Cycling – The World As I See It

Going east after Easter Island, the only practical destination is Santiago, the capital of Chile. I had been there before in 2009 but I couldn’t remember much of the stay itself. And after spending the past five days in the city centre I have come to realise why. This city has a strange way of pulling you into it, spending your days leisurely walking through its parks, cycling, running, dining, drinking glasses of superb Chilean wine filled almost to the rim and just floating on the ‘I’ll do that mañana’ vibe. I did nothing extremely exiting and I haven’t had such a relaxed time during my trip so far.

This also means there are no stories here that will make the people at home jealous but let me just share with you some of the non-exiting stuff you can do in Santiago because I can certainly recommend a visit if you like (long) city trips.

Costanera Sky Tower

Every big city has its sky tower or equivalent and Santiago is no exception with its Torre Costanera, the highest building in South America. What is exceptional is that this one is not ridiculously priced. For the equivalent of 8 euro, you can go up to the 51st floor and stare at the vastness of greater Santiago, the mountain range that encloses it and all its parks and other highlights. There are guides and good signage which makes the spotting easy but you’ll have to be lucky with the weather and smog. The first five floors of the building hold a very modern shopping centre with a good layout of international and domestic retailers. Maybe this is professional deformation but I always have to go and check out these concepts. I wondered why I hadn’t done the Sky Tower last time until I saw that it had only opened for public in 2015. Which incidentally also makes it an activity that not many tourists have done yet.

Viña del Mar

At roughly 100km west of Santiago lies Viña del Mar, bordering the Pacific. It is the most popular beach destination in Chile, even though at 13 degrees Celsius, swimming in the ocean is a chilling experience, apparently because of Antarctic currents. People mainly go to party, sunbathe, enjoy the beautiful gardens and to visit the casino. I went there on a daytrip with Chile’s excellent bus system (5 euro each way), trying to recapture some of the magic of my legendary 5-day stay in 2009. As the casino at that time held restaurants, bars and clubs, the evening out started for many people in the Casino Municipal, a beautiful 1930 art-deco building. My friends and I got hooked on a slot machine called Cheese Caper, a themed play with bank robber mice. You could play for as little as 1 peso, and we were determined to advance through all the bonus games to reach the vault with the motherload of cheese. Only after three days did we succeed and against all odds, together with our poker gains, we ended up with a very large amount of pesos on our last day in Chile. We traded this for all the available euros (paper and coins) at the money exchange at the airport, finishing their business for the day very profitably, and put the remainder in charity boxes. I wasn’t able to reproduce our success this time but it was a lot of fun to be back and the casino still operates the Cheese Caper machines. Viña del Mar is only a few miles from the beautiful city of Valparaiso with its colourful houses so don’t miss that if you have never seen it.

Cycling and Running

There is an abundance of cyclists in and around Santiago and even though the main roads are not safe for cyclists by Dutch standards, the city has made a lot of effort to create some cycle lanes and areas. Close to my hotel was Cerro San Cristóbal, the main hill of downtown Santiago with a chapel and large statue of the virgin Mary on top. I decided to go for a run but most people cycle to the top. There are a few ways to reach it and therefore you can run or cycle in a circle which is nicer than just up and down. All the way up to the virgin Mary is about 8km, but it yields a magnificent sight over Santiago that rivals the sky tower. The Christian chanting music at the top paired with the chapel and statue also make it a very beautiful experience if you appreciate the Roman-Catholic religion. There are food and drinks for sale at different points. Running uphill for 8km is tough but the descent is only 6km and really a breeze. Cycling may be the better choice for most people and it’s probably more fun too.

Santa Lucia Hill

This is arguably the most beautiful location in all of Santiago, also right in the city centre. I almost missed it because it seemed like such an unpretentious park. However, covered in trees and vegetation, a winding road circles the hill with a huge amount of little side-paths, stairs and inroads. These in turn lead to beautiful vistas, a small castle, cannons, chapels, fortifications, fountains and beautiful gardens. I like places that you cannot discover in one go but where every time you try and look, you find something different. It’s by no means big and you can do most of it in 2 hours but it’s very, very impressive. The hill supposedly was the first point of reconnaissance in the area for the Spanish conquerors and legend has it that Pedro de Valdivia decided on this hill where to build Santiago. I missed it, but I read later that at noon each day a cannon shot is fired from the hill.

Wine tasting

Wine tasting in Chile is a bit different from most other places because vineyards provide full tours and explanations on the estate, soil and processes with tasting only afterwards. I much prefer the loose and efficient vineyard hopping and tasting that is prevalent in many other wine regions. Having done one of the tours already I decided not to opt for another one. However, I came across the Bocanáriz winebar in the bohemian district Barria Lastarria in the centre of Santiago that offered easy wine tasting with many theme based flights, all with Chilean wines only and with different Carmenères, the red grape most typical to Chile. They also have an excellent menu with dishes you don’t find in many places. I didn’t particularly enjoy the raw sea urchins but it was interesting to try them in a ceviche. If you like something sweet to finish, check out Italian-American restaurant Nolita in the same street for their Belgium chocolate cone, one of the best chocolate desserts I’ve ever had.

Easter Island! The mystery island, called Rapa Nui in Polynesian language, a name used for both the island and its inhabitants. It was claimed by many European powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century but nowadays it is a province of Chile. The island is filled with large ancient man-like statues called ‘moai’, mainly along the coast, that were made to worship ancestors and to watch over the living. Easter Island has been on my list for a long time but it is not easy to reach, it must be one of the most remote places in the world as there is absolutely nothing of interest within a 3500 km radius. The island is very small so it doesn’t really function as a destination by itself from Europe. There are flights from Tahiti once a week and daily from Santiago de Chile (with a LAN Dreamliner), making it a nice extension to a long holiday in Chile or a stopover on a world tour that takes you past the Pacific.

Ahu Tongariki - Very famous for its sunset pictures — Ahu Tongariki – Very famous for its beautiful sunrise pictures. Still beautiful if you don’t enjoy getting up early.

The history of Easter Island is still relatively unclear. The first people to arrive were probably Polynesians around 1200 EC. They formed a fairly advanced civilization around the moai cult and when the island was first spotted by Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen on the Easter Sunday of 1722 (hence the name), moai were still standing erect. However, there were almost no trees and estimates by the Dutch explorers on the population on the island ranged between 2000 and 3000 inhabitants. Scientists now think that the island may have held up to 20.000 inhabitants in its prime period several decades earlier but that the complete deforestation of the island led to soil erosion, conflict and a lack of food and resources (no wood to build canoes means no fishing).

Without large fish supplies, the Rapa Nui diet was limited to birds and molluscs and therefore these sources of protein also quickly disappeared from the island. After that happened, the Rapa Nui may have turned cannibalistic for a while. With the soil depleted, the land and sea birds gone and streams dried up, there were no means for pollen and seeds to spread and grow into new trees and so the destruction of the original natural environment was complete. Popular science writer Jared Diamond wrote an interesting book about the decline of the Rapa Nui civilisation (among others) called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I like Diamond as a writer for his magnificent award winning book called Guns, Germs and Steel about why civilisations thrive or not. However, his man-made deforestation theory in Collapse is much debated in recent years as there is no consensus on whether the Rapa Nui themselves cleared the trees or whether millions of Polynesian rats with no natural predators ate the seeds and gnawed the bark, preventing the forest from renewing itself.

Fifty years after Roggeveen, Captain James Cook visited the island but many moai had been toppled by then, possibly due to tribal wars. More outside contact followed, bringing pests, diseases and slave trade. Peruvian slave raiders in the nineteenth century took half the population and when after international pressure the remaining Rapa Nui were allowed to return, they brought with them diseases, mainly smallpox, that decimated the population. The first Christian missionary that arrived shortly after was affected by tuberculosis which spread on the island, killing a quarter of all people. Additional strive and conflict continued until the point where only 111 original Rapa Nui remained. Luckily, numbers have rebounded to about 2000 since then but much of the history, folklore and culture was lost. This is a pretty sad story but in the past 40 years much has been done to revive the culture, grant the original Rapa Nui people more rights and excavate and reconstruct the moai statues and other historical places.

The ancient moai quarry Rano Raraku with scattered moai, some half buried in the ground, some only partly carved our in the rock wall. — The ancient moai quarry Rano Raraku with scattered moai, some half buried in the ground, some only partly carved out from the rock wall.

When visiting Easter Island, there are many options to go out and explore. Most people hire a car, scooter or arrange a guided bus tour and it’s also possible to hire quads. I decided to take the sporty and environmentally friendly option and hired a mountain bike for two days. Many of the roads leading to interesting sites are unpaved so any type of cycle other than a mountain bike is not a good idea. There is a nice 55km loop that you can follow that starts in the capital Hanga Roa on the western part of the island and that takes you past a large number of historical sites. The road follows the coastline for about 20 km past the Moai quarry, towards the Ahu Akariki row of moai and the volcano in the east. It’s then on to the Anakena beach in the North and back to Hanga Roa through the center of the island. When you stop at all the points of interest along the way it’s a full day tour. However it’s also great cycling trip and I was tempted to take the bike out for an extra day to do the loop again in one go.

A shorter but more difficult ride is the road north from Hanga Roa of which the largest part is unpaved. This takes you past the Tahai moai (the only one with eyes) and the inland Ahu Akivi row of moai on the way back. The path also takes you past caves that were once used by the ancient civilization that sculpted the Moai and together with some French people I met on the way we were able to descent in one of the main caves and crawl out of a smaller hole in the ground some 50 metres further.

Ana Kakenga cave complex - crawl to the exit — Ana Kakenga cave complex – crawl to the exit

And frankly, that is it. If you are an avid surfer, Easter Island may have more to offer you with its big rolling waves but once you’ve seen all the moai, the volcano’s, caves and burial sites, you’ve seen it all. Four days is more than enough unless you like to take things very slowly. Still, it’s a great once in a lifetime experience.

A word of caution: Wifi is so poor and patchy on the entire island that you can’t really do much online. This shouldn’t be a problem for most people but it made my style of planning and booking everything last-minute very inefficient. Book your hotel and tours before you get there, especially in high season.