Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Rose had to go home on Sunday night, so on Monday morning I flew solo to Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island (so called because the first Europeans to see the island arrived on Easter Sunday).  A 5.5-hour flight away from Santiago, Rapa Nui is apparently the most remote inhabited location in the world and the waters are reportedly the clearest in the world, devoid of coral reef, plankton, or other plant life.  The coast line is absolutely gorgeous and the moai (statues) are awe inspiring.

I went on two full day tours of the primary archaeological sites on the island.  The restored moai generally stand on ancient ahus (stone platforms) in groups of various sizes, ranging from 1 to 15.  Most people think that the moai are "big stone heads" that face the ocean.  Actually, the moai were all carved to have bodies -- the famous heads (see left) are really full statues with the bodies buried in the ground.  The heads, massive as they are, are only about 1/3 of the entire statue.  Moreover, almost all of the moai actually face inland, not out to sea, because the statues look toward the villages that built them.  The one exception is Ahu a Kivi, where the seven moai face the sea.  According to legend, this is because these particular moai represent the seven Polynesian explorers who initially found the island and reported its location to their people, so they look across the sea from which they came.  Or they could simply be facing the village, which in this instance was not a coastal fishing settlement but an agricultural community further inland.

The highlight of the tours was the stone quarry where the moai were carved.  You can see moai in various stages of construction, including statues carved directly in the rock -- one would have stood about 5 stories tall if it had been removed from the cliff and put up.  There are also a plethora of moai that have been removed from the rock that were prepared but, for whatever reasons, never taken to their final locations.

We also visited most of the major moai locations.  Some moai were carved more homogeneously; others seem deliberately designed to be heterogeneous.  Only one moai has been restored to have eyes (see right), which were fashioned out of coral and obsidian, and installed only after the moai were moved and raised.  In some places, the moai have not been restored, but have been left fallen down, in many instances with the heads separated from the bodies.  Although many of the moai fell due to disrepair, others were pushed down, either during the dark period of internal warfare or after most of the island converted to Christianity.  There are also several caves of interest; some have pictoglyphs or rock art, and many were used by the islanders to hide from Peruvian slave raids during the mid-1800s.

Finally, we visited the restored village of Orongo, where the yearly "bird man" ceremony took place.  During the late period of island history, this ceremony was how the island chief was chosen each year; each village chief could choose a proxy to climb down the cliffs and swim out to the islets.  The chief of the person who brought back the first egg of the sooty tern bird would then be chief of the island for the year.  It isn't totally clear what power this brought, however, since the island chief spent the first three months of his tenure in meditation (maybe this was the previous chief's lame duck period?).  Go figure.

I also had a full day and a half beyond the day tours to myself, during which I took it pretty easy.  I hiked from town to the top of one of the volcanoes, did some reading (a little odd to be reading about polar exploration on a South Pacific island), spent a lot of time looking for sea turtles, and spent even more time pouting about not seeing any sea turtles.  

Also, since Rose wouldn't go bike riding with me in Santiago, I rented a bike and took a ride along the coast.  It sounded like a good idea at the time, even though everyone said the road was bad, because there weren't any cars allowed on the road and, as I mentioned, the coast is pretty.  But there's a difference between hearing the road is bad, seeing the road is bad, and feeling the road is bad.  This road made the dirt paths in Cambodia look like freeways.  I wound up walking the bike for most of the hard parts, which inconveniently always seemed to coincide with inclines and declines.  (Admittedly, my threshold for "hard" on a bicycle is pretty low.)  All told, I probably walked the bike around half the time along this road, so somewhat less than half the distance.  But I managed to make it the entire way without falling or otherwise hurting myself, so I'm going to go ahead and call it a win.  (My threshold for "success" on a bicycle is also pretty low.)  I took a different, far easier route back.

On two evenings, I met up with the other solo traveler on my day tours for dinner and the Rapa Nui cultural dance/music show.  Definitely commercialized, definitely touristy, but also definitely fun.

In sum, a fantastic place to visit, but I think 3 full days and 2 half days was just about right.