All Ashore? (Easter Island, Part 1)

Easter Island
ms Amsterdam
January 21, 2013

I was just looking through the pictures I took on Easter Island and had one of those "Did
that really happen?" moments. Visiting Easter Island has long been at the top of my
travel list. It was why I took this trip. I'm verklempt (sp?) just sitting here thinking about it.

Ah, but unless one takes the five hour flight from Santiago, Chile (the terminal is very
tiny; makes the air terminal on Molokai look like LAX, but the runway goes on forever.
It was improved and extended to be used as an emergency landing strip for the space
shuttle and in fact the Concorde did make a trip to Easter Island. Who knew?) getting
onto Easter Island is not a slam-dunk given.

This blog will be about getting from Point A, the ms Amsterdam, to Point B, a tender,
and then to Point C, the "dock" on Easter Island. Talk about getting your money's worth!
I'm terrified of roller coasters and thrill rides so give them a wide berth but I was so
excited to visit this wind-swept rock that I gladly handed over my E Ticket for this ride.

Easter Island has no natural harbor or port. Everyone seems to have a story of arriving
on a cruise ship only to be unable to go ashore. On the windward, north side of the
island there is a cement block on the edge of the swimming beach that is a possible
landing spot but it is too small for the ship's tenders (aka the life boats) so the crew
has to install a temporary dock on pontoons to get people on the island. The winds and
seas are coming straight ashore at that point so the swells make this a bad choice. We
visited that beach (absolutely gorgeous white sands, coconut palms, turquoise water
that deepens to darkest blue), saw that cement block and thought, there but for the
grace of God.

We anchored about a mile off of the city (and only city on the island) of Hanga Roa on
the southwest corner of the triangular-shaped island. And then the dance began.

I'm going to attempt to send a picture along with this so you can have a visual to
accompany my words. You can see the stairway on the side of the ship that leads down
to the tenders.

You can see the steps leading down to the tender boarding area on the side of the ship. The damaged tender is being hauled back up.

The basic procedure for taking a tender from the ship to shore is you go down to deck
A which is "one floor" up from the water level, pass through the checkpoint where your
cruise card (all-purpose credit card sized that is your ID, credit card -- no cash used on
board anywhere, room key) is scanned to record that you have left the ship and then

walk the few steps to the doorway. Next you go through the doorway to a small platform
that is suspended off the side of the ship and over the water and then walk down a flight
of metal stairs (think fire escape on the outside of a building) to another platform that
is actually a temporary, floating dock. The tender is at this dock waiting for you to step
off and over a threshold into the tender. It has 100+ seats with not much room to move
once you're in your place.

That is the basic procedure and if the seas are calm, the planets are in line and all is
right in the world, it's a piece of cake. However, that is rarely the case at Easter Island
so the captain and crew get to strut their stuff and prove their seamanship.

The seas were running two to three meters with a 20 knot wind causing quite a chop.
The captain had the port anchor set and used the thrusters on the starboard side to
keep the ship as steady as possible. Every one on the staff from busboy to deckhands
to officers to the guys in the house band had a job to get the passengers off the ship
and onto the tenders. You have to just surrender yourself to the helping hands all the
way and let them put you on the little boat rather than do it yourself.

Your card is scanned and then you step out of the ship into the raging wind onto that
little platform about a meter square and gingerly walk down that flight of wet metal
steps with a death grip on both railings. (In my case, the man in front of me was also
juggling his camera, backpack and CANE!!!) Then one at a time you step onto the
floating dock which is going up and down that two to three meters and is sloshing with
sea water and then you do the surrender bit. There are deck hands and officers on
either side of you to grab your upper arms and get you onto the dock, pivot and a big
step to the edge where the tender is also going up and down that two to three meters.
There is a threshold that you must step over to reach the cabin floor which is also
awash with sea water. (I really, really wanted to go to Easter Island!) You stand on that
bobbing deck, held by at least two men and when the dock and tender are bobbing in
unison you're lifted and practically catapulted from the dock, over the threshold and into
the hands of another set of boatmen.

At this point you think, ah, made it! Then you realize that the little boat rocks a LOT
more than the big ship and grab ahold of anything that looks stationary and take little
mincing steps to your seat where you sit down with a thud and start to think, are my
affairs in order?

And this is repeated 80 times until the tender is deemed full and ready to go. The cabin
is enclosed but the doorway is "sealed" with a plastic door that zips all around. The ride
was only ten minutes or so but it was rough with lots of crashing through waves, water
splashing around inside and out. Then you round a point and head for the "harbor"

which is an itty bitty area barely protected by an itty bitty rock jetty so we got to do the
same dance getting off except this time the boat was bouncing and the landing area
was not. But the landing area was a small cement area with two very steep stairs and
no railings up to terra firma so once again you relied on the kindness of strangers to lift
you off the boat, onto the platform and then up the stairs.

It took approximately 2-1/2 hours to get the 210 people who had booked shore
excursions from ship to shore. Because the conditions were so arduous, only two
tenders were launched so there would be enough crew to take care of business. I
learned when we got back to the ship that afternoon (and THAT was really a rough
ride!) that the captain had ordered the tenders to cease taking passengers ashore after
our lot had been transferred. This meant a lot of people never made it onto the island.
Going back to the ship in the afternoon the tenders were loaded with just 37 passengers
in the aft section only so the driver could keep the nose up as much as possible but the
boat was still riding up and down the waves with one of the crew bailing in the back of
the bus!

And then we still had to get from tender to ship. Obviously we made it with just a few
bruises as souvenirs. The captain provided oceans of champagne at dinner both to
celebrate the safe return of those who went ashore and to apologize to those who
couldn't go. The wine should have gone to the crew.