Hey, what's up, guys?
I want to try something new today.
I think that this shot is the best photo that I've ever taken... and the reason why I love
this photo so much is because of the context, because of when I was in my life.
So I want to try to tell you the story behind it.
Here it is.
I moved to Santiago in late 2013.
My company had just been accepted in a program for startups called Startup Chile, and my
co-founders and I moved there for 6 months.
Flying to Easter Island is expensive.
A Flight from Santiago on good dates is about $500, and trust me, we waited.
Back then I lived on a $1,200 salary which is OK for Santiago but certainly not enough
to travel much.
I also had debt I had piled up from my previously failed startup attempt.
Our friends in startup Chile made trips to Torres del Paine, Atacama Desert and even
Argentina, we saved up for Easter Island.
Less than a week before the trip I had been back home, where I learned I was going to
be a dad.
I was still wrapping my head around this as we flew out.
I even considered canceling the trip, considering how broke I was... but luckily most expenses
had already been paid for.
Rapa Nui, as the locals call it, is one of the most isolated places on Earth.
A flight from Santiago, the nearest continental land mass is over 5 hours.
Only about 4,000 people live on the tiny Island, which is just 25 km or 15 miles across.
Accommodations are quite humble, but Easter island is beautiful.
Wild horses roam the prairies.
An inactive volcano crater dominates the landscape.
Unsurprisingly, the locals settled Orongo, one of their villages there well over 500
years ago; most of which still stands and seems stolen out of the Last Jedi, or the
other way around.
There’s a single beach on Rapa Nui, on the far side of the Island, the rest of the coast
is made up of sharp, black, volcanic rock.
This volcanic rock is the material in which the Moai were sculpted, which is of course
the reason we were there.
As a kid my mom used to tell me how much she dreamt of visiting… and here I was, lucky
enough to visit as early as my twenties.
The first statue you’ll probably see is the lonely Te Ata Hero, near Hanga Roa, the
population center... only a few steps from there is Ahu Tahai, where you’ll see one
of the best restored statues, with eyes and Pukao.
Over 900 statues were carved on Rapa Nui, between the years 1250 and 1500... and you
can truly see the evolution of their designs, from very basic and simple shapes to the more
stylized and ambitious statues.
When the island was discovered on 1722 all the moai were standing, but by the 19th century
they had all been toppled.
All the moai standing today were brought back up by archeologists.
The most mind boggling place on the island is Rano Raraku, the quarry were all of the
moai were sculpted.
While smaller, lighter pieces were transported over 10 miles across the island, the biggest
moai never made it out of the quarry... they were just left abandoned.
This moai which was left incomplete, is 70ft or 21m long and weights 270 tons.
Walking the slopes of this crater turned quarry is out of this world.
A couple kilometers down stands Ahu Tongariki, the biggest Ahu on the island with the biggest
Moai outside of the quarry.
We heard this was a great place for sunrises, so on our last day on the island, we woke
up at 3am in the morning and drove our rented scooter there.
I had never seen stars so bright.
You could walk around just with the starlight.
This was my first time trying astrophotography.
I balanced the camera on the motorcycle seat, since I was carrying no tripod and we shot
these.
To photograph the Ahu, I balanced the camera on the grass with some rocks.
A couple or decent shots came up, with a coincidentally aligned Milky Way... but I wasn’t able to
get enough light on the moai.
This is when a car drove by.
By the strangest coincidence a car drove by at 4:30am in the morning, just as I was exposing
the 30 second shot.
The headlights illuminated the statues just right, with just the right amount of light…
and I captured this.
We moved out of Chile only a couple weeks after this trip.
With the both amazing and scary news I had received just a week earlier, escaping to
Easter Island for a week helped me remain sane, and prepare for what was
to come.