No, not me collapsing. I'm reading a fantastically interesting book: Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Diamond is a professor of Geography at UCLA. (He won the Pulitzer for another book: Guns, Germs and Steel which I'll read as some point ( Read more... )

This year we went to South America twice. In March we went to the Galapagos. And in November we went to Peru primarily to go to Machu Picchu and Easter Island. Originally the Machu Picchu visit was to be after the Galapagos trip but major rain storms in Peru in January washed out the railroad and the site was closed to visitors since there was no ( Read more... )

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Two kinds of dancing on Easter Island. One night we went to an entertaining native dancing show. Here are a couple of fragments of what they were doing.




Then we did our own - some English Country Dancing and a couple of Contras. We danced Easter Morn but didn't do Easter Thursday because we didn't have its music.

Several fragments of ( Read more... )

We lucked out in our timing when we heard that there was going to be Banana Sled racing one day while we were there. Contestants are decked out in body paint, almost no clothes, and sometimes feathers or other decor. There were men, women, and children who did it. The sleds are constructed from two stalks of a banana tree lashed together and the ( Read more... )

There are three large, dormant volcanos on Easter Island plus several smaller ones. This one, Rana Koa, was the only one we got to see the inside of. It is a verdant spot with a lake. Some reeds - origin South America (same as are found in Lake Titicaca) - grow here and were used to make boats of varying sizes.


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As we went to various places on Easter Island we saw various collections of Moia, some standing up and some not in very good shape. There were some in the quarry where they are made that were works in progress. I read in Aku Aku, Thor Heyerdahl's book about his trip that some of the local made some new ones using what they thought were the tools ( Read more... )

Easter Island is in the Pacific Ocean in the middle of nowhere. It is 2,300 miles from South America, 2,640 to Tahiti and 1,289 miles from Pitcairn Island, the nearest place. People from Peru and people from Polynesia migrated to it. There is lots of controversy among archeologists and historians as to who was really there first and who ( Read more... )

We're back from a most fabulous trip to Peru and Chile. It was even better than I expected and my expectations were high. I need to work on pictures by selecting a few from the ~1600 I took for some detailed postings but here is a quick summary ( Read more... )