Disney & SF

After Vegas, Mini Bear and I took a quick jaunt to the happiest place on earth where I got to meet Mickey Mouse...

 

...before continuing on to one of my all time favorite cities, San Francisco. My flight landed in the evening and I watched a great sunset from my window seat.

 

No trip to SF is complete without spending some time at Pier 39, which many sea lions call home. Since late 1989, just after the 6.9 magnitude earthquake, seal ions have been using the docks as a place to rest and socialize. Over the years, their numbers have fluctuated greatly, depending on the food supply.

 

While I could happily watch the sea lions for hours, there are also plenty of shops and restaurants at Pier 39.

 

(I was really excited to see this shirt in one of the stores because so often, penguins and polar bears are depicted as living together. Not true!)

 

I've been to SF many times, but this was my first time visiting Alcatraz. The island has a long history, dating back to its early days as a military prison. Nowadays, Alcatraz receives well over one million annual visitors.

This sign greets tourists upon arrival. I hadn't realized that Native Americans had occupied the island in protest beginning in 1969, lasting nearly two years.

 

Inside the prison are three tiers of cells which once housed prisoners like Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelley, Robert Stroud (perhaps better known as the Birdman of Alcatraz), and Doc Barker, among others.

I was fascinated by the tales of attempted escapes. The creativity, patience, and resourcefulness of these prisoners are truly spectacular. Officially, there has never been a successful escape from Alcatraz but that didn't seem to stop the prisoners from trying. One man tried to escape by patiently stealing American military uniform parts, wearing them, and slipping out onto the laundry boat. Unfortunately for him, the boat's only other stop that day was not San Francisco, but nearby Angel Island. It wasn't long before his mismatched uniform gave him away and he returned to Alcatraz. More famous is the 1962 attempt by three inmates who, after tirelessly digging a tunnel out of their cells and into a vent, placed papier-mâché heads in their bunks and slipped out under the quiet cover of night. It is thought all three inmates drowned in the frigid waters but this has never been conclusively proven.

 

Not feeling up to the steep walk, I was satisfied with taking a photo of Lombard Street and its famous 27% grade.

 

Feeling hungry, Mini Bear strolled through Chinatown on search of dinner.

 

As dusk fell, Mini Bear called it a day with a walk through beautiful Washington Square Park.

 

 

 

Rapa Nui: day 5

Unfortunately, I had to catch a flight out of Rapa Nui and back to mainland Chile. I didn't do much in the morning before my flight, so I'll now share some tidbits about my time on the island.

 

The post office will stamp your passport with an Isla de Pascua stamp for free (mine is on the page next to my Antarctica penguin stamp!).

 

The island's only town, Hanga Roa, is so small that when two Swiss tourists at the airport realized they hadn't gotten their passports stamped and that the post office closed in fifteen minutes, there was enough time for one of them to sprint to the post office, get the stamps, and sprint back to the airport before the post office had even closed and in time to catch his flight out!

 

Either the fire department has a close relationship with Japan, or they really love the LA Lakers.

 

While Rapa Nui is worlds apart from mainland Chile, they are identical in one important aspect: countless stray dogs. Walking to sunset one night, we were followed for a good twenty plus minutes by a group of ten dogs!

 

The final step in completing a moai was to carve the eyes or the eye slots, as the white sclera are actually removable.

 

And here are a few parting moai shots...

 

Back to the mainland (be sure to get a window seat on your flight!).

 

Rapa Nui: day 4

During yesterday's bike ride, we passed near the island's museum so three of us headed there today to learn a little more about the island.

 

The Rapa Nui writing system, called rongorongo uses glyphs and is boustrophedonic (you can thank me for that word the next time you play Scrabble). This means you would start reading from the bottom left corner, from left to right, then turn the tablet upside down, and continue reading left to right. The previously read line of text is now upside down. As an armchair linguist, I find this fascinating and exciting! No one has ever successfully decoded the glyphs. The Rapa Nui lost their knowledge of their unique writing system when slave raiders and a seventy year civil war wiped out much of the population.

 

Fishing has always been important in Rapa Nui.

 

Fun fact: the entire island was rented out as a sheep farm for the first half of the twentieth century!

 

In the afternoon, I hiked to Vinapu, the last major site I hadn't yet visited. On my way there, I passed a great tree that I couldn't resist climbing.

 

All of the moai at Vinapu have toppled over, one way or another. It really is quite something to see these massive stone statues (and their hats!) lying in pieces on the ground.

 

I caught one last sunset behind the moai.

 

To celebrate a great week in Rapa Nui, a friend and I got dressed up (that is, we put on clean clothes) and went out for a nice dinner at a restaurant overlooking the water. We took one last long look at the clear, starry sky before turning in for the night.

 

Rapa Nui: day 3

Our guide yesterday told us about some caves on the island. I'm a sucker for a dark, enclosed, rocky space, so three of us rented bikes to go exploring.

 

As I've said before, mountain biking is not my forte. And I had conveniently forgotten that most of the island's hilly roads are dirt. Oy vay. (Fun fact: NASA came to the island several years ago and beautifully paved a few of the roads as the island's airport, which had a surprisingly long runway, was an emergency landing spot for past space shuttles. Some people think aliens created the moai. Perhaps paving roads and runways was just a cover for NASA? You be the judge.)

 

Our first stop was Two Windows Cave. The cave entrance was deceptively tight as it was a spacious cave. The Rapa Nui people often lived in caves so it wasn't long before the three of us started to joke about where we'd put the kitchen and the bed rooms, as if it were the latest house hunting show.

 

The next cave was the one that had us really excited. Yesterday's guide had told us about a cave that is so small, you crawl on your belly to get through and then have to rock climb up the cliff to get back. It took some time but we eventually found it. Ironically, the tiny cave was an offshoot of one of the tallest caves I've been in yet. Going through the cave was like evolution in reverse: first walking, then crouching, squatting, and finally crawling on your belly. Actually crawling is misleading: at the cave's lowest point, I did tiny push ups to inch my way forward. It was slow going to say the least and we had no idea how long it would take. After several minutes of mini push ups with just my head lamp and occasional giggles from my companions following behind to keep me company, I shouted, "I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!" Who doesn't love a good cliche?

 

As we emerged from the tunnel, there was a small ledge that was just big enough to support us but not big enough to inspire much confidence. We started to climb around a little to see how we get back without having to return through the cave and quickly concluded that our mothers would all be angry with us if we proceeded to climb the unstable rock face, so we turned around and went back through the cave.

 

After we emerged, we surveyed ourselves for damage. We each had countless scrapes and bruises and little cuts and were covered in rocky dust. We used my hand sanitizer to disinfect our wounds, laughing as the alcohol burned.

 

Back on the bikes, our trio grew by one. A dog started to follow us and happily stuck with us, patiently waiting as we stopped, for the rest of the day.

 

The banana cave was next up. Banana trees grew just inside the cave and proved to be good for climbing. Further inside the cave, a crew was filming a documentary and we all agreed that if we ever formed a band, we'd return here to film our first video.

 

Not much further up the road, we reached a group of seven moai. We took photos, had some lunch, and gave the dog some water. One of the great things about Rapa Nui is that you'd often find yourself visiting moai or caves or hiking all alone, free of massive tourist groups.

 

We locked up our bikes and started to hike up to the island's highest point. By now it was around two in the afternoon, but because the island is in an artificially eastern time zone, the sun was right on top of us as we walked through the shadeless fields. In the end, we decided not to go all the way to the top as it was so hot and we didn't want our adopted dog to get too tired. The views were gorgeous every step of the way.

 

We made one last stop to see what I called the hat factory. Some of the moai wore large, Russian looking red hats. This is where the red rocks were extracted and carved.

 

By this time, we were happily exhausted and headed back to town. We were thrilled to reach the paved road for the first time in hours!

 

I took a quick dip at the nearest beach, where the local kids made me repeatedly demonstrate the waterproof capabilities of my camera.

 

This in itself would have been an outstanding day, but we weren't done yet. In the evening, we attended Kari Kari, a traditional dance show. The women shook their hips, the men stomped around, and we were all thoroughly impressed.