la isla de pascua

I just got back from 5 days in what seemed a lot like paradise. I can't even begin to express what an awesome way this was to wrap up the semester.

You know you've just arrived in tropical paradise when you're greeted with leis as you step off the airplane!

The island was so beautiful it almost didn't look real. Can you spot the rainbow?

Pretty much the entire island was formed from volcanic eruptions. This is an old volcano that we visited on the second day. Its last eruption was hundreds of years ago; now, the locals use it to grow vegetation that can't be produced on the rest of the land.

And of course, the huge Moai statues are the main attraction on Easter Island. The indigenous community there, called Rapa Nuis, constructed them for their chieftains to represent their forms after death. At one point, there were over 900 Moai displayed all over the island -- but they were all destroyed during a civil war. In the 1960s, anthropologists began studying the island and decided to reconstruct the giant Moai. Now, Easter Island is a historical site protected by UNESCO, and you can see tons of the Moai in various states of restoration.

They're huge! It's amazing to think that they were all carved out of the side of a cliff.

The stone in the background is what the Moai were carved from. I love that you can see them poking out of the hill, like they're about to stand up and walk away.

Our third day, we spent the afternoon on the biggest beach on the island. It was the most beautiful beach I've ever seen...and isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! Easter Island is about 3,000 miles away from its closest neighbor -- so even though we were technically still on Chilean soil, we were pretty far from home.

All in all, it was our most relaxing trip yet -- due to the combined facts that our finals are over, we got to sleep in until 9 every morning, we didn't have to bundle up in winter coats, there was lots of lounging by the pool deck, and we sat on the beach to watch the sunset every single night.

It's hard to go back to real life in Santiago...if you can call this whirlwind of my last few days "real life." I'm flying back the States on Saturday night, and I have an intimidating to-do list to accomplish before then. More on this later.