Easter Island

QUESTION: Where is Easter Island?

ANSWER:

Where is Easter Island? Easter Island lies in the southern Pacific Ocean, approximately 2200 miles (3500 kilometers) off the coast of Chile and from the resort of Tahiti. Lying close to the Polynesian Islands of the Marquesas (where one season of Survivor was filmed) and the Society Islands, it is the world’s most remote inhabited island. Imagine being in a place so isolated!

It is quite amazing to imagine how the first people came to inhabit this place. Why would one or two boatloads of people decide to stay on an uninhabited island? Maybe their cultural tendencies involved searching for new lands. Perhaps their homeland had deteriorated to such a point that the residents were forced to leave in search for food.

The early settlers experience may have been reminiscent to Tom Hank’s predicament in the movie Cast Away. The movie was filmed on a different island, but Easter Island may have looked similar...remote, lush, extremely quiet (except for the wildlife), and totally devoid of human life.

Perhaps those early travelers were unable to leave because of tidal influences; perhaps their boats were damaged by a storm, or wrecked among the dangerous rocky edges. So remote is Easter Island that it is not on any cruise ship itinerary. It truly could be the “navel of the world,” as its name Te Pito o Te Hunua suggests in the native tongue.

Flying is the only other means of transport to the island, which even now claims its own landing strip for the United States Space Shuttle. As remote as the island is, it has still managed to garner more notoriety than any of its visitors can claim for themselves, having inspired countless books and theories concerned with its discovery and intriguing statues.