Later in the afternoon, my best bear bud and I walked to town to rent a car.

For being a low-trust country, it’s certainly not a low-trust island.  We paid cash, $60.000 CLP ($120 USD) for 2 days and walked out of Rapa Nui Oceanic with a 4WD.  No deposit, no credit card, just my best bear bud’s name and some cold hard cash exchanged.

I guess it’s easy to be trusting when there aren’t a whole lot of ways to smuggle a car off this island.

Along with the 4WD, we also got a map that was nicely marked up for us.

Red roads = ok
Blue roads = not ok.
Blue roads with hand cross lines across it = definitely really not ok.

After extensive cross analysis between map and legend, we arrived to the conclusion that the only allowed roads for this car were the 2 paved highways of the island.

So why are we in a 4WD again?

I guess it didn’t matter because Nicholas let me copilot.  I handled the stick shift.