First stop ... Easter Island!

29 Aug 2002

First stop, Easter Island! (aka Rapa Nui or Isla de Pascua) 

As the most isolated inhabited island in the world, it's not particularly easy to get to. I had a fancy round-the-world ticket which was only valid with a selection of airlines, so rather than take the direct route via Tahiti, I flew all the way to Santiago in Chile, then promptly jumped on a plane and flew a third of the way back across the Pacific Ocean. The upshot of this was that we were heading west at dusk, chasing the sun over the horizon for a glorious extended sunset.

View over Hanga Roa

On the first non-travelling day of my big adventure I walked from the main town of Hanga Roa to the ceremonial village of Orongo which is perched on the edge of one of the island's three volcanoes. One side slopes steeply down into a water-filled crater, and the other drops precipitously to the ocean. Apparently the original Polynesian inhabitants would slide (careen?) down the crater walls on banana leaves. There was also an annual competition to swim out to a group of offshore islands. The first to find a bird's egg and return would be honoured as Birdman and have his achievement immortalised in petroglyphs. This is a genuinely impressive feat, as they would have had to dive off huge cliffs into wild seas, then swim a kilometre there and back.

Ranu Kao

At Orongo I had my first experience of not being able to speak the local language. The ranger said something to me in rapid Chilean Spanish, and I was dumbstruck. I had no idea what she'd said, and with mouth agape, couldn't even begin to phrase a response. I'd spent a few months learning Spanish, at night college and with teach-yourself books and tapes, but I was desperately under-prepared for the real thing. I couldn't even bring myself to say "No hablo espanol". Luckily, another person there spied my predicament and had some English, so was able to help me out. I felt completely out of my depth, dumb, inadequate, even disabled - a salutary lesson (as my dad liked to say, repeatedly, "Training for life, son.")

Motu Kao Kao, Iti & Nui, viewed from Orongo. Petroglyphs in foreground.

Garth Goes to South America - 19 year anniversary edition!

On this day in 2002 I set off on a six month backpacking trip through South and Central America. I'm planning to post my photos and recollections from the trip, as close to the actual day/month as possible.

 

Here is me fresh-faced at 21 years old, raring to go and perhaps just a touch apprehensive. I am wearing exceedingly shiny nylon travel pants, and a white Tea Party shirt (alas from their underwhelming album Triptych - the start of their slide into mediocrity). I had spent months planning this trip, and yet I wore white! Luckily the hard-working laundresses of the Andes could get anything clean-as-new. The washing machines of the wealthier countries were no match. 

One might ask why I'm doing this, and why now. Certainly, next year would have been much more numerically pleasing. But right now, the idea of heading off on such an adventure is ludicrous, and the looming spectre of climate change makes it morally indefensible. In 2002 a big overseas trip was regarded as a rite of passage, in a world that, despite 9/11, hadn't started to unravel. A young person on the cusp of adulthood just doesn't have the same opportunities, nor the cause for optimism that we still carried back then. So there is an element of nostalgia for those glory days when we were footloose and fancy free. More personally, perhaps I'm at a stage where there is some value in facing up to who I was, and what I have lost from carrying the burden of ME/CFS.

Some background to my trip: My third year at uni in 2001 had been hard work, and I was ready for a break before tackling another two years. I hadn't taken a gap year after college - I was only 17 and there is no way I was mature enough to venture out into the actual world. Over summer I had a fantastic internship with CSIRO doing a cool project with Greg Castle on haptic virtual reality. They then sent me for a few months to Perth, where I got paid a real salary, so could save heaps of money and do lots of planning for my trip.

I was the only one of my brothers to go on an extended backpacking trip. But my Mum had been on a big round-the-world trip via Africa back in the late-60s, and her dad had a huge adventurous streak which he satisfied by dragging out his war service in the Melanesian islands and with his aboriginal tracker mate in the wilds of the NT. Perhaps it's a Boxall thing.

I settled on South America for a few reasons: Europe and North America weren't adventurous enough; South-East Asia was too stereotypical (I tried a bit too hard to differentiate myself ...); Africa seemed intimidating and didn't allow the kind of independent travel I was after; and the Middle East and Central Asia was a no-go so soon after 9/11. Also, I'd only have to learn one language for a whole continent (I didn't got to Brazil). But most of all, when I was a kid I read all the Willard Price books, starting with Amazon Adventure! 

This series followed Hal & Roger as they traipsed around the globe catching wild animals for their father's zoo on Long Island. Luckily I didn't absorb too much of the wealthy colonial white privilege, but I developed a huge love for nature and wilderness. I had to go to the Amazon.

So stay tuned to find out where I went and what I got up to!

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