Chile – Easter Island/Rapa Nui

Everything you look at on this island is an archaeological find. For instance, the first day we were on the island, a new cave was found in the interior of the island with a unique statue in it. I thought these kind of things didn’t happen anymore as us humans seem to have reached every corner of the globe! Easter Island or Rapa Nui is a pretty special place. The pace is slow and the town is small but the charm and mystery of the island is gigantic!

A 5 1/2 hr flight from Santiago into the middle of the Pacific Ocean gets you to Rapa Nui, the most isolated inhabited island in the world. We were welcomed at the airport by Claudio from our guesthouse and presented with our flower necklaces, which was pretty cool. Turning straight out of the airport you are immediately turning again onto the main street in town. After an introduction to the island from Claudio at the hostel we just walked about town and got some dinner before going to look at our first Moai statues down at the shoreline.

We timed this pretty well as the sun was setting. Now I’ve seen some pretty amazing sunsets, and Rio was putting up a good shout, but this evening the sky was so colourful and adding the Moai to the scene, made it one I am going to remember for a while!!! I can’t tell you much more but show you some examples of the changes as the sun went down…

That was a pretty amazing way to spend our first evening on the island, and the next day we went on a tour of the island with Patricio Ballerino who is a Chilean man who married a lady from Easter Island and has been living here for 40 years so is practically a local. He had so much knowledge of the island and could answer any question I threw at him. I would highly recommend him!

So a quick history lesson (per legend anyway) before I go into what we saw.

A long time ago, this population of people (called Long-ears for the story as they wore earrings to lengthen their ears) were in trouble because their volcanic island was sinking. They sent 7 explorers out to find a place to live. The long-ears left their island to join the explorers and on the way picked up some slave short-ears from an island on the way. The Short-ears were more Polynesian looking than the longer faced taller Long-ears. Getting to Easter Island, the Long-ears were the high society and the Short-ears the low society. The population split into 15 different tribes across the island and started to build Moai to be the earthly statue of dead Long-ear chiefs. Different tribes were specialist in different things and traded amongst themselves but the short ears were always the work horses for the tribes.

The population at its height had 15,000 inhabitants. At a point in time (around 1540), something caused a big social upheaval (maybe famine by overpopulation, deforestation from working on the Moai, revolt by the Short-ears) and a war broke out between the two races. The Short-ears came into power and began their rule with selecting their ultimate leader from the winner of the birdman contest. The Short-ears did not build Moai either during or after the war. After taking power all but 3 Moai were pushed over by the new rulers. By the time Europeans arrived the population was down to 2 – 3000. After slave raiding, European diseases and eviction for sheep farming the population dropped to 111 people and only 36 had descendants. The island now has about 6000 permanent inhabitants.

For anyone thinking of coming to Easter Island, my single recommendation is to take a tour with a local guide. The Moai are impressive but without the stories, facts and details that the guide provides, once you have seen one, the rest look the same. If we were walking around by our self, we would have missed so many things that just look like piles of rocks! I will apologise now for the lengthy blog post, but the primary reason for the blog is to be a diary for Tanya and I, we saw so much so we want to keep a good record of it. Hopefully you aren’t too bored reading along.

Patricio picked us up from our guesthouse in his classic VW van for our tour round the island.

We stopped at a few places along the south coast on our way out to the main quarry. At Vinapu it was interesting to see that the ‘ahu’ (stage) is constructed very accurately, aligned astronomically and resembles the stonework seen in the Inca empire which poses the question did the Islanders have contact with Inca people? There is also a female Moai at this site which is very unique. The view of the coast was pretty nice along here too

Ahu Akahanga was another stop, which has a well preserved village. The foundations of the houses and earth ovens where all around, and there was a cave used by the Islanders as a shelter here too. The Moai all along here were toppled, but there was a special Moai at this location which gave scientists the knowledge that all Moai, were given eyes once they were placed on the ahu. This is because all the Moai at the quarry do not have rounded eye sockets, and this one here must have been about to be completed at the time of the war, as it too is without completed eye sockets. This is the kind of information that we would have missed by ourselves

The incomplete Moai without rounded eye sockets

The cave entrance

There was another Moai laid face down by the side of the road, that we stopped at. This one also did not have completed eyes, and is actually one that was in transport at the time of the war. At the outbreak of the war, everything literally stopped overnight and it’s interesting to see all this evidence around the island.

Almost all 887 Moai around the island came from one location, the Rano Raraku quarry. The statues bodies were made from black volcanic tuff carved straight from the side of the volcano. This was the main stop of the day and it was so interesting. At the farthest reaches of the island, the huge statues were transported up to 15km across undulating ground from this quarry. This is just one of the many mysteries that are still unanswered.

The Rano Raraku from a distance

A lot of the Moai here at the quarry appear to be standing up and not toppled over like at the ceremonial sites. This is because they were stood waiting to be transported and the earth and mud from the volcano slid down the slope partly burying them.

This has provided some useful information though, as scientists at some points have dug this ground away revealing that at the quarry the Moai were much larger than they were when they were placed on the ahu (18m at the quary, 10m on the ahu). Legend says that the Moai were walked to their destination, and this could explain that through walking the Moai upright to their ahu, wore a considerable amount of the rock away. Digging the earth away also showed that with protection against erosion from the elements, the Moai all had intricate carvings over their bodies.

We spent a while at the quarry walking around as there were so many things to see that we would have easily missed if we were there by ourselves. We saw the buried statues waiting to be transported, statues about to be taken from the rock face, some that were still just impressions on the mountain. Seeing them at all stages of construction really gave an appreciation for the effort that went into one, let alone 887 of them! There was even one that they gave up on where some workers would have been killed where the rock caved in on them as they were carving a tunnel to dig out the moai.

Sizing this one up

This just looks like mountain, but you can see the shape of a Moai still being carved

Another one being carved from the rock

This is just his head remember, there is a whole body underground

Next stop was Tongariki, which is a famous site as it has the 15 Moai (the most ever erected on a single Ahu) which were all re-erected by the Japanese after a tsunami washed away the old remains back in the 60’s. This was pretty awesome to see how they would have looked in their prime. One of the statues here also has its top-knot on (a red headpiece that all Moai had which came from a different quarry on the island).

The 15 as well as the 16th in the foreground which was in transport and just didn’t make it

We also stopped at Te Pito Kura which has the largest Moai erected on an ahu as well as a sacred rock that is positioned at the points of the compass. Legend has it that this rock came with the first settlers from their island, but it may have even been a meteorite as it is high in iron and is magnetised.

The final stop for the day was Anakena which has some more re-erected Moai and a sand beach which looks like it as been artificially made when compared to the black volcanic rock coast around the rest of the island. It isn’t artificial however, but formed from the coral reef near here. Luckily, when these Moai were toppled into the sand, they have been well preserved and carved features on the status are really clear.

We finished off the day with fresh seafood empanadas watching the sunset as the local surfers were out enjoying the waves

The next day we wanted to get a quad bike so that we could go exploring the island some more. Walking down the main street we picked one up for 24hrs use and headed for the Rano Kau volcano just south of the town. The island is basically shaped like a triangle with the 3 main formation volcanoes at each point. We got up to the rim of the volcano in no time and got a few shots before heading round to Orongo which was a significant village in the islands history.

The view over the airport and Hanga Roa

Rano Kau

Orongo was a powerful village after the fall of the Long Ears, as this village overlooks the island of Moto Nui. After the war, the overall leader of the population was determined from a competition known as the birdman. At the start of spring each year the competitors would have to scale the 300m vertical cliffs, swim out to Moto Nui and wait for the first egg from the Sooty Tern. The person who successfully brought back the first egg up the cliffs to Orongo was crowned the birdman and considered sacred.

The village itself is quite large and there has been a lot of reconstruction work done on it since the western world ransacked the village for the treasures of the ancients. The view out to Moto Nui was good as the sun was out. There are also a lot of rock carvings here.

After leaving, we took a scenic ride along the south coast driving down many side tracks which the Quad bike easily handled. We did a similar thing in Greece as a quad is much more adept at getting down rocky or sandy tracks where a car would struggle.

And the bike well and truly paid off when we took a turn down a track on the north coast and stumble across a little bit of paradise! We rounded a corner after hopping off the bike at a stone fence and were welcomed with a pristine white sand beach and red volcanic cliffs with absolutely no one around.

We got out or towel and sat down for some lunch by ourselves on the beach and enjoyed the feeling of being on a deserted island. It was a really special moment of the trip so far and one that I will be remembering for a while! I went for a swim in the sheltered bay and the water was refreshing and fish were swimming around me once I was up to my waist in the water. The water was incredibly clear as well. I put my goggles on and went out to the reef just at the headland for a bit of a look round under water. We reluctantly left after a good hour or so there by our self, but the afternoon was starting to get on and we still wanted to visit some of the places on the north coast that we hadn’t seen yet

The next destination was Puna Pau, which is a red volcano that was the quarry where all the top-knots came from for the Moai. Similar to Rano Raraku, there were top-knots at all stages of production in the quarry. The colour of the rock was very distinctive, so it was easy to see how striking a top-knot would have been on top of the black Moai.

We drove further along the road to come across the Moai of the 7 original explorers which have been re-erected. Unlike most other Moai who have their back to the ocean, these face out to sea and are aligned so that they have the sunset and sunrise directly behind and in front of them during the equinoxes.

The next few stops were a number of Caves that the Islanders used as shelter and hideouts. Ana Te Pahu is known as the Banana Cave as it has some banana trees in the open centre. Ana Te Pora and Ana Kakenga were both lava tube type caves which were pretty spectacular. The cave entrances were very hard to pick out amongst the rocky landscape, so its easy to see how they were good hideouts. Ana Kakenga was really unique as it is right near the coast and has two openings in the cliff face that look out to sea.

Ana Te Pahu

Ana Te Pora

Ana Kekenga

We got back into town and I sat and watched two of the local football teams while eating some dinner and the sun setting behind me.

The next morning we returned the quad bike and walked back out to Ana Kekenga with our head torches as we couldn’t go inside yesterday with it being completely pitch black in there. It took a couple of hours to walk out there, but worth the effort to go inside the cave

We spent that afternoon and the following morning just hanging around town and looking for the perfect Moai statue souvenirs. We had a good 40 hours of travelling to do to get up to New York and we were monitoring the situation with hurricane Irene hoping that it wouldn’t stop us getting there for our friends wedding.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Daniel – The sunsets, the deserted beach, the remoteness… these are all going to stay with me for a long long time. Easter island has been somewhere that I have always wanted to go from the first time I ever saw it on TV, and it didn’t disappoint one bit. It’s already started to get quite popular on the tourist trail, but I feel we were lucky to see it as it currently is, as another 10 years of tourism is probably change this remote corner of the globe, maybe not for the best.

Tanya – I loved being in an outdoor museum. There was soo much to see (in all honesty before we got there I thought there were one or two main sights and that was it). The variety of Moai’s,caves and carvings plus the natural scenery was amazing. It was also really cool to almost always be in sight of the ocean – it is an Island after all. Dan seemed to think it was pretty funny every time I grunted after landing back on the quad bike after he kept throwing me in the air at the high speeds he was going over the very very rocky terrain – my bum was a little tender after that. He also found it hilarious when I applied sun cream towards the end of the day when I was already covered in dust from quad biking and I managed to just spread dirt all over my face instead!! We had a fab time!!