005)
8. Now, write K zeros after it. (50005000)
9. You’re done! (Adding all the numbers from 1 to 10000 gives you 50005000.)

$$
\begin{aligned}
j \in \mathbb{N}: \sum_{n=1}^{10^{j}}n &= \frac{10^{j}(10^{j}+1)}{2} \\
&= \frac{10^{2j}+10^{j}}{2} \\[10pt]
&= 5 \times 10^{2j-1}+5 \times 10^{j-1} \\
\end{aligned}
$$

Dear ChatGPT:

I want a spicy short story that includes floor wax, dessert toppings,
skunks, pantaloons, chickens, and puffy porcupines, and reading, and
more chickens.

“Pantaloons and Porcupines: A Spicy Tale of Skunks, Chicken, and Desires”

Mary was a quiet and shy girl who loved nothing more than curling up
with a good book. She spent most of her days reading in her small
cabin in the woods, surrounded by her beloved pets – a flock of
free-range chickens, a curious skunk, and a puffy porcupine that liked
to nestle in her lap as she read.

One day, while Mary was waxing the floors of her cabin, a handsome
stranger named Jack came knocking at her door. He was dressed in a
pair of pantaloons that hugged his muscular thighs and a tight-fitting
shirt that accentuated his chiseled chest. Mary felt her heart skip a
beat as she gazed into his dark eyes.

Jack had come to Mary’s cabin to ask for her help in making a special
dessert for his mother’s birthday party. He had heard that Mary was a
master at creating delectable desserts and wanted to impress his
family with something truly unique.

Mary was flattered by Jack’s request and agreed to help him. They
spent the next few hours in Mary’s kitchen, mixing together various
dessert toppings and flavors until they came up with a scrumptious and
beautiful cake.

As they were finishing up the cake, Jack noticed the skunk playing
around with the puffy porcupine on Mary’s lap. He couldn’t help but
laugh at the sight of the two unlikely friends.

Mary blushed and smiled, feeling grateful for Jack’s company and his
easy laughter. She realized that she had been missing out on the joys
of life by reading alone in her cabin all the time.

Feeling emboldened by Jack’s presence, Mary suggested they take a
break from the kitchen and go for a walk in the woods. They wandered
around, talking and laughing, until they came across a group of
chickens that had escaped from Mary’s coop.

Jack and Mary quickly rounded up the chickens and returned them to
their rightful place. As they were walking back to Mary’s cabin, Jack
leaned in and whispered into Mary’s ear, “You know, Mary, there’s
another type of ‘bundling’ that’s not just for chickens.”

Mary felt a shiver run down her spine as Jack pulled out a set of
handcuffs and chains from his pocket. She had never felt such
excitement before as Jack led her back to her cabin, ready to explore
the depths of her desires.

As the night wore on and the candles burned low, Mary realized that
she had never felt more alive than she did in that moment, tangled up
in the chains and surrounded by the sweet smells of dessert and floor
wax. She was grateful for the unexpected joys that life had brought
her and for the handsome stranger who had opened her eyes to them.

The divorce was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through.

I miss her terribly. She wanted the divorce, I didn’t. I came home stupidly, still expecting that she would be there, and of course she wasn’t.

I should have been wiser and more honest. All that’s broken now, and it will never be reassembled, and it’s up to me to try to figure out what this new life looks like.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss her in some way. But she’s not talking to me anymore, and there’s nothing I can do.

It’s only very recently that I’ve started looking for ways to have fun on weekends. I’m doing a show again. Dating here and there. Little driving trips.

I stayed in the house, probably longer than I should have, because I kept hoping that she might come home. Seems silly now.

I’ve been broken a long time. Trying not to be broken now. Takes a lot of energy. Radical honesty, that sort of thing.