69 km of cycling - as part of a bicycle world trip - across the most isolated place an earth, right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!
19 - 24 June 2006 / 6 days
69 km
860 metres in altitude
Highest cycled point: 480 m
Unfortunately no travel report in English available yet. Below the German report translated by Google Translate. Sorry for the partly weird and bizarre English! Proper translation is coming within the year 2018!
After five hours of flying time, a small island flanked by thundering waves emerged from the clouds with a broad runway that stretched from one side to the other at this point. It had been broadened by NASA to use as an emergency landing site for the space shuttle.
With Javier from Chile, who had also been to Tahiti, I was driven to the guest house Apina Turuna, one of the few accommodations on the island. Although the weather was not so great, as gray, windy and rainy, but there was enough company in the guest house. Javier, who had been back on home soil for a year (even though it was 3,700km away from his real home, the Chilean mainland ...), saved me from my yet frighteningly modest Spanish. After an extensive Pisco evening we explored the island the next day with a jeep, climbed volcanoes and wandered through countless Moais, the world-famous rock statues of the Rapa Nui scattered all over the island, especially scattered on the coast. My head felt about as heavy as that of one of the Moais ....
With Ivan from Chile I could finally go diving after three days, as the weather improved slowly. But from the world's unique visibility of up to 100 meters, for which the island was famous among divers, could not be really due to the previous bad weather.
Javier had taken the last step of his one-year journey and had gone on. So I explored with Ivan, Pedro from Spain and Vladimir from Israel the island by bike and on foot, because so slowly even here and there blue sky. Five days after I landed on this little mystical island in the middle of nowhere, with just one place, a bank, an arriving plane per day, many wild horses, a rugged lava coast and an isolated family atmosphere that was hard to describe, I had to disassemble and pack my bike again. With Ivan, Pedro and Vladimir I boarded the plane to Santiago de Chile, where I had to say goodbye to the three after five hours of flight, because only one flew further, and that was me. There had been great days at this most remote place on earth, the place furthest from Earth's next inhabited spot.
Two hours later I boarded the next plane for the flight to the capital of Peru, Lima! It was the fifth flight since my departure from Alice Springs two weeks ago. After a total of almost 24 flight hours my flight marathon should now find an end in Lima. A new continent was waiting!