Things to do
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Ahu Akivi
Seven moai stand inland from the coast, the only ones on the island that face the sea, set so they look at the equinox sunset with the sunrise at their backs. The platform sits in grazing land off the ring road and a short flat path reaches it from the gate.
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Ahu Tongariki
Fifteen moai stand on the largest platform ever built on the island, thrown down in the island's own wars, carried inland by the 1960 tsunami and re-raised in the 1990s with Japanese help. The row faces the sunrise, so the car park fills before dawn and empties again by mid-morning.
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Ana Kakenga
A lava tube on the west coast opens through two windows in a sea cliff, entered by a low crawl from a hole in the grass above. A torch and firm shoes are needed, the passage stands head high once inside, and the cave is best left alone in heavy rain.
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Anakena
The island's main beach is a crescent of coral sand under palms planted in the 1960s, with the restored moai of Ahu Nau Nau behind it, several still wearing their red topknots. It is one of two sites open without a guide, and the water inside the bay stays calm enough to swim.
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Explora Rapa Nui
A low stone and timber lodge on a rise at Miro O'one, some seven kilometres from Hanga Roa, built to sit below the horizon line and lit so the night sky stays dark. Rates cover guided excursions each day, and the position means every outing begins with a drive.
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Hangaroa Eco Village & Spa
A hotel on the Hanga Roa clifftop built in the curved, turf-roofed shape of the Orongo houses, with volcanic stone walls and a spa cut down into the rock. The harbour and the museum are within walking distance, and the west-facing rooms take the sunset over the sea.
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Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert
The island museum is named for the Capuchin friar who catalogued its archaeology from the 1930s, and it holds rongorongo casts, a rare female moai and one of the few original coral and obsidian eyes recovered. It stands a short walk north of Hanga Roa and takes about an hour.
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Orongo
A village of fifty-three stone houses sits on the rim of Rano Kau, where the birdman contest was settled each spring by a swim to the islet of Motu Nui for the first sooty tern egg. The ticket admits a single visit, the path runs one way along the crater edge, and the wind is fierce.
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Poike
The oldest of the three volcanoes forms the eastern headland, a grass dome that ends in cliffs and holds the cave of Ana o Keke, where girls were once kept out of the sun. The crossing is made on foot with a guide over park and grazing land and takes most of a day.
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Puna Pau
The red scoria of this small crater was cut into pukao, the topknots set on a moai's head, and rolled down to the coast, with about twenty-five of them left on the slope. A short loop climbs above the quarry and the whole visit takes under an hour.
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Landmark
Rano Kau
A crater 1.6 kilometres across holds a floor of reed-covered ponds, its seaward wall cut open by the ocean so the rim looks straight out over water. It shares the road and the park ticket with Orongo on the lip above, and the ground near the edge is loose and fenced off.
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Rano Raraku
Almost every moai on the island was cut from the tuff of this crater, and close to four hundred remain in it, some standing to the shoulders in fallen ash and one lying unfinished at over twenty metres. The park ticket admits a single visit, the trail runs one way, and a guide is required.
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Tahai
Three platforms stand on the shore just north of Hanga Roa, one carrying a lone moai with its coral and obsidian eyes restored, all re-raised by the archaeologist William Mulloy, whose grave lies beside them. It is the other site open without a guide, which makes it the island's sunset walk.
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Te Pito Kura
A smooth magnetic boulder sits inside a low stone ring on the north coast, beside the largest moai ever moved onto a platform, ten metres of it lying face down where it was toppled in the 1800s. The stone is fenced now and no longer handled, and the stop takes half an hour.
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Terevaka
The island's highest point at 511 metres is also the youngest of its three volcanoes, walked in about three hours there and back over open grass from the Ahu Akivi side. The summit is the one place on Rapa Nui with sea on every horizon, and the route carries no shade and no water.
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Vinapú
Two platforms on the south coast carry seaward walls of fitted basalt so precise that Thor Heyerdahl read them as evidence of contact with Peru, a reading archaeology has since set aside. The moai here lie face down where they fell, and the site stays quiet because it sits beyond the runway.
