Nuseir Yassin - Around the World in 60 Seconds

EASTER ISLAND, CHILE

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Okay, Ill admit itI momentarily lost my mind.

The date was October 2, 2016, and I was on Day 176 of my worldwide adventure. By then, Nas Daily had visited some twenty countries and sixty-three cities, and Id just come off a two-day trip to Chileone day in Santiago, where Id grabbed some awesome footage from the roof of Gran Torre, the tallest skyscraper in Latin America; and the next day in the port city of Valparaiso, where Id shot the towns famous candy-colored cottages and enjoyed a sunset dinner by the bay with some new friends.

But this dayday three in Chilewas the reason Id made the trip there.

Im heading to the most remote island in the world, I had told my Facebook followers a few days earlier, slapping a map onto the table like an overeager schoolkid delivering a geography report. Here! Right here! This islandEaster Island! Its going to take forever to get to, but I think its going to be worth it.

And so there I was that following Sunday, standing on the shore of sixty-three square miles of impossible beauty floating on the easternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle, and, basically, flipping out. Id been told that Easter Island was an awesome place to visitthats why I was there. But no travel brochure on the planet can prepare you for its unexpected assault on your senses, when the wind and the surf and the overwhelmingly beautiful nature knock you off-balance, and you suddenly feel as if everything in your life has pointed you to this space and this place and this precise moment in timeand nothing else matters.

Oh, my God! This is a sick shot! I yelled into the lens of my Canon digital over the opening image, the wind rippling my T-shirt and my smile clearly combustible. I made it to Easter Island! This place is ridiculously insane!

What followed was two and a half days of unchecked euphoria as I crisscrossed the island with abandon, my breathless commentary punctuated by one stunning shot after another:

Angry waves slamming against the deep-red cliffs on the northern coastline.

Time-lapse footage of fat clouds tearing over a mountain ridge.

Wild horses lazily grazing a field of tall golden grass.

And panoramic sweeps of the countless hills that dot the island, each one carpeted in soft, green vegetation.

And, of course, there were the moai, Easter Islands huge, iconic sculptures of human heads carved by the Rapa Nui people nearly eight centuries ago. Standing guard on the islands perimeter, facing inward to protect its inhabitants, these monolithic behemoths887 of them altogether, the largest of them rising 71 feet and weighing 150 tonsare at once breathtaking and humbling, and I wasnt going to let my time with them go wasted.

This is fucking beautiful! I told the camera, pointing to a lone moai on a hillside. Its a face! In the middle of the island! Theres nothing here, nothing around. The nearest piece of land is six hours away from here!

I rented a bright-red Kawasaki Brute Force ATV, climbed on, and tore across the island, leaving behind any last shred of emotional inhibition I had carried with me since embarking on this journey. With each new destination, I became a little more wild, a little more freetaking ballet leaps across the screen, sprinting through a grove of coconut trees, and lying down in the grass, whispering my innermost thoughts into the camera.

I cant get enough of this nature, I said. Its just so beautiful!

Now comfortable with the islands topographyand blessed with unusually perfect weatherI launched my drone six hundred feet into the skies above Easter Island and let her do her thing. As always, she crushed it, as she swept over the enchanted landscape and returned a dizzying array of pictures that only God deserves to see.

EASTER ISLAND, CHILE

You wanna see heaven? Look right there! I said to my invisible viewer after my brave little quadcopter sent back an arresting collection of aerials above Anakena Beach.

When I put the clips together for that nights Facebook post, the background music I selected was the theme song from the movie Gravitya fitting choice, I figured, given that every moment I spent on Easter Island made me feel weightless.

Three days passed in a blink, and on my final morning, I packed up my gear and prepared to leaveand not a moment too soon, it turned out. Evidently, my over-the-top enthusiasm for this wild Chilean outpost (and my, um, slightly illegal droning activities) had attracted attention. The bad kind.

Ka ui riva tiva te kapi ne, the park rangers wrote on my exit ticketwhich, roughly translated from Rapa Nui, means, Youre not welcome anymore.

Thats okay. Chilly dismissal notwithstanding, I had experienced something magical during my seventy-two hours on Easter Islandsomething I would feel again and again as Nas Dailys originally planned 60-day world tour turned into 260 days. Then a year. Then two years. Then more.

It was the same feeling of heart-stopping awe that I experienced on nearly every leg of this grand journey since 2016:

Watching Mount Fuji break through the clouds on a foggy morning on Honshu Island in Japan.

Standing in the shadow of Zuma Rock in Nigeria and scanning its twenty-four-hundred-foot face for the ghosts that legendarily live there.

Stepping into a six-hundred-year-old cathedral in Cologne, Germany, or a woodland sanctuary in Rishikesh, India, or a Buddhist temple in Phuket, Thailand.

Sleeping beneath the stars in the Sahara Desert in Morocco, or taking a mud bath in the Dead Sea.

Walking the ancient streets of Jerusalem and Palestine.

And throughout it all, no matter the country, I continued to witness up-close the indestructibility of the human spirit and the overwhelming power of the human heart. In Arabic, Nas means people, and on this wild adventure, it was the people I cared about most.

Like the eleven-year-old schoolgirl I met in Myanmar who taught herself seven languages so she could work as a tour guide to support her family of eight.

Or the young man in India, a Nas Daily follower, who saw online that I was in his country and feeling ill, so he tracked me down and brought me to his home so that his family could care for me.