George Anderson, founder of Anderson Die and Manufacturing, has long dreamed of visiting exotic Easter Island, a Polynesian island of 63 square miles 2,200 miles off the coast of Chile and over 1,289 miles from its closest inhabited neighbor island – tiny Pitcairn Island. Rapa Nui, as Easter Island is known in its native language, is famous for nearly 900 large stone statues or moai that were carved between 1100 and 1680. The island is now listed as a World Heritage Site and is mostly protected as part of the Rapa Nui National Park.
In late November of 2013, George, along with Rick Anderson, Anderson Die and Manufacturing’s president and Rick’s wife, Nancy, made the journey to Easter Island going from Portland to Houston, then to Panama City and Santiago before the final five plus hour leg to Easter Island itself. Five days and four nights on the island included tours of various island sites including the quarry where the moai were craved and where many partially completed statues remain. The largest of unfinished moai in the quarry is over 60 feet in height and estimated to weigh over 200 tons. The visitors also spent time at island’s fine little archeological museum, in the local village and on the island’s one beautiful swimming beach at Anakena.
This trip also included stays in the capital city of Chile – Santiago with its 6.5 million plus people and in the sparsely populated 7-9,000 foot high Atacama Desert in northern Chile, said to contain some of the driest sites on earth and sometimes used in movies to portray the terrain of the surface of the moon or of Mars.
