We arrived on Easter Island at around 8pm and were greeted by Marcelo our hostel host who has leis for both of us. The weather was very warm and was a lovely change compared to the rainy Santiago that we had just left. The hotel we stayed in was so lovely as was our host. Marcelo took us on a tour of Hanga Roa the main town of Easter Island which took about 2 minutes!

The first day of our stay and we decided to take a walk around Hanga Roa and walked to the Easter Island Museum which gives really good background info on the history of the island. We saw our first Moai statue too and many many more after that! The views on Easter Island are beautiful and everywhere you look there are Moai statues. This night we ate a traditional Polynesian meal called Hangi which is cooked in an underground oven wrapped in banana leaves and hot volcanic rocks are placed on top and buried for 3 hours to cook, as you can see from the pics we ate rather a lot this night! It was delicious.

The second day on Easter Island we did a full day tour of the whole island, taking in the beach of Anakena, a beatiful white sandy beach with five Moai statues in the backgorund looking inland. The tour also took us to Rano Raraku the Moai quarry. This was amazing and some of the Moai here you will recognise from TV programmes and pictures etc. The quarry features the only Moai to have legs and many Moais in all different stages of carving including one that would have been 21m high, the tallest one on the island.

Day number three we decided to go on a hike up the coast and to a fascinating cave inland and I saw a mouse. We also saw the only Moai on the island that are facing the ocean. The hike took us all day and after this we were exhausted so ate 'completos' which are hot dogs with tomatos, gucamole and mayo (mmmm healthy...) as Eatsre Island is SO expensive and we were running out of money by this stage! This was also the day that we tried tuna empanadas - a tuna pasty with cheese and herbs- for lunch on our hike and they were SO good!

On day number four we hiked up the volcano of Rano Kau and on top of here is a crater lake, which features on most postcards of the island and is one of the main things to do on the island apart from see Moai. The crater is filled with reeds which are the same as the reeds in Lake Titicaca where the reed people live on. The views here are incredible. It was eerily quiet up there too. Also on this hike two dogs started walking with us from Hanga Roa and stayed with us on the entir eduration of the walk all the way back to Hanga Roa! They probably wanted our tuna sandwiches! At the top of Rano Kau there is Orongo a ceremonial village celebrating the 'Birdman' competition. Please Wikipedia this! There are pics off here where the competitors used to swim out to the islands to claim the bird eggs. Once you see the pics you will realise how crazy that must have been the waters are rough, shark infested and freezing and the island are so far away!

We had an amazing time on Easter Island, everyone we met were really friendly and our host was lovely. Even though the island was very very quiet as it was low season we weren't stuck for anything to do. The weather was lovely, warm and sunny which was a nice change from being so Chile (ha ha). I really didn't want to leave! But we had to go onto our next stop New Zealand but before that back to Santiago to prepare for what seemed like the longest flight in the world. Santiago->Buenos Aires->Auckland!

Hope everyone is well

Lots of love Fi & Tom xXx