This afternoon I rent a mountain bike and made a 10-15 km tour in the west of the island. It's a rocky off-road piste and since it has rained for about 2 days it's all muddy as well, so I'm all splattered in dirt after the first hour. Fortunately, the rain finally stops and it clears up a bit, so I have a great ride along the beautiful cliffs in the west coast of easter island. Quite tired I read the A Kivi, a site of 7 Moais that are quite well preserved (see p...

This morning I set out to dive. Christian, our dive master seems to be a good guy, who takes it slow and careful and cracks a lot of jokes. We ask him to take photos for us, so for the first time I have the chance to show a few decent-quality images of my dive. Amongst our group of five divers there's one guy from Kiel, Tim, who also turns out to be a scientist (he's a biologist working in Basel on biological pest control projects). He's a really great guy and a ...

I went snorkeling with a hilarious Rapa Nui guide and an english couple in the north of the island (near Anakena). After a few meters where the water is opaque from the sand of the beach, we arrive at a shallow coral reef with really clear water. The fauna here is not mind-blasting like in Galapagos, but we see a few pretty fish and I get to test my new underwater camera. It turns out to be really really hard to make good photos when you have no way to stand stil...

That's what I left Santiago for. Marcelo's Hotel is actually a small Bed+Breakfast with a very nice open area in between the rooms, where we have a common breakfast every morning. I'm here with three couples, who a really great people. An australian couple, an english couple (Heather and Dan), who's traveling the world for one year (Dan is really funny, he reminds me of Ricky Gervais), and an american couple (Gary and Sheree) who have been building houses and now...

I managed to get a last-minute ticket to Easter Island (Isla de Pascua) yesterday - literally the last ticket availble within a whole month, probably from a cancellation - and flew out today, with a return flight on sunday (4 days). Isla de Pascua is actually a polynesian island far far in the south pacific, but politically belongs to Chile. This was a 5-hour flight, during which I enjoyed Die Hard 4.0 and Mission Impossible:Ghost Protocol in Spanish :-) You mig...