Easter Island, Chile: The Moai at the Edge of the Pacific

Ahu Tongariki, on the southeastern coast, is the most dramatic of the island's ceremonial platforms. Fifteen moai stand in a line facing inland, restored to their original positions following a 1960 tsunami and subsequent Chilean-Japanese collaborative restoration. The ahu faces east; the moai catch the first light at sunrise, and photographs taken in the twenty minutes after dawn are the defining images most people carry away from Rapa Nui. A taxi from Hanga Roa takes about thirty minutes.

Rano Raraku, the volcanic quarry crater where all but a handful of the island's 900 moai were carved, is about fifteen minutes from Tongariki by road. The crater interior and the slopes around it contain 397 moai in various stages of completion, some buried to the shoulders by centuries of soil accumulation, some still lying in the positions where they were abandoned when work apparently stopped suddenly in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The quarry is the most instructive place on the island for understanding how the moai were made; the sheer density of partially finished figures conveys the scale of the effort that was interrupted.

Orongo, the ceremonial village on the rim of the Rano Kau volcanic crater at the southwest corner of the island, is a compact cluster of low stone buildings overlooking three offshore islets. Orongo was the center of the Birdman cult (tangata manu) that replaced the moai-era culture; the annual competition, in which contestants swam to the nearest islet and retrieved the first egg of the season from the sooty tern colony, determined the following year's chief. The crater lake inside Rano Kau is 1.5 kilometers across and filled with reed mats; the view from the village rim takes in the lake on one side and the open ocean on the other.

Practical note: Easter Island is remote and the logistics of a tender port are weather-dependent — seas in the unprotected anchorage at Hanga Roa can prevent tendering entirely, and ships sometimes anchor in the calmer waters off Anakena Beach on the north coast instead. The island is entirely within a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a national park; entrance fees apply and must be paid in advance or at the airport.