Vacation to Chile and Rapa Nui

I am back from the best vacation of my life. I had an unbelievable time. I flew out to visit my friend Beylka in New York for a few days. Then we went together to Rapa Nui for four days, and Santiago, Chile for five. All incredible. We packed our time. We saw shows, did tours, met incredible people, had a bunch of great food, learned a ton, and all around had a great time.

On the first night we had dinner at a vegan Korean restaurant called HanGawi.

We followed that up with a concert in a crypt by a group called Death of Classical. It was a piano performance on a variety of spooky themes, anchored by a three-act symphony about Frankenstein.

The following day we went to something called the Tenement Museum in NYC. It’s a restored old tenement building with several tours that talk about life and culture in the early parts of the industrial revolution.

And a super cool interactive theater experience called Sleep No More in which you wander around a converted hotel made into a giant setpiece for a very loose, wordless interpretation of MacBeth. They took our phones from us, so I can’t provide my own photos of it. It was immersive and atmospheric in a way that makes you want more.

We then flew to Rapa Nui. It was a much longer flight than anything I’ve ever attempted — 16 hours in the air plus an additional three in a layover. We needed to unwind after that, for sure. But the island is a fantastic place for it. Everyone on Rapa Nui is laid back, including the street dogs and wild horses. We saw no anger, no crime, precious little poverty. It is a beautiful place.

Of course we took tours of the moai on Rapa Nui.

But in a lot of ways, the things I was most interested in were island culture, both then and now. For instance, people on the island drive cars, but there are no dealerships. How do they buy them? Where does the fuel come from? Our tour guide was more than happy to engage with these kinds of questions, showing off the shipping systems that support the island economy.

It also shortly became clear there was tension between the native Rapa Nui population and the Chilean nationals. Chile conquered the island in a military invasion in the 1880s. Now Chilean nationals outnumber natives on the island 2:1. The Rapa Nui government has been setting very strict transport requirements to keep a clamp on population, trying to manage the island’s limited resources. There is also a separatist movement, and we saw some Rapa Nui independence propaganda around.

Rapa Nui has an airport with a single runway that basically crosses the entire island. It was built for them in the 1980s by NASA because they needed an alternate landing site for the space shuttles in the South Pacific. In exchange for the land, they also built the only hospital on the island.

Rapa Nui had a written language called Rongo Rongo, one of the few independently invented written languages in human history. But when Chile conquered them, they killed everyone who understood it, so now it’s a mystery to all.

This is a pair of moai statues that were given up on in the midst of being carved out of the one mountain on the island with the right kind of rock for making them.

There were 18 warring tribes on the island. The one that controlled this mountain had a kind of peace with everyone else. The others would pledge them fish, slaves, or produce in exchange for a statue. The deals would last for a few years while the statue was being made.

You can see styles and features changing among the statues, based on both the artisans making it and the requesting tribe.

Apparently people farmed in this crater. Those are some steep slopes.

This is probably my favorite ever piece of kitsch.

We then flew back over to Santiago, Chile for an additional five days. Our hotel was across the street from a gigantic rock with a castle on top, part of an old defensive structure. A city sprung up around it. Over time, Chile has grown to be one of the most stable economies in South America and attracts immigration from all over. Santiago now has an urban density that beggars the imagination.

We went to a local marketplace to get a local vibe. It is jam packed with competing vendors with all kinds of fresh fruit, meat, fish, and grains.

We took a trip into the Andes.

And stopped off at a hot springs way up in the mountains.

Beylka is a relentless charmer. She kept making bonds with the people around us, particularly with our tour guides. When a cooking lesson tour canceled on us, another tour guide volunteered to show us around the local market and invited us to her home to cook a Chilean dinner with us.

We took a trip to Valparaiso to see the local street art, architecture, and an area winery.

There were sea lions and pelicans at a fish market in Valparaiso.

I rode my first funicular.

Chile is absolutely covered in street art. Sometimes it feels a bit threatening — literally everything is tagged — but they have embraced it as an art form.

It was a fantastic vacation, like nothing I have ever done before. I’m hooked! If I had it to do all over again, though, I would have shifted a couple days from the Chile time over to Rapa Nui. It would be great to spend a little more time in that comfortable, hot tub of a nation.