toddler on easter island
When you take your toddler to a place like Easter Island, you begin to wonder whether you are being just a little bit selfish.
We have now taken five flights as part of our round the world trip, lasting a total of 26 hours, to reach what is one of the most isolated parts of the planet. Lola has generally been fine on the flights but after ten hours, it isn’t the most stimulating environment for anyone, least of all a lively and inquisitive toddler.
The constant jumping of time zones also plays havoc with the sleeping routine we have taken two years to hone. And for what? To get to see a bunch of old stones that she’ll never remember anyway.
As she gets older and begins to remember things more, I predict one of two things will happen. One, she’ll be so sick of travelling that she’ll be a real home bird, never setting foot outside Bedfordshire where we now live. Two, she’ll have been bitten by the travel bug and demand that Mummy and Daddy pay for her to go back to all these places she was so cruelly taken when we didn’t have to pay for her airline seat.
Is she does become the sort of person who lives out a backpack, she’ll certainly want to come back to Easter Island. No matter how often you see those eery staring stone heads on television and in National Geographic magazine, nothing prepares you for the impact of meeting one – or better still hundreds at the quarry of Rano Raraku – face-to-face.
My favourite piece of trivia about the island is that the US Government paid for the island’s airstrip to be extended as an emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle has never had to drop by and now it looks as though it never will. What it has done is enable bigger planes to come here but only 24,000 visitors make the trek each year to see what all the fuss is about. As a result, Easter Island still feels relatively untouched by tourism.
Our friend from home Vincenzo who organised
flights to touch down here this week as part of his own journey
around the world summed it up perfectly. “Walking down the main
street feels like being in one of those 1950s matinee movies set on
a Pacific island.”
I know what he means and hope that things are still the same when
Lola comes back again under her own steam. If she does that is…