Visiting Rapa Nui

Flights, Lodging, Logistics

The brief overview of how to visit Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island, is:

There is one daily flight from Santiago to Rapa Nui and back. It's 3,750 kilometers each way, the flight takes five and a half hours.

A tourist visit is limited to 30 days.

To get through security at the airport in Santiago you must pass through a light version of Chilean border control, showing proof of a return air ticket and a reservation at approved lodging.

You can see some ahu and mo'ai, ceremonial platforms holding the large statues, within the town. But to get into the larger sites, you must have purchased a national park pass and you must be accompanied by a licensed Rapa Nui resident. That requires either joining a group tour or hiring your own personal tour guide and renting a car.

Plan ahead. Details follow.

As explained in the History and Background page, the Rapa Nui people and their culture were almost completely wiped out in the mid to late 1800s. In 1877 the total population was down to 110 individuals, and all Rapa Nui people alive today descend from just 36 people from that population bottleneck.

There was a unique written script, but the ability to read it was lost in the 1860s when all the elders who could read and write it were captured to be slaves in mines in Peru. Almost all were dead within a year.

We think that the original settlers called the island Te Pito 'o te Kāina, meaning "The Center of the Earth". The name for the island, the people, and their language became Rapa Nui after their language had become heavily influenced by Tahitian.

The first European to visit called the island Paasch-Eyland, 18th century Dutch for "Easter Island", because he was a Dutchman arriving on 5 April 1722, which happened to be Easter Sunday. Chile has controlled the island since 1888, they have called it Isla de Pascua, and English speakers have tended to say "Easter Island". But the local name Rapa Nui now seems to be used more than Isla de Pascua within Chile.

Isla Sala y Gómez is a pair of uninhabited rocks, a total of 15 hectares in size.

Rapa Nui is a volcanic island, roughly triangular, about 23 kilometers east–west and 11 kilometers north–south. It and some small surrounding islets are the summit of a large volcanic mountain rising over 2,000 meters from the sea floor. What protrudes above the ocean are the coalesced peaks of three extinct volcanos. Terevaka, near the center, is highest at 507 meters above sea level. Poike at 400 meters is the eastern tip of the island, and Rano Kau at 324 meters is the southwestern tip, above the airport and main town.

There are three rano or freshwater lakes in volcano calderas, but no permanent streams. The three rano remain the primary source of drinking water.

Reaching the Island

LATAM flies daily from Santiago to Rapa Nui and back. The schedule varies from day to day, but generally leaves Santiago late morning to mid-day, arriving in Rapa Nui in early to mid afternoon with the two-hour time zone change. Then it returns to Santiago after about an hour on the ground, arriving there in the evening. The flight was on a B787-9 when I went.

I stayed on Rapa Nui for a week. My travel from home through Santiago to Rapa Nui involved two once-a-day flights spaced two days apart, and I wanted some schedule resilience in case of delays caused by mechanical problems. My planned itinerary was:

• Leave home on Friday morning and take a bus to the airport to fly to Atlanta. Yes, Delta. In the 1990s, Northwest Airlines used to fly a Saab 340 twin turboprop link between the Purdue Airport, which I could actually walk to, and Detroit. And once you get unintentionally committed to an accumulated mileage program...
• Leave Atlanta late Friday evening and arrive in Santiago very early on Saturday morning.
• Stay in Santiago for two nights, and then fly to Rapa Nui on Monday morning.
• The annular eclipse, which was the excuse for the trip but very much my secondary reason to visit Rapa Nui, was on Wednesday.
• Fly back to Santiago the following Monday afternoon, stay overnight near the airport, and then fly south to Punta Arenas.
• Then after another three weeks in southern Chile — Southern Patagonia, Torres Del Paine National Park, a 30-hour ferry journey through the Strait of Magellan and Beagle Channel, and four nights on Isla Navarino, I would return to Santiago for two nights before returning home.

Fortunately, everything worked according to the plan.

Once you have your LATAM ticket, they send you email a few weeks before your trip telling you to create an account and register on a Chilean government web site with the flight and lodging details for your visit. You have to specify one of the approved lodging choices at which you have a reservation. You receive an email with the results after doing that, print it out and bring it with you.

When you arrive from another country in Santiago, the PDI or Policia de Investigaciones de Chile run the passport control. They give you a thermal-printed slip that you need to keep with your passport to register at lodging in Chile.

The PDI booth to get into the concourse for the Rapa Nui flight will want to see your passport, your initial PDI slip for entering Chile, and that printed email. They bring up and check your registration. I also had my Booking.com reservation page printed out, showing that I had a reservation in an approved location for the duration of my visit.

With all your papers in order, you get a second PDI slip for the Rapa Nui portion of your visit to Chile.

After over five hours of flight over the Pacific, Rapa Nui came into sight.

Rapa Nui has a population of about 7,750 people today. There's just one town with one airport with a single runway.

The airport was built in 1965, and scheduled service began in 1967 with a once-per-month flight in a 4-piston-engine DC-6B that took nine hours to cross the distance. That was upgraded to a once-per-week B-707 flight in 1970.

The U.S. backed the 1973 coup that overthrew Chile's democratically elected government, killed its President, and put the bloodthirsty dictator Augusto Pinochet in power until 1990. Pinochet imposed martial law over Chile, with stricter control over Rapa Nui that kept it more isolated.

The U.S. came in during 1985–1987 and enlarged the runway, making it thicker, wider, and longer (now 3,318 m or 10,885 feet) so it could be an abort site for the Space Shuttle. The U.S. Department of Defense had ambitious plans for monthly Shuttle missions, launching toward the south from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California into polar orbits.

Then the Challenger disintegrated during launch in 1986 and put an end to plans of monthly launches from Vandenberg.

After Pinochet was finally removed from power in 1990, travel to Rapa Nui became somewhat easier.

The airport has been used by Qantas B-747s to and from Australia, and by Air France Concordes en route to and from Tahiti. Here's a picture of a Concorde departure in the terminal.

Air France Concorde taking off from Mataveri International Airport, in a series of historical pictures in the terminal. This picture is from some time after the runway's lengthening in 1987, more likely after the end of Pinochet's martial law in 1990, and before the Concorde's retirement in 2003.

After five and a half hours of subsonic flight, I landed on Rapa Nui! The terminal is a cluster of small buildings.

The runway is along the eastern side of Rano Kau, an extinct volcano cone forming the eastern corner of the island.

Down the stairs, walk across the tarmac and into the terminal.

To My Lodging

Your innkeeper will be at the airport to present you with a lei and drive you to your lodging. I stayed at Hostal Henua Roa, where I had a nice apartment with a small kitchen. It's a 1.1 km walk from the fishing port, with an elevation gain of 50 meters.

Here are some pictures from different days and times through my one-week stay. First, in the early evening, walking up the street toward the lane leading back to the hostal.

Here's the lane where I turned off.

There's a sign for the hostal by the middle fork of the lane.

The family lives in the white house. Two cabañas or apartments are attached to its left.

Then, on a sunny late afternoon, my porch and apartment:

As for water, fresh water is limited on Rapa Nui. The main sources are three lakes in volcanic calderas. Now there is a municipal water plant at the base of Rano Kau, near the north end of the airport.

After the annual eclipse, I got a locally brewed beer in a cafe along the waterfront road. Looking up the URL on the label, the Mahina microbrewery was close to where I stayed. That's it in the below picture, with the two tanks of the municipal water supply on the hill above it.

The brewery surely does some further treatment of the water. The water out of the taps in my cabaña tasted a little brackish. Not as brackish as the incompletely desalinated water you find on Greek islands, but a little off. It was fine for making tea or getting a quick drink in the night, but I picked up large jugs of water at the minimarts.

Accessing the Sites — Park Pass, Guide, and Transport

You can't just show up and wander around as you please. New rules came into effect when the island re-opened after being closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 to August 2022. The rules aim to limit harm to the sites and the island's culture, and to provide income for the local people. Given how they were so nearly wiped out, I'm all for it. The national park pass funds restoration and improvements for visitors at the controlled sites. The requirements during my 2024 visit were:

• You must purchase a national park pass. It costs about US$ 80 and is valid for ten days. You are only allowed one visit each to two sites, Oroŋo and Rano Raraku. You can return to the others for multiple visits. You purchase the pass at the office in town.
• You must be accompanied by a licensed local person. This might be a guide, with good historical and cultural background knowledge and able to speak your language. Or it might be a companion, who is licensed and will supervise your site visits but won't be explaining anything, possibly because they speak only a few words of your language.

You are told the rules when you apply for your permission to visit. Then your host will tell you about the details after you arrive.

My innkeeper told me about the requirements, and explained that she knew people who could serve as both guides and companions. Or, there are multiple businesses in Haŋa Roa operating half-day and all-day guided trips for groups.

That was on Monday afternoon, when I arrived. My very tentative plan was to spend all of Thursday seeing the sites, giving me a couple of days to make plans.

I did an all-day trip with Hahave Rapa Nui and was very pleased with the experience. There were 12 of us in the group. We left at 09:00 and spent the entire day visiting six sites, not returning until almost 18:30. Emilia Tepano, our guide, was excellent, and the day's itinerary was well planned. Having designed, written, and presented one-week training courses, I appreciated the tour's plan and Emilia's presentation. Emilia is fluent in Spanish and English, speaking both rapidly in the Chilean fashion, and explained everything in both languages at all the sites. Later pages in this collection take you through our stops in order: Vaihū, Akahaŋa, Rano Raraku, Ahu Toŋariki, Te Pito Kura, and Anakena.

Other Logistics

Yes, there is good cellular phone coverage on Rapa Nui. Entel added 5G support in 2023.

About 7,750 people live on Rapa Nui, and it's about 3,700 kilometers to the South American mainland. As far as I have seen, there is no fiber link. The mobile phone network uses a satellite link, so while there's 5G around the island there's limited bandwidth and significant latency to the mainland. Here's the local telco.

At least with the T-Mobile version of Android, my phone was convinced that it was in the mainland Chile time zone of UTC-4 rather than the Rapa Nui time zone of UTC-6. Probably because Rapa Nui is associated with the Valparaiso region on the mainland. That's no big deal, the only two events with a starting time requirement were the tour of the ancient sites and my departure flight.

As for Wi-Fi, lodging and cafes have it, frequently Wi-Fi 6 with WPA3. However, that will use Starlink to connect to the mainland. That adds variable latency while funneling more money to Elon Musk. Unfortunately, for the moment that's the main choice.

I later saw the same thing in far southern Chile, and came to recognize the distinctive Starlink routing and tunnel shenanigans. Running tcptraceroute showed the first three hops were always 192.168.1.1, then 100.64.0.1, then something in 172.16.251.0/24 or 172.16.250.0/24. The second hop to 100.64.0.1 added 50 to 200 milliseconds of latency. The fourth hop as tcptraceroute sees it returns nothing, and seems to be associated with traversing some tunnel. Hop #5 was always 206.224.69.198, allocated to Starlink, and then it hit a major carrier in Santiago, usually Hurricane Electric.

This first test was when the latency was only 50–65 milliseconds to Santiago. The same command an hour later might show up to 200 milliseconds latency to Santiago. I assume that the widely varying latency has to do with which satellites are visible and the resulting times for the hop distances.

$ tcptraceroute engr.purdue.edu 443
 1  192.168.1.1  2.114 ms  1.098 ms  8.578 ms
 2  100.64.0.1  60.068 ms  49.970 ms  55.956 ms
 3  172.16.250.22  52.660 ms  50.053 ms  52.881 ms
 4  * * *
 5  undefined.hostname.localhost (206.224.69.198)  51.010 ms  50.267 ms  48.975 ms
 6  HurricaneElectric-6939.SCL.PITChile.cl (45.68.16.244)  62.174 ms  53.338 ms  56.436 ms
 7  100ge0-35.core1.bue1.he.net (184.104.188.168)  89.029 ms  87.641 ms *
 8  * 100ge0-27.core3.sao1.he.net (184.104.188.73) 99.287 ms *
 9  * * *
10  * 100ge0-75.core1.cmh1.he.net (184.104.193.93) 224.341 ms  212.197 ms
11  100ge0-76.core2.ind1.he.net (184.104.192.150)  210.162 ms  212.302 ms  225.028 ms
12  indiana-university-co-indiana-gigapop.e0-49.switch2.ind1.he.net (184.105.35.194)  212.620 ms  223.722 ms  247.977 ms
13  38.101.160.251  244.661 ms  217.845 ms  214.712 ms
14  192.5.40.2  209.533 ms  219.095 ms  221.420 ms
15  * * *
16  * * *
17  * * *
18  web-01-02-ha.ecn.purdue.edu (128.46.104.20) [open]  228.274 ms  217.494 ms  216.561 ms

Hop #7 is Buenos Aires, Argentina; #8 is São Paulo, Brazil; and #10 is Columbus, Ohio, USA. Brazil to US adds another 100–130 milliseconds.

A site like WhatIsMyIPAddress.com shows that the Starlink tunnel ends in the Santiago area.

There's a cable from Valparaiso, Chile, to Papenoo, French Polynesia, but it seems to bypass Rapa Nui without landing.

Humboldt Cable, still in a planning stage in 2024, is to connect Chile to Australia. It may include a connection to Rapa Nui. It's to be a 144 Tbps cable, and only 7,750 people live on Rapa Nui. If connected, Rapa Nui would be on a side branch with lower bandwidth.

Next❯ Background and History