Also in Chile: rapa nui, theoretical penguins, cartoon irony

Easter Island is about 2000 miles off the western coast of Chile. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to go there- it would have taken 4 days out of our 8 day trip, and another $1000 for tickets. But we did visit a museum about the island, where this Moai statue sits, in the shrubberies, guarding the residential streets of Vina del Mar. Unlike most museums (that don't want to scare children or disturb sensitive people) this one did not gloss over Easter Island's brutal history. Civil wars, colonialism, and mismanagement of ecological resources led to famine, death, and the near total destruction of the native people. So little of the culture from before the late 1800s European invasions was preserved that the Rapa Nui language from before that period remains undecifered.

Also in this very blunt museum was an installation describing, in great detail, the ritual of creating shrunken heads, with actual shrunken heads behind the glass! This was not a mystical process: the skin was removed from the human head, wrapped around a monkey skull, and dried until it shrunk to fit the smaller skull. Clever.

80% of the world's population of Humboldt penguins nest on a protected island off the coast of Chile, in a suburb of the town of Zapallar, a few hours north of Vina del Mar. I was very excited to go see the penguins, figuring it would probably be my only chance to ever see them in the wild. But unfortunately the penguin island was obscured by fog. Can you find the penguins in this photo?






In Valparaiso we found the Mirador de Lukas House Museum, a collection of the cartoons and journalism of Renzo Pecchenino ("Lukas"), a political cartoonist in the 1960s.