Rapa Nui

So here we are then on Easter Island (as the British call it) or Isla de Pasque (as Spanish speaking Latin Americans call it) or Rapa Nui (as the indigenous people call it).
Before we tell you about the island though just a word about our flight here with LAN airlines. We got to the check-in desk at Santiago Airport in plenty of time for our flight; we were horror-struck when we saw the queue snaking three times around the departure hall and only one desk open. The queue occasionally shuffled forward a few inches as the time for departure drew near. Suddenly four check-in desks were open and, no worries, we made it to the plane with 30 seconds to spare! Security was minimal – we were allowed to carry liquids on board. We weren’t seated together (Gregg row 19, Christine row 35) and the cabin crew offered all assistance short of direct help to get us seated together. We did eventually manage to both change seats and sit together. Then came the “vegetarian” breakfast (previously ordered and confirmed); Christine got two pieces of burnt cold toast with slimy mushrooms inside, Gregg got a chicken sandwich... which was eventually swapped for an omelette of the kind you see in Japanese restaurant window made from plastic. Later in the flight (4hours 50minutes) we were served with a snack, again we asked for our pre-booked vegetarian snack “don’t do vegetarian snacks” came the curt reply. LAN Airlines has now been added to the hit list along with GAP Adventures (that saga continues).
We arrived on Rapa Nui, brilliant sunshine, beautiful warm breeze, sparking turquoise sea. Truly wonderful.

Rapa Nui is the most isolated inhabited place on the planet, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn and 3,790km west of Chile. It is triangular in shape with an extinct volcano at each corner and is only 24km across. The cultural development of the island shows a unique civilisation which grew in complete isolation (e.g. they never developed pottery, instead using wooden and stone implements and vessels.) Some of this isolation continued until 40 years ago when an airstrip was built thus ending the once-a-year visit of a cargo ship from Chile – mind you they still don’t have Ocado. Until the 1960s, the surviving Rapa Nuians were confined to the settlement of Hanga Roa while the rest of the island was rented to the English Williamson-Balfour Company as a sheep farm ! It is believed the original colonisers were from Polynesia in about 800 CE. They called the island Te Pito o te Henua – the navel of the world and we visited a large black magnetic rock which is now referred to as the navel, it was venerated in ancient times and is still considered to have supernatural powers. They built huge ahu (altars) and fitted them with tall gaunt Moai statues with elongated faces (and later with large ears). It seems that the five clans on the island did not live in idyllic peace, they had warfare which seems to have resulted in the cannibalistic sacrifice of their defeated enemies. The huge Moai were sculpted from the volcanic rock using obsidian tools from the island quarry of Rano Raraku, which we visited and has numerous complete statues that were awaiting transportation across the island as well as several incomplete statues in various stages of carving. These Moai were then transported across the island to be stood on the ahu. How they were transported and erected has been the subject of great conjecture and it for a long time it was thought that the Rapa Nuians used wooden rollers; this theory is now not considered correct at they had completely deforested the island long before they finished the era of Moai building. The red top-knots were sculpted at a different quarry and transported across the island, and the rounded pebbles laid out in a checkerboard pattern on the ahu all came from the same beach.

Pictures from the 2 quarries.

Over several centuries from about 1400CE the stone work slowed and eventually stopped as the sculptors could not be fed, as, owing to the deforestation and heavy cropping the island was unable to support the inhabitants. By this time there were two distinct types of Moai: large ears and small ears representing an inter-clan rivalry which led to a civil war that resulted in most of the Moai being toppled – the remaining few were knocked over by a terrible tsunami in 1960. Many have now been restored.
A ‘birdman cult’ developed in about the 16th century after the islanders had lost their clans due to warfare and the soil erosion which meant they had a very meagre diet. The birdman cult had as its central feature an annual ceremony in which the representatives of the old clans raced to Motu Kao, a small island off the coast to be the first to obtain an egg of the migratory sooty tern which nests there every September. The chief of the winning clan was named Bird Man or Tangato Manu for the following year and was king of the island for a year. This cult produced a number of petroglyphs and cave paintings on the island. The petroglyphs depict the half-man half-bird the creator god Make Make and the symbol of fertility, Komari.

Petroglyphs and cave paintings associated with the bird man cult.

It appears that both the Moai and the birdman cult were not only connected with ancestor worship but also representatives of a fertility cult ( we won’t go into too much detail but it was suggested to us that the Moai were, in fact, phallic symbols and the red top-knots, far from being hairstyles or hats, represented a vagina). So much of this is conjecture because, as usual, when the missionaries arrived they destroyed so much of what they considered pagan (including all but one of the hieroglyphic texts that would have told the world so much about this isolated society) and gave the Rapa Nuians Christianity, smallpox and a life of slavery. It is only now that the indigenous peoples are reclaiming their culture and have reintroduced their indigenous language, song and dances – although they acknowledge they have had to “borrow” quite a bit from Hawaii, French Polynesia and the Maori. They are extremely hospitable and friendly.
Although In recent times the island has been used as a cautionary tale for the cultural and environmental dangers brought upon by the over-exploitation of resources, this theory is now being contested by ethnographers and archaeologists alike who argue that the introduction of diseases carried by European colonizers and slave raiding, which devastated the population in the 1800s, had a much greater social impact than environmental decline and that introduced animals, first rats and then sheep, were greatly responsible for the island's loss of native flora which came closest to deforestation as late as 1930-1960 rather than in the 17/18th century, as previously thought.
We have explored many places on the island by mini-bus and on foot – even visiting the caldera of one of the extinct volcanoes which is now a freshwater lake. We have walked on dusty tracks and sandy beaches, we have clambered up and down lava flows, we have swum in a turquoise warm sea, we have walked through lava tubes which are now caves decorated as part of the birdman cult, we have looked at night skies with myriad stars and unfamiliar constellations, we have experienced power-outs and hours without wifi (hence no blog), we have marvelled at the magnificent Moai and we are so happy. A truly wonderful experience.
Afterword: We have often been asked “Why Easter Island?” It all goes back to when Gregg was at primary school and though at the time he thought it was awful, in hindsight he realises what a wonderful learning experience it all was. Thanks to Miss Schofield (mixed infants head teacher) and Mr Haycock (junior school head teacher) and complemented by “Knowledge” (a magazine that built week-by-week into an Encyclopaedia), a thirst for knowledge was ignited and he started compiling one of his famous “lists”. This one was of places to visit/things to see; it has gradually got longer and more sophisticated but started off quite modestly to include the dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History Museum, gradually grew more adventurous (the Bayeux Tapestry and the Pyramids of Egypt) and in about 1959 Mr Haycock enthralled him with tales of Thor Heyerdah’s visit to a strange island with huge sculptures with inscrutable trance-like features and Easter Island got added to the list. He has dreamt of visiting ever since, often thinking that he would never make it. Now the dream has been realised. After such a long time there was a strong chance that it would not live up to expectations – it has exceeded those for both of us.
Since then many places/things have been added and many places/things have been ticked, many have not – e.g. we’ve still not seen all of Caravaggio’s paintings but his list combined with Chris’ list is still long enough for candggortw2.