Easter Island

aka Isla de Pascua aka Rapa Nui



An early start to get the first metro and hope that the bus connections work to get me to the airport in time. Everything works out okay and onto a plane that seemed to be considerably more modern than the one that brought me to Buenos Aires. we took off and flew away from the Andes and over the Cordillera on the way to the Pacific and then over seemingly endless expanses of the bluest ocean you can imagine, with white flecks that could have been small ships or monstrous waves. We fly over the island, turn around and come into land from the west and then taxi back to the terminal. Steps are brought out to the plane and I walk to the terminal, bathing in the warmth after the chill of Santiago.

Most people have accommodation organised and are welcomed at the airport with floral necklaces. My Italian friends are looking for a camping ground and I haven't decided where I'm staying (but haven't got a tent so it'll likely be a hostel), but focusing on the most important matters, we look for somewhere for lunch, and almost more importantly, a beer. 50 yards from the airport we find both. Afterwards, after another 100 yards a pick up stops and asks us if we were the people looking for the camp site. We say yes, she says jump in and she takes us there. She runs the hostel next door where I end up staying. It seems as though it's low season as I'm the only person in the dorm, so pick a bed with a view of the sea!

As my friends put up their new (enormous) tent, nicknamed the Hilton, I head into town to have a look around and buy some beer. I get my bearings (not too difficult as it's quite a small town), and see my first moai (stone heads). I go back to the ahu (stone platform with moai) for sunset and am not disappointed, the Pacific turns to fire behind the stone faces.

Afterwards I see my friend from Santiago and we head for a drink and later realise that there's a ballet on at 9, not far from where we are. We get there just in time after nearly adopting a pair of stray puppies, and at this ballet there are no tutus. There's a live band, but with modern instruments and a series of male and female dancers (think Maori or Polynesian), the men nearly naked with a mix of temporary and permanent tattoos who are undoubtedly athletic and spend most of the time leaping around and beating the floor, or themselves on the chest and legs with or without the help of a stylised short canoe. The women tend to wear something like grass skirts and sway their hips quite a mesmerising fashion. You could understand why the earliest visitors to the islands were likely excited and terrified by the local population. The dance was interesting, especially in hindsight where you could see that one of them was about the birdman competition which we were to learn about the next day. Then they asked for audience participation (fortunately not looking in my direction) and it slightly degenerated into something more akin to a mix of stag and hen dos.

The view from my room

The next day there's a little rain, which creates the first of a series of amazing rainbows that I was to see over the rest of the week. We decide to walk up the volcano at the south western corner of the island, not far from where I was staying. It's a nice, gentle walk up, through fields with lavender coloured grasses, past cows and dogs to the crater. The volcanoes that created the island are all long extinct and in the crater is a large lake.

Volcano Rano Kau. The ceremonial village of Orongo is to the left of the rim with the Birdman Island (Moto Nui) being the largest one to the three to the left

Walking back round the volcano we head to the partially restored village of Orongo. It was here that the Birdman (Tangata Manu) competition took place every year. The chief of each clan, or his designated representative would take place in the race which involved climbing down the steep cliffs from the village, swimming across the treacherous and shark-infested waters to Moto Nui, where they then had to climb up the cliffs at the other end and stay there until the migrating Sooty Tern birds returned to nest. The aim was to find the first laid egg and return with it safe to Orongo [1]. The winner was regarded as special for the following year, would live in isolation attended by servants to feed him, but no one was allowed to touch him for the year and he couldn't cut his hair. It kind of puts triathlons to shame...

AWOL in the British Museum

The other notable thing about Orongo was the absence of any moai. This is partially because when the Birdman cult was worshipped, they had partially moved away from ancestor worship in the form of moai, and partially because the one moai that had stood at Orongo is now sitting in the British Museum. As the only British person I was obviously held personally responsible for the fate of Hoa Hakananai'a (Rapa Nui for "the missing friend"). After failing to see some of the petroglyphs that were meant to be visible there we headed down the hill, back into town to a waterfront bar where we enjoyed another amazing sunset.

Another stunning sunset 

Day 3 was fun but not particularly productive. The tour we wanted to go on wasn't happening so we went to the pub, then a museum, then had lunch, a nap, back to the pub, food, club and ended up getting home at some point in the early morning.

Which made they full day tour on Day 4, starting at 9am, a bit more of a challenge, but interesting all the same. One of the highlights for me was the quarry where the moai were all carved before being transported to the ahu where they would be erected and awoken by having the eyes carved.

They're coming to get you, just very, very slowly

A high proportion of the moai's on the island are at the quarry, or on their way to the ahu's when they were abandoned. The Rapa Nui people talked of the maoi being walked from the quarry to the ahu and there is a school of thought that rather than use rollers to move them, they were transported upright, with ropes leaning it forward-left and forward-right so that they would basically walk there. The strange thing about the quarry is that there are so many of them abandoned, at various stages that it almost looks like they are walking out of the mountain themselves. 

We then went to the ahu Tongariki, that has the most number of moai, 15. And there's another one not on the ahu but near the gate [2] where all of the moais top knots (the stone carvings that represented their hair) are after having been recovered (they were partially washed away in a tsunami).

Then we went to the a beach where there was a small ahu in an idyllic setting. The maoi here looked particularly chilled.

On the way back to town we passed a pretty much perfectly shaped volcano, Mount Pui. As we passed we were told that it was the location for the Haka Pei. This is the sport I'd like to have a go at - it basically involves sliding down the side of the volcano, on a banana tree trunk, wearing only your underwear. It's the pacific island version of the Cresta Run but I don't think you get a tie if you come off [3]. You could still see the scars left in the hillside by the banana trunks - well, I hope it was the banana trunks.

An early start the next day to watch the sunrise over the Pacific from the top of the island. Initially I didn't have the feeling that I was on a small island (versus being on the coast of a larger continent) but seeing the sun rise and then set over the ocean on the same day was challenging that perception. It's not a big island, roughly shaped like an isoceles triangle with a base of no more than 25km and a height of no more than 15km [4].






Later that day we went to another ahu with seven moai. This one was special because the moai were looking out to see (all of the moai at the other platforms look inland). There was a suggestion that this ahu represented the seven islanders who first found Rapa Nui and they are looking back to the islands they came from for their friends and family to arrive. Although a nice story, the slightly more pedestrian reason that appears to be the accepted wisdom now is that the ahu and moai were arranged so that they would overlook the villages (the moai represented their dead chiefs and were thought to contain mana that protected the village). It's one of the interesting things about Rapa Nui, although a relatively recent civilisation, for a number of reasons (some pretty bad ones like slavery included) relatively little is known about them. They had writing, rongo rongo, but no one knows how to decipher it and many of the stories have been lost.

Close by was a series of caves - each village tended to have at least one cave where the women and children could shelter in case another village came marauding and a lot of these caves were made from lava vents which criss-crossed the island. Some of the villages had more extensive caves and they lived in them, and kept their animals (such as chickens) in them as well. We had a walk through one of these using our mobile phones for light and the scale was impressive. One of them leads out to the ocean but we weren't able to find that one.

Later we went to a large cave that opened out to the sea and was apparently used for ceremonies. It was here that we saw the sun end it's commute and disappear into the sea on the western side of the island.

Before the stars came out.

The next day it was up another volcano, this one (Terevaka) was the highest on the island and from the top the horizon for all 360° was the Pacific Ocean and you could see no land in any direction. Here there was no escaping the fact that you were on a (relatively small) island in the middle of a very large ocean [5].

The next day I flew back to Santiago. It was a great "break" from the trip, I was literally stuck on the island for the week, it was big enough to keep me interested but not so large that I felt rushed. And it was nice to be in the warm and wear shorts for a change (although I can't say that anyone else was particularly keen on the sight of my legs after back-to-back winters).

I'd definitely like to go back, ideally around late January, early February so I can have a go at the Haka Pei...



Notes:
1. They would carry it back in a strap that would carry it on their forehead. I have no idea whether the failure of this this strap led to the saying "egg on your face"...
2. The one on his own is the Wandering moai, so called because he was taken on an overseas tour.
3. Video - also includes dancing girls: www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5-qQybEc14
4. The lack of space was to be the island's undoing. Competing tribes and overpopulation resulted in a Malthusian crisis. There can be a tendency (in the western world) to regard a simpler lifestyle as closer perfection. What Easter Island demonstrates is that people are people, and greed and the selfish gene can make any island paradise anything but if you give it enough time.
5. There's some debate as to whether it's the most isolated island in the world or not, I'll let you google the debate and let you choose which side to agree with.