Travel with Indigo

The 1,700 mile trip from Robinson Crusoe to Easter Island takes us a full seven days and a wakeup, so we reach our destination on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. Easter is the most remote inhabited island in the world. In keeping with this distinction we see along the way not another vessel. No cargo ship, no fishing boat, no military ship. Nada. Not even a stray plane flies overhead. We spot no whales and just a few birds. Beyond Easter, another 1,100 miles to the west lies our next stop, Pitcairn Island. We are at Easter Island surrounded by many hundreds of miles of trackless ocean.

We make landfall at about 7 am, always an exciting time when you’ve been at sea for a week, even when on a fine yacht with chef and wine. I can only imagine what early sailors felt when they saw land after months of suffering with gruel and grog.

The sole village lies on the island’s lee shore in the southwest corner at one of the few places not atop high cliffs. Its “harbor” is little more than a bight where all vessels must stand off a half mile from shore to take advantage there of holding ground for the anchor. Closer in is an undersea rock shelf.

After securing Indigo in the bay, we are greeted by the usual coterie of local bureaucrats as well as our shore agent. Through the agent, we earlier managed to secure, and pay in advance for, the 3,500 gallons of diesel fuel we will need to get us to Tahiti.

We are also greeted by a two-man contingent from the local outpost of the Armada de Chile, whose mission is to deliver a large freezer chest of wagyu beef, a heartily welcomed gift from my friend Fernando Hartwig.

Once cleared by immigration, I take a small local outboard launch into the village, which proves to be a thrill ride. As we approach the shore I see nothing but enormous crashing waves, great flumes of spray arching into the sky, and a few intrepid surfers. But as we draw nearer, I can just makeout a gap between the breakers. It is into this breach that my chauffeur delivers us making a bee line for the rocky shore. Surfing the backs of the combers, it seems as if he intends to drive us up and onto the rocks, but just at the last instant a tiny protected boat basin comes into focus and, after a hard left turn, we sit in its placid waters where I offload at the quay. Fun stuff!

Ashore a rental car is awaiting, arranged by the crew and our agent. Over the next three hours or so I take a high speed and abbreviated tour of Easter Island. The place immediately reminds me of the Dakota badlands, the Nebraska sand hills or the Wyoming plains. Great sweeping hillocks, deep fissures and chasms, shoulders and hips and undulating pastures, all nearly treeless and grass covered and all peppered with black volcanic detritus, from baseball to house sized, left over from explosions of the three volcanoes that form the island. It is from this porous rock that the eary Polynesian civilization here sculpted the moai, the eerie stone stautues for which the island is justly famous. There are a lot of them in all shapes and sizes, most now standing after being re-erected for the tourist trade. I make a note to myself to suggest to Jim Beam that these might make for a fine new decanter. I’d surely buy one…or more.

There is a great deal of literature available on these moai things and the decline and extinction of the peoples that built them. No need for me to elaborate further here, but you can consult Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, among many others, if you’re interested in the matter.

After my culture tour and a few photos mugging with the moai, I return to Indigo for a siesta before the night’s festivities. I am pre-introduced by a Santiago friend to a colorful local guy, a Chileno with the distinctly un-Chileno name of Andy McDonald. He, a self-described surfer hippie dude, and friends have arranged a full night’s tour of the fun spots. It is Saturday night, after all.

We begin at a fine French restaurant attended by the owner, a predictably obnoxious caricature of the Frenchman. He upbraids me for not eating all of my tuna carpaccio, and I, after a few too many pisco sours, ask him why he persists in being an asshole. He replies unperturbed that it’s just the French way. He’s right.

From there we hit another restaurant for desert, coffee and more pisco sours. Things are beginning to travel downhill by this time. And it’s still early. The disco is conveniently located next door, and it is there that we spend far too much time and murder too many brain cells. Music is provided by a well-known Easter Island band playing the modern version of Polynesian music, a kind of cross between bluegrass, country and Polynesian traditional sounds. It even sounds faintly Bahamian. Or maybe that’s the sound of pisco sours late at night.

At some point, Andy asks if I’m ready now for what he innocently calls Phase Three of the night. Not being at the time in full control of my rational faculties, I say why yes, quite so. Lets go. So it’s off to Toroko, a local version of an all-night honky tonk. At somewhere just short of daybreak, I make my way back to the small boat quay with the launch drivers as bodyguards (they had been assigned the task by my thoughtful crew) and somehow get back on Indigo at about 4:30am.

While at anchor in the bay, we see two smallish and quite old crew ships enter, stay a few days then depart. They have passengers from Japan and Russia, which seems quite a long way to come to see a bunch of rock statues, but then what do I know. If you’ve a mind for it, you can fly here five hours from Santiago, but the hotel accomodations are pretty basic and after the statues, some tablets and a paltry museum there ain’t all that much to justify the trip. Still the landscape is lovely.

To get 3,500 gallons of diesel fuel from shore to an anchored yacht is no easy feat, but captain and crew accomplish the task with ease. First they charter two local open runabouts with operators and install in each boat four 55-gallon drums. The drums are filled with fuel from a quayside truck. The operators then make their way out of the small harbor, tie up to Indigo and wait as their cargo of drums are pumped into Indigo’s fuel bunkers. It takes 15 boat trips with 60 drums of fuel to top off our tanks.

During all of Monday, December 10, the crew roams the island doing their tourist thing, and Fiona and Darcie replenish our fresh fruits and veggies. Finally we clear out of immigration and depart from Easter Island at 6pm bound for Pitcairn Island 1,100 miles west.