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Shimmering, luminous days on an island thousands of miles from anywhere…Unspoiled natural beauty in a tropical island setting – without the bright lights and frenetic pace of a typical resort…Mysterious statues that walked to their resting places and a more mysterious culture that erected them…These are just a few of the attractions of the beautiful, mysterious island of Rapa Nui, better known to most of us as Easter Island.
Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Rapa Nui is over 3,000 km from the central coast of Chile and 1900 km from the closest inhabited island, making it one of the world's most remote places. The small island – only about 46 square miles in area – is nearly a perfect triangle whose longest side is 24 km and is only 12 km wide at its widest.
Yet within that tiny space exists the luminous beauty of a natural sanctuary and one of the best-known mysteries of the ancient world – the mysterious Moai – the statues of Easter Island. Made famous by Thor Heyerdahl's books Kon Tiki and Aku-Aku, there are 887 known moai on the island. The enormous stone statues are carved of tuff, an easily compressed volcanic ash. They weigh as much as 75 tonnes, and among the enduring mysteries of Easter Island is the question of who carved them and how they got from their birthplace at the center of the island to the coasts of the island where they were meant to stand guard.
Although Thor Heyerdahl and his crew of explorers slept in tents on Rapa Nui's beach in the 1950's, today, visitors usually stay in nearby hotels and can join guided tours of the island or explore it independently. Even if there are many commercial flights to the island, and tourism is an important industry, it has remained mostly unspoiled and beautiful.
The Moai and their attendant mysteries have overshadowed many of the other attractions of the island. Most people who come to Rapa Nui are drawn by the mysterious stones and the myths surrounding them. Once they arrive, however, they find that there are many other things to see and do, though many are interconnected in some way to the Moai.