Hello from a little airbnb in Cartagena, Colombia! The A/C is blasting and our Curacao video is exporting. Life is good. 😌
Easter Island 🗿
Easter Island (Rapa Nui in the local language) is an absolute gem of a place. Just the Polynesian tropical island culture would be reason enough to visit. Then you add on hundreds of world famous Moai statues… and well, it becomes one of our favorite (if not, the favorite) place we visited in South America.
As you can see, it’s not just Reyka and me here this time. We were so lucky to have been joined by none other, than my wonderful mom. She was in Chile already for business, so it didn’t take much convincing to get her to leave her colleagues behind to fly out West deep into the Pacific Ocean with her crazy son and his girlfriend.
Some Easter Island Fun Facts:
- The Moai (the famous big head statues) are actually head stones for the graves of ancient Rapa Nuians. When someone died back in the day, their family would commission a statue from the quarry, pay them a lot (their currency was food), cart the statue across the island by sliding them on massive (now extinct) palm trees, then erect the statue at the grave. Once up, they’d place eyes in the eye sockets made from coral and obsidian, which was believed to bring their dead loved ones back to life.
- It’s a very small island. Only 14 miles wide and 7 miles tall.
- It’s considered to be one of the most isolated islands in the world at 2000 miles from the nearest population center. That’s 2/3 the width of the continental U.S. 🤯
How did we end up here?
Easter Island is not somewhere we ever imagined we would visit. It’s technically part of Chile, but it’s also a 5.5 hr flight from Santiago. So it’s not exactly easy to get to.
And despite loving Night at the Museum and laughing at the Easter Island statue that says “Dumb dumb give me gum gum,” to Ben Stiller, our plan for South America was always to make a sort of U shape.
We changed plans because my mom visited and we wanted to go on a special trip together. But also, we love changing plans while traveling.
We used to plan way ahead, but now we often don’t book flights until a few days before. Yes, maybe it’s because travel planning is a lot of work. And yes, that does make it more expensive often times.
But, there’s also something so fun about being somewhere you had no idea you’d be at a few days earlier. We are so lucky to live in the 21st century, where all corners of the globe are, at most, two days of travel away.
Anyways, to summarize all this, Easter Island is awesome. If you had any inkling to visit, we highly recommend adding it to the must-see category of travel destinations.
Thanks mom for letting us tag along with you ❤️
Colombia 🇨🇴
After Easter Island, we flew to Medellin, a marvelous city which is home to the best tacos of my life.
Now we’re in Cartagena, a beachy Caribbean city on the coast.
We’re rapid-fire racing through Colombia as this time next week, we’re headed back to Columbus. Yup, that’s right, North America.
It’s wild that we’ve been so behind on editing that we really haven’t even started posting our dozens of South America videos (if you don’t count Brazil, which we posted out of order.) What can we say? Editing is a lot of work.
New Video (tomorrow)! 💪
After all that heavy traveling, we fell of the Saturday posting schedule, but our Curaçao vlog should be up and live tomorrow, Monday morning. We’re hustling to get back on schedule, and we have some long travel days in the next week to get more videos done!
That’s all for today! We’re going to watch some American Idol. We’re shamelessly hooked and watch it every week. Please always feel free to respond to these emails. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like. Most days I just sit down and kinda let it flow, so it’s helpful to get some feedback sometimes 🥰
Love,
Wyatt (and Reyka)