Easter Island, Chile – Part 3 (Post #104)
Mike writes (with Michele looking over his shoulder)…
Yesterday, April 6, we flew from Easter Island to Santiago, Chile where we are now. We have spent the day so far (it’s 3 p.m.) running errands. One of those was having the photos from one of our dives developed and burned onto a CD. We don’t have a lot to say but we wanted to post pictures from one of our dives and the view from above the site.
While on Easter Island we did four dives over two days. The first dive, on the morning of Monday the 3rd, was just by the town of Hanga Roa in the bay while the second, in the afternoon, was at the more challenging Motus. The following day we did two more dives. One was in the morning at a place called Te Peu “the pyramid” which was a reef formed like a pyramid. The dive at the pyramid was our deepest to date at 30m or around 100ft. I rented and underwater camera for our fourth and final dive which, much to our great pleasure was to be at the Motus (again). We consider the Motus to be our absolute favorite dive site in our short diving careers. Taking photos underwater is quite difficult. Most of our photos suffer from parallax error which is a mis-alignment of the viewfinder with the lens and/or apeture.
Anyway, on to the photos…
This first one is a view of our dive site, the Motus, from the village of Orongo.
The dive site was not the sharp protrusion seen in the foreground, rather the small islands behind it. We actually dove around the larger of the two there in the back.
During the dive we saw this enormous (maybe 18″ long) spotted pufferfish.
And this is a picture of our guide and another diver just to give a feel for the underwater envirnoment.
That’s all for this blog. Tomorrow morning we will be flying to Puntas Arenas in Southern Chile from where we hope to explore Torres del Paine National Park.
Tags: Category #27: Chile
Michele Harmon
Wow! Talk about exploring! You two are seeing areas of the world that most of us will only see via our National Geograhic mags. or tv programs. Then, to make it more interesting, you throw in a completely different way to see the world–underwater. I keep trying to forecast your future jobs–tour guides, foreign service personnel, diving instructors, nature photographers, etc. Wonder what the future holds in store.
Nice work guys! I’m planning on heading to Easter Island this August from Chile. Did you rent your entire dive gear there? I’d rather not bring my dive gear with from home and just rent everything there. If I could score a day of diving and possibly a night dive, I’d be stoked.
What are your thoughts on the overall cost of this?!
Thanks