Category Archives: easter island

So long, old friends

I’m saying goodbye to two fine traveling companions — my Nikon D200 and D300. They’ve served me well and we’ve had a great many adventures together.


Easter Island, shot with the Nikon D200 in 2006.

I picked up the D200 in 2006 just prior to a trip to Chile and Easter Island. What a way to start. It was almost literally like going to the ends of the earth. The D200 was my main body for a couple of years and never gave me a bit of trouble. In 2008, I borrowed my brother’s D300 for a back-up body when a trip to China suddenly came up. Upon returning home, I bought it from him.


A low-light shot from China, taken with the Nikon D300 in 2008.

The two traveled well together but the D200 was semi-retired in early 2009 when I added a D700 to once again have a full-frame body. I like to carry two bodies both for back-up purposes and to have two lens options quickly available at all times, but carrying three is too much for me. Still, I hung onto the D200, thinking that I might convert it to infrared. It was tempting but I never got around to it — partly because I didn’t know how much use I’d get out of it and I didn’t want to have the extra weight in the bag at all times. If it’s not with you, you won’t use it, right? So… it never happened.

The D300 and D700 have accompanied me to Egypt, Canada, Dubai, Thailand, Jamaica, Germany and other exotic and not-so-exotic places but the time has come to make a change in the lineup again. I’ve been feeling the need to add more video capabilities and the new DSLRs that shoot video would allow me to do that without carrying much extra gear. So, I’ve ordered a Nikon D7000 to become the new traveling companion for my D700. I’ll fill you in more when it arrives.

Decade in review: 2006

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Continuing my review of the the past decade…

2006 kicked off with a trip to South Korea. Traveling with a group of American journalists, we caught the attention of school kids everywhere we went. They would rush over and want to practice their english on us. The reception was warm and welcoming. Anyone in our group with blonde hair and blue eyes was especially popular. We had our own paparazzi, too. Korean journalists following the American journalists everywhere. One night we saw an on-the-street interview with a member of our group on the nightly news, dubbed in Korean. Americans seemed to be truly loved in South Korea. It was a feeling that I hadn’t experienced abroad so strongly for several years.

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The street markets in Korea were a favorite of mine. Always colorful and always full of the smells of street food. Some of that yellow twine in the top photo has been wrapped around the handle of my suitcase ever since this trip. It makes for an easy way to identify my bag on the airport carousel — even though it’s showing the wear of many thousands of miles of transport.

One of the more memorable events from this trip was an overnight visit to a buddhist temple. We dined with the monks, took tea, made paper lotus lanterns and were schooled in buddhist philosophy. I’ve written about the dining experience on this blog before so I won’t go into it again here. Suffice it to say that I’ll remember that night for a long, long time.

There were several US trips in 2006 as well, including a post-Katrina visit to New Orleans. Then, in the Fall, I got to experience Spring again by crossing the equator and visiting Chile. Here’s a shot from a great old neighborhood in Santiago:

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I spent a day in the port city of Valparaiso as well. It’s a picturesque town that spills down mountainsides in a riot of color. Funiculars take you up many of the hillsides but I generally preferred to walk. After many hundred steps up the side of one mount, I followed the sound of some odd music to find this fellow with his parakeet selling toys from his music box:

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Santiago is one of two places from which you can fly to Easter Island (the other being Tahiti). One of the most remote inhabited places on earth, I had always wanted to visit it to see the stone heads, or Moai. The flight was about 5 hours straight west over the Pacific. There was a little screen in the seatback in front of me where I could watch the image of a tiny plane as it neared the Chilean coast, then headed out into the blue. The screen remained simply blue with that little plane pointed forward until, more than 2000 miles later, we miraculously landed on the tiny island. For four days I explored the nearly treeless landscape that strangely reminded me of the Flint Hills 60 miles west of my home back in Kansas. Except these hills were surrounded by ocean and were inhabited by those mysterious heads.

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Easter Island, a little less remote

Easter Island MoaiWhen I visited Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, a little over a year ago it was stunningly isolated. Just a few thousand people lived on the island, mostly in the one small town of Hanga Roa. Groceries were purchased in a small garage-like building on a brick street and there were only a handful of small hotels for tourists. Nothing glamorous — fairly basic lodging.

There was talk at the time among the locals of a new hotel that was to be built on the island’s south side. It was causing some concern and I could understand why. Few places have escaped the plastification of tourism and it would be sad to see this remote outpost fall as well. I was picturing in my mind a rude concrete tower with a neon-lit casino and shuttles buzzing to and fro hauling tourists to the various archeological sites.

Today, I find this on the internet:
Explora En Rapa Nui

I guess I feel a little better. The newly opened Explora En Rapa Nui appears to be a very nice hotel. The architecture fits in nicely with the landscape and bears some resemblance to the ruins of Orongo that perch on the cliffs of Easter Island’s southwest coast. Still, you wonder what the impact of this hotel will be on the island. Is it just the first in a long line of “improvements”? Is a Starbucks soon to follow? I hope the island can retain its charm. And I hope that whatever further changes come are good for the local people.