LATAM — Santiago to Easter Island

Flying from Santiago to Easter Island on LATAM is five hours over the South Pacific to one of the most remote inhabited places on earth — the nearest continental land is 3,500km away in any direction. The flight itself is economy, fine, unremarkable except for the point when the screen map shows your tiny aircraft moving across an entirely blue ocean with no land visible for three hours. I had a window seat and stared out for most of it. Arriving at Mataveri Airport — a single runway surrounded by grass and moai — is one of the great landings in commercial aviation: the runway ends 300 metres from the Pacific Ocean and you touch down with the sea filling the windshield. LATAM is the only airline that flies this route; flights from Santiago cost around $400–600 return and run daily in peak season. Easter Island has no chain hotels, no traffic lights, and 900 moai scattered across an island you can drive end to end in forty minutes. The five-hour flight to get there is already part of the experience.