Rapa Nui, 12 October 2015

Today's journey begins at the Rano Raraku quarry, where the Moai were carved from volcanic rock.

Some moai are just about underground.

These two are still being carved.

Migration of the Moai.

Ernie and Bert.

Rock stars.

Anahanga as seen from the quarry

Petroglyphs at Papa Vaka

There are two horizontal slabs with significant petroglyphs at Papa Vaka, both depicting marine life, fishing, canoes, and other glyphs to ensure a good harvest.

Octopus? Crab? Spaghetti?

A tuna, and a shark. Other glyphs are there but are more difficult to see.

Seven Moai

Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, and Dopey

More Moai. These seven were along the road returning to Hanga Roa, I didn't catch their names.

Dinner and a Show

For dinner, we splurged on a traditional celebration and show by a local Rapa Nui cultural group.

Traditional Rapa Nui entertainment

Before dinner, we were serenaded with traditional songs sung in Rapa Nui.

The cooking pit, minus the sand and the blankets

Dinner was cooked over hot rocks in a pit in the ground. The food was inside hollow bamboo stalks, covered in banana leaves, then blankets, and finally buried in lava sand.

The lava blocks around the pit have holes in the top. Traditionally, the blocks were set in the ground parallel to each other a canoe-width apart, and the length of a canoe. The holes held the ends of the wooden ribs to form the hull of an upside-down canoe, bent over from one row to the other. This held the ribs of the canoe in place while the rest of canoe was being built.

Rack with bamboo stalks

Here's dinner, still inside the bamboo stalks. There was chicken, tuna, some other local fish, sweet potatoes, and banana cake for dessert. All cooked in the pit. The Dutch and their ovens have nothing on this!

The Show

The King with a Moai

I won't try to retell the story,  but here's the king with his Moai.

Warriors of the tribe

Brave warriors to protect the king...

dancing ensues

...and much partying and dancing.


That's all for today

The next update will be the Ana Kai Tagata cave and the Orongo village.


Jerry

Rapa Nui, 11 October 2015

First stop today was a visit to the Museo Antropologico P. Sebastion Englert. Even my pigeon Spanish can translate 'Museo,' and the map shows exactly where it is: find the cemetery, go up two blocks and turn left. I only got lost a couple of times.

The museum has displays with descriptions in both Spanish and
(thankfully) English, telling the history of the Rapa Nui people, some speculation on the significance of the Moai (big stone heads), the rise of the birdman cult, the warring tribes, influence of western civilization, and has artifacts from around the island.

Moai at the Museo

There are Moai all over the place, about 900 total scattered around the Island in various conditions. The warring tribes knocked over most of statues, so there are fallen Moai lying face down in front of their Ahu (stone platforms), some intact, some broken. The Moai that are standing on their Ahu have been re-erected.

Rapa Nui Manuscript

The spoken language of the Rapa Nui people has been handed down and is still spoken today, but the written language has been lost. It is speculated that only the elite members of the tribes were taught to read and write. There are carved wooden manuscripts with Rapa Nui writing, the lines of text are written horizontally (left to right? right to left? who knows). At the end of a line of text, the manuscript is turned upside down and the next line is read, so every other line is inverted. Wikipedia has an article on this writing style, look for "reverse boustrophedon."

Sculpture at the museum

There's an interesting sculpture at the museum. I don't know its significance.

The Cemetary

The catholic cemetery is outside of town, and is quite colorful.

Cemetery in Hanga Roa

Moai everywhere!

Tahai Moai

On the edge of Hanga Roa are a few nice examples of Moai standing on their Ahu. There's not a lot to say: they're big, carved out of lava rock, and standing on their Ahu.

Moai at Hana Kio'e

Moai at Hana Kio'e

Complete Moai

This Moai is complete with eyes and a Pukao (top hat). The hat was quarried from a different volcano and made of red lava rock. Many of the Moai on the island have lost their hat and eyes, so this one is significant for it's completeness.

Toppled Moai

Toppled Moai at Akahanga

Leaving the village of Hanga Roa, there are many sites of fallen Moai. This is one has a sign that reads, "Ahu Ura Uranga te Mahina", and another sign here reads, "Akahanga."

The Quarry

The Rano Raraku quarry from a distance

The quarry at Rano Raraku is open to visitors from 0900 until 1800, and it was already 1730 when we arrived. We saw just enough from a distance to convince us that we really need half a day to wander around in there.

Tongariki 

Tongariki has the most stunning display of Moai on the island, with 15 statues lined up near the ocean. The scale is massive, visible for miles.

Tongariki Moai

That's it for today. Tomorrow, a visit to the quarry, petroglyphs, and more Moai.

Jerry

Okay... where to begin. It's been quite a few years since I updated this blog, it took some effort to figure out my old login, but (obviously) I succeeded.

First, the back story.

A few months ago my friend Vernon returned from Palau and told me his world travels were amazing, but getting increasingly difficult due to his limited vision. He suggested I join him on a journey to, perhaps, Cancun, where there's snorkeling for his interests and desert for my exploration. Cancun? Really? How about somewhere more exotic, less traveled, certainly less commercialized, somewhere neither of us have gone (not difficult there...), and maybe some place I don't know anybody who's visited.

Me and my big mouth.

After a couple of months of anticipation, I picked Vernon up early on Friday morning (9-Oct-2015), drove to the long-term parking lot in Burlingame where we caught a shuttle bus to San Francisco International. The flight from SFO to LAX was uneventful, and thankfully the stopover in Los Angeles was short. The next flight was equally uneventful ... but not so short. Eight (or so) hours later we were in Lima, Peru for fuel and exchanging passengers-- they didn't even let us off the plane. I was hoping to pick up a refrigerator magnet from Peru, but it was not happening this trip. Then another eight-ish hour flight to Santiago, Chile where we were processed through customs (easy) and boarded a 787 for the last leg of our journey.

BIG plane, tiny airport

After another six hours in the air the wheels touched the tarmac at Mataveri International Airport in Hanga Roa, Chile, our final destination. After 26 hours of travel, it was finally getting real. During the entire trip I kept asking myself, "Am I really on Easter Island?"





Day One: October 10, 2015

After collecting our bags, I hailed a taxi. Okay, to be honest 'hailing' is not entirely accurate, and neither is 'taxi.' A guy in a rusty Nissan with a hand-lettered 'TAXI' sign on the dashboard offered us a lift. For only CLP$4,000 he drove us to Oceanic Car Rental where I had arranged to rent a Suzuki Jimny (in the U.S. it's called a Suzuki Samari) for the week.

Next stop, the hotel: The Mataveri Inn. If you know me, I've always said, "I own a GPS not because I want one, but because I need one" because I can't navigate my way out of a paper sack. Unfortunately, my old Garmin doesn't have maps for Easter Island. But that's okay, I printed out the Google map of Hanga Roa. Unfortunately, there are no street signs in Hanga Roa, but that's okay because there are no house numbers either. Sigh. We drove in circles for an hour searching for the Mataveri Inn before I stopped at the car rental place and asked for directions. The guy used google maps on his phone and pinpointed the Inn on the rental car map, but nope, nada, no inn there either. Okay, I remember the web page for the inn has a phone number so I found an internet cafe to look it up, and the very helpful lady at the cafe knows the innkeeper (in a village of 3300 people, it's not too unlikely), called her, and gave us directions! When we arrived at the inn, we found out they had sent a car to the airport to meet us, and neither of us saw the sign with Vernon's name misspelled. And, the place is called Cabanas Mataveri, not Mataveri Inn, both on the sign and on the map.


Dos Locos Touristas

Confident that we now have a place to stay, it's time to play tourist. The best part of being a tourist on Easter Island: I couldn't get too terribly lost, there's only one village, and all roads lead back home. I randomly choose a road, and we arrived at the Rano Kau crater. It's about a mile to the far lip of the volcanic crater and the lake in the middle is a fresh water swamp teeming with life.

Rano Kau

The island has a number of small coves with fishing boats but no ship harbor (which begs the question how they get bulk supplies to the island.)  This is the busier harbor in Hanga Roa, the other harbors I saw seemed quieter but perhaps deeper, judging by the size of the boats.

Hanga Roa Harbor at sunset

Hanga Roa fishing boats

We choose a random restaurant for dinner at the harbor, a cozy place with a french theme and a wooden ship motif inside. The Paella for two was outstanding: shrimp, baby lobster, calamari, and other locally caught fish, and the leftovers was breakfast for the next four days. I still don't know how "doggy bag" would translate to Chilean Spanish, but we had it wrapped up to go.

It was dark when we got back to the hotel and I took a couple of shots of the starry night from the road outside the inn.  I was looking south-west, so I suspect there are constellations in the picture that I can't see from home in San Jose, California. If someone would post a comment identifying what's in the photo, I'd appreciate it.

Starry night outside Cabana Mataveri

That's all for day one on Isla de Pascua, check back soon for day two.

Jerry

Room & Chair, #1

For today's post, the first of an occasional series of Room & Chair.

Where: the office of the Homestead Cafe in Inyokern, California.

When: 27 December 2009.

Why: hope, abandoned. When I peered through the broken window of the small building next to the cafe I spotted a single chair in a dilapidated room. The office chair, presumably from when the business was an ongoing concern, now vacant - along with the owners and the clientele.

Convergence

Parallel tracks, coming from everywhere and going, nowhere? Along a railroad siding on the way to San Juan Bautista, stitched panorama from eight individual photographs taken from between the tracks.

(Click for much larger version)

Panoramic photography has always fascinated me - the distorted perspectives that arise are often unpredictable, the final product either surprising or disappointing depending on expectations. Or in the case of this photograph, the final product was both - I was at first horrified at what had emerged from the stitching, but the starkness brought out by the near infra-red black and white conversion brought out what I was originally trying to convey from the scene.

Looking backwards, looking forwards

I look where I've been through the pictures I've taken, each image locked in an intricate dance of 1's and 0's on my computer - the vast majority never seeing the light of day. Today I begin to catch up on a years worth of moments in time from journeys through California, my home state, which all seems so ordinary because it is home.

Now for the tough part - deciding what to post; digging through thousands of pictures, looking for what I did and where I've gone the past year.

2009: The Year of the Bicycle

In May of 2009 I finally bought a bicycle, for entertainment, exercise, and basic neighborhood transportation. As a side benefit, it did help protect my sanity as an escape pod at the end of the workday, to relieve stress. It has replaced my car for basic errands around town, and I've noticed that I eat lighter if I have to pedal all of my groceries home in my backpack.

Fortunately, San Jose is a very bike friendly city and I live close to Campbell Park with an entrance to the Los Gatos Creek Trail. If you look closely at my bicycle in the panorama pictures, you'll see a tiny Pelican case bolted to the seat tube where I carry a Canon 2100is camera on my rides. The Panoramas were stitched together in Photoshop CS4, and they usually cover 180° field of view.

From home, the first bridge I cross on my way to the trail is over San Tomas Expressway on this pedestrian bridge.

Along the creek are a few bridges, with a bike path on each side of the creek.



As the trail passes through Los Gatos, it turns to an elevated boardwalk.




In Los Gatos, the creek trail crosses over highway 17 on a bridge with brightly painted murals along the walls.



At the end of the creek is Lexington Reservoir, just a couple of miles down from where my brother David lives.



Now that I've broken the ice off of the blog in 2010, it's time to dredge up the interesting pictures I've got squirreled away in the deep, dark recesses of my hard disk.

More soon, I promise!

Jerry.

Home again...

So I've been home for six months now and people keep asking me when I'm going to update my blog... so here it is.

The trip home from Korea was uneventful, if not a bit disappointing: I returned home on Saturday September 6th, slept most of the day Sunday, went into work on Monday, applied for unemployment on Tuesday, started my resume on Wednesday... well, you get the idea. Actually I didn't seriously look for work for about a month, I took the time to reflect on life and get a bunch of overdue chores done, recuperate from two years of frantic prototype development, and basically re-tune myself into living in America again.

When I was in Korea I kept thinking about what I would miss when I return home, and it would have to the friends I made during my stay in Korea, the friends that helped me hang onto the slippery bit of sanity I have left: Jason, Roger, JR, Gina, Will, and the others I don't recall off the top of my head. Curiously enough, it's the huge circle of friends I have here at home that I missed the most while I was in Korea, and frequent Skype phone calls helped me maintain the ties to my friends. There were a couple of times in Korea that my phone, er, my computer would ring in the evening and it was a friend calling from San Jose, unable to sleep at 3:00am and just wanting to talk.

I haven't updated my blog since I returned home because I didn't feel that I had anything significant to blog about. Because everything seems so ordinary here at home I keep thinking there's nothing worth posting on my blog, even though the state of California is three times the size of the Republic of Korea! Looking back through my pictures, there were a few journeys I've had after my return so I've got six months of catching up to do.


While in Korea I signed up for a retreat at the St. Francis retreat center in San Juan Bautista. My original return date was about a week prior to the retreat and I mailed my registration form from Korea - I can only image what the retreat coordinator thought when he got a retreatant registering from 6,500 miles away. The retreat was a relaxing time to reconnect with friends.

Of course, my transportation of choice for the weekend was my motorcycle. Somehow I always find another vehicle to camouflage the bike in parking lots - the picture does look like it needs a caption, though.




One Saturday morning in October I commented to my roommate that it's been months since I've had a road trip on the motorcycle - he had only one word for me: GO! I quickly packed up the bags, reserved a bed at the Yosemite Bug hostel and headed out for a quick weekend in Yosemite. There's something about being on the road on motorcycle that's indescribably wonderful, and really can't be explained - you have to experience it for yourself.


Saturday afternoon I wandered around the town of Maraposa playing tourist and taking pictures. The atmosphere of Maraposa is somewhere between folksy, kitschy, and historical - it feels like a town that's in the midst of redefining itself while holding on to it's historical past. The downtown business district looks like a wild west movie set with the crew still there, either setting up before or cleaning up after a shoot.

There's a neat little curio shop in downtown Midpines that had one object that caught my eye amongst the totem poles and jade jewelry: a piece of antler with bats carved into it. It's an odd piece that looks like the outer skin of the antler was peeled back revealing a colony of bats living inside.

Dinner on Saturday was Pizza from Pizza+ on the edge of town and it was okay, nothing really to write home about, then off to the hostel. I stayed at the aforementioned Yosemite Bug hostile just outside of Midpines and got a bunk in one of their dorm rooms. The facilities are clean and comfortable and they have a good cafe with a couple of computers available for checking email and such. I arrived too late for dinner on Saturday, but breakfast on Sunday was terrific - eggs, ham, toast and lots of coffee. The only interesting picture I took at the hostel is the dog enjoying the cool morning on the redwood deck.




Riding through Yosemite is always an amazing experience, and when I was there it was the last weekend before the park closed for the winter. Many of the campgrounds had already been shut down - the picnic tables packed up and the outhouses locked for the winter - which meant the crowds weren't there, either. Traffic was especially light, and the people I talked with seemed to appreciate the park more than the regular tour-bus tourists. I entered the park through the West entrance on highway 140 with the goal of making it to the East entrance (Tioga pass) before turning around for home. The motorcyclists in the picture were arriving as I was walking around the Tioga Pass entrance station taking pictures.


While riding out of the park I spotted a gathering of people gawking skyward, so I stopped to investigate. They were watching the climbers on El Capitan, and from the valley floor I couldn't spot them without binoculars. If you look closely at the picture on the right (click on it to see the larger version) you can spot the climber dangling from his rope near the bottom-center of the picture. This guy was probably half way up, so he still had some serious work to do.

It was amusing watching a couple of other climbers taking a break, perched on a tiny ledge eating lunch. They weren't very far up the face, thus the tree branches in the picture.

I returned home on Sunday in time to meet friends for a late dinner over stories of the weekend.

Enough for today, I'll continue again soon...

Jerry, the hometown tourist.