Dan Park's Homepage

May 25 – 29

After spending the first two days on Easter Island exploring the various sights, we began the first of three weeks that we would be working on understanding the feasibility of local pineapple production.

Our time is spent mostly between two locations:

Internet cafes – To communicate with agricultural experts around the world


The hotel – To discuss our findings and review the information that we’ve gathered

One of the “fun” aspects of our project that we sought to conduct early on was a taste test of the Ecuadorian pineapple variety currently found in mainland Chile and the local Easter Island “Queen” variety pineapple:

The Easter Island pineapple (left) is smaller than the Ecuadorian pineapple (right)

A blind taste test revealed that the Easter Island pineapple won! =)

One of the main issues with understanding the feasibility of our project is that Easter Island is the most remote inhabited island on the earth and only two options exist for possible transportation to the mainland:

We observed a small ship being offloaded
 

And examined the possibility of air freight on LAN

Finally, when we are finished with our work during the day, we spend our evenings at one of few restaurants having drinks and playing cards (we’re running out of games!):

 

On one evening, we had the chance to watch the local Kari Kari cultural dance show and take pictures with the dancers:

  

And so, the first of our three working weeks on Easter Island passed…