Day 141 - Lots of Discoveries

This is probably the worst "selfie with dog" the world
has ever seen. But anyway, there are lots of
dogs strolling around all over the island.

Today we planned to hike. As the streets are quite bumpy in the village (which seems to be a global island phenomena) and get even worse in the countryside, we were suggested to walk instead of going by scooter. After we met some cattle and horses along the trail, we arrived at the first highlight: ana te pahu, a crashed big lava tube which was used as a orchard and dwelling by the historic Rapa Nui people. The crashed underground lava tube provided not only shelter from the strong winds here, on both sides there was even water in the tunnel parts of the tube. Some banana trees may either survived here over the centuries or may have been re-planted.

The pond on the one side of the lava tube
(with flashlight, because it was completely dark here)

The second highlight of the trail was quite a big ancient village with huge boat houses and large chicken houses, that has not been restored yet. At the seaside a platform (ahu tepeu) with toppled statues, as usual. In the middle of the scene: a cattle skeleton.

 

The main attraction of this trail was definitely the ana kakenga after a six kilometer hike. At first, we unfortunately didn't notice the little hole in the ground as a cave entrance. So we walked up to the coastline and I climbed down the cliff looking for any cave that looked like the virgin cave from the movie "Rapa Nui". I didn't find exactly a cave there, but noticed two big holes in the cliff some meters away from us. On the way back we discovered the little hole in the ground and I wanted my dad to take a picture of me in that hiding cave - but behaved like a chicken and didn't even look around the corner. If there hadn't been two other visitors that somehow knew about the cave, we wouldn't have dared to "walk" (better creep) through a pitch black claustrophobic aisle that took us to exactly the two holes in the cliff that I saw earlier. How a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Fortunately we were told to bring a torchlight, even though it wasn't too much of a help.

 

 

 

After we got that adrenaline experience, we walked back to our scooter. Before we relaxed after this 12 km hike, however, we had to visit the little museum which was founded long time ago by a German missionary. And indeed, it was a very nice exhibition, a lot to read, but also some stuff to see, like one of the very rare feminine moais, the one and only moai coral eye that was found, or the last few wooden plates with Rapa Nui writing. Researchers haven't found out yet what the writing means, but they guess it's like the lyrics of a song.