The island is about 3500km from the coast of South America, but is part of Chile.  It is known as Easter Island, because Dutch sailors encountered the island on Easter Sunday.

The island’s airport has an extra long runway – NASA paid to have it upgraded so that it could be used as an emergency landing strip for the space shuttle.  The hotel owner arranged to meet me at the airport.  He didn’t have to ask what flight I was on, as there was only one flight arriving that day.

Rapa Nui’s parliament.

About 5000 people live on the island.  Most of them earn their living from tourism.  The island is famous for its moai – giant statues.

The most widely accepted theory is that the statues are funeral effigies for the island’s nobles.  They were carved from volcanic rock at a crater in the center of the island and then transported to their resting places across the island.

Completed moai had eyes and a hat added, but most of the statues were damaged in the island’s civil wars.

An example of a restored maoi.

Some moai also hang out at the beach.

http://www.castofwonders.org/2012/03/23/ep31-inksucker-by-aidan-doyle/

There are hundreds of lines and the longest straight line is more than 50km long.  The lines were created by different groups over a 1000-year period.  Some of the lines serve as a form of calendar, matching up with the position of the sun on the winter solstice.  It is believed other lines indicate the position of underground water sources and some of them also roughly correspond to some constellations.

From the ground it is easy to miss the lines all together, and a highway was built through one of the lines that no one had noticed prior to flights going over the area.  The lines weren’t made by adding rocks.  They were made by removing rocks and exposing the different colored rocky ground.  The lines have been preserved because Nazca is such a dry place.

There are some viewing towers and I also did a flight over the lines in a small plane.  We flew over lots of different designs, including a whale, a 9 fingered monkey, a hummingbird and a spider.  Even from the air it can be sometimes quite hard to distinguish the lines from the marks in the terrain.

I also visited some ancient aqueducts and an old cemetery.  The mummies were preserved because the air is so dry.
The guide kept saying the mummies had probably died of Thai food.  Well, at least that’s what his accent made it sound like.  I think he might have meant typhoid.

I stayed in Cusco, city of the Incas.  I had visited Cusco a few times before and had already seen Machu Picchu.  This time I was there for the Peruvian Day of Independence celebrations.  There were lots of different military forces around.

Some of them were tasked with the important task of securing ATMs.

The police cracked down on a potential wookie uprising.

I also visited Arequipa, which is near to Colca Canyon, one of the deepest canyons in the world and a good place to spot Andean condors.

Arequipa is also home to Juanita, the ice maiden, the world’s most famous non-Egyptian mummy. The frozen body of a sacrificed Incan girl was found in 1995 after it was dislodged following a volcanic eruption. It is one of the best-preserved pre-Conquest bodies ever found. While he was president, Bill Clinton commented on Juanita, “If I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That’s a good-looking mummy. That mummy looks better than I do on my worst days, I’m telling you.”

Bogota is home to the Gold Museum, which houses a vast collection of indigenous gold artifacts.

Cartagena was the main port the Spanish used for transferring their loot back to Europe, and as such was the world’s number one destination for pirates.  The Spanish built big walls to surround the city, but it was attacked numerous times, as well as ships leaving the city.  It is now a popular tourist destination and the old city is a nice place to wander around.

The city walls with the new city in the background.

Mobile library.

Medellin is best known for being the home of Pablo Escobar, one of the richest and most powerful criminals in history.  He made billions of dollars and terrorised the country.  But he was initially a popular figure because he gave money back to poor neighborhoods and built housing estates.  But then he was denounced as a drug lord and embarked on a war against the government.  He hired assassins to storm the supreme court, killing more than half of the judges.  He offered to pay Colombia’s national debt in return for immunity to extradition.  He targeted presidential candidates and had a plane blown up.  He eventually surrendered on the condition that the constitution be rewritten to prohibit extradition and that he be allowed to build his own prison.  Police weren’t allowed within 20km of his prison mansion.  Truckloads of prostitutes arrived at the prison and he held parties and ran his business from there.  He would even leave the prison to go on shopping excursions to Bogota.  After he had people executed inside the prison the government finally decided to intervene and he went on the run again.  This time they tracked him down after he talked on the phone with his son and he was killed.

I went on a Pablo Escobar tour where they show you sites associated with Pablo’s life and death, such as his house in Medellin and his grave site.   While it’s important not to glorify the lives of vicious criminals, the fact remains that many of the most famous ones had particularly interesting lives.  And they make the subject of great drama.  The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, Blow, Killing Pablo.  Consider Robert de Niro’s film career without gangster movies.  He’d basically be left with Meet the Fockers and its sequels, which would be a sad state of affairs.

We drove through Barrio Triste (The Sad Neighborhood) which is full of auto repair shops and people sitting on the street smoking a form of crack cocaine.  The guide said the poor neighborhoods had become really dangerous again and four of her friends had been murdered in the last couple of years.  In the 80s and early 90s, Medellin had the reputation of being the most dangerous city in the world.  In 1991 the murder rate was 381 per 100,000 inhabitants.  By comparison the city with the highest murder rate in the US is New Orleans with 52.  Melbourne has a rate of 3.7 and Osaka 1.8  A big effort was made to make Medellin a safer place and in 2007 the murder rate had fallen to 33.8.  But in the last couple of years it has risen again.  In 2009 it was 94.5.

Medellin is also the birthplace of artist, Ferdnando Botero, known for his distinctive fat figures.