Today we visited the UNISCO World Heritage Archeological Park which is approximately 3km out of town. 3km is not far so we decided to walk… bad idea… the heavens opened and we got soaked. I was starting to notice a pattern that around the same time every day it absolutely chucks it down with rain. I have since found out that we have our good friend El Niño to thank for this as the weather system is currently affecting certain areas of South America. Typical!

Anyway we arrived at the park damp. As we were buying our tickets we were approached by a guy who introduced himself as Gerry Lewis. Gerry speaks 8 different languages and began to tell us all about the park and what we are likely to see and the theories behind the finds. We decided to hire Gerry as our guide as without any explanation we would just be looking at some old rocks!

Walking through the park, Gerry told us that the entire Heritage site covers approximately 65,000 km⊃2; and they have only uncovered 10% of it. In what they have found they have managed to carbon date the statues back to approximately between 2500BC and 1500AD. When you look at the statues and carvings there are representations of elephants, gorillas, crops from other continents, representations of Pyramids and connections with Egypt. Up to now they have not found any text or symbols to explain how these people of South America knew about these items that it was assummed were alien to them, but they are hoping that further excavation in years to come will uncover hieroglyphs or the equivalent of the Rosetta stone to explain what happened thousands of years ago.

Gerry turned out to be an excellent guide as he showed us all the different symbology in the carvings and explained the theories behind them. He showed us burial chambers and places of sacrifice. He told us about when the first born child would be offered to the gods on its birth and then carefully raised to the age of 13 before having its throat cut and bled into the river for the chiefs and higher ranking people to bath in his/her blood.

As wonderful as these explanations were we had to keep telling ourselves that these are only theories and the only thing that they can be 100% sure of was that date and the fact that these stone heads were carved by hand.

As we were coming to the end of our walk we were taken through a forest section where some of the smaller carvings had been re-homed to protect them from theft. In this section Gerry pointed out that there was a rather large carving representing a stone penis and rumour has it that if we touch this carving you get a boost to the fertility. Worryingly Cecilie jumped on the thing with great gusto as you can see in the photo!

All in all this was a great site to visit and it has given us an insight into what we are to expect in our upcoming visit to Easter Island