Travelling these days has become so easy, that in many places it is a question of going somewhere almost to tick it off the list of places to go. I am as guilty of this as the next person; I've been to a few places now because I could rather than because I had any particular interest in going there.
Easter Island could very easily fall into this category, it's a convenient stop on the way to/from Tahiti if anyone is heading that way, and everyone knows something about it; as the giant stone heads have been immortalised in pictures and films, they rate highly on the 'things to see' list. Easter Island though, or Rapa Nui, is so much more than a tick in the box destination.
There can't be many places in the world that can truly claim to have still been in the Stone Age in the 1700's. Are there many cultures left where almost no record of their history exists before the explorers visited them? The mystery of the construction of the pyramids and Stonehenge are partially solved, but to me they are almost incomparable to the idea of a Stone Age society on a tiny island in the Pacific carving 100 tonne statues out of rock and transporting them vertically 15km across unsettled terrain.
We arrived in Rapa Nui on a Saturday afternoon, after a 5.5 hour flight from Santiago. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, Easter Island is a very long way from everywhere. The airport is miniscule, at their peak they get 4 planes in a day, and they are not interested in scheduling any more. The usual is 2. We were greeted with beautiful lei's, and torrential rain, not quite what we had been expecting. This continued throughout the night, and in fact at one point was so loud it woke us up - we had never heard anything like it!!
We quickly discovered on Sunday morning that pretty much everything is closed on a Sunday... So we spent the day exploring Hanga Roa, the main town that consists of 2 streets, and relaxing in tropical paradise - the rain stopped in the afternoon and we headed down to a small beach area in the town. There are Moai dotted throughout Hanga Roa, although many of them are replicas or only partially whole. I'll admit to being a little disappointed that we had come all this way to see these amazing statues and they were just there between the shops and restaurants on the waterfront. We went to bed eagerly anticipating the next day, where we had arranged to go and see the Moai at sunrise, and for a full day tour of the Island to see many of the other archaeological sites.
We set off in the pitch dark, to the other side of the Island. Neither of us had realised that the Island was so big, it took us 20 minutes to cross it in a car. Still pitch dark we stumbled down the rocky trail to the sunrise spot at Ahu Tongariki - any lingering sense of disappointment from seeing the Moai was gone, even against an inky black sky with only the crescent moon lighting the statues, they were obviously immense, and 15 of them were standing in a row! Watching the sunrise behind these incredible statues was a real once in a lifetime experience, as the sun came up you could make out more detail in each statue, and really appreciate their size. One of these is 86 tonnes, the largest erected on the Island. We visited Tongariki again later in the day on our tour of the Island, one interesting thing that we learned was that despite their size and weight, all of the 15 statues at Ahu Tongariki were washed inland by a tsunami in the 60's. When you are standing beneath these enormous statues, knowing that nature could move them several hundred metres is quite a thought.
I could go on about the history of the Island, and what happened to the statues for a long long time, but I'm not going to. I'll talk a bit about the quarry, and then let the pictures do the talking. Ranu Raruka is the volcanic crater where the statues were carved from. In my head, a quarry was a big hole in the ground, I was not expecting to see layers of Moai having been partially carved out of the rock going up the crater. The biggest unfinished example was a massive 21m tall had he been raised, weighing in at over 200 tonnes - he is so big they even named him - Tok Anga.
Tok Anga
It's only when you see it that you really appreciate how amazing it is that these statues were ever made, they were carved with tools made of slightly harder stone, and manoeuvred into a standing position once the front had been carved, so that the detail could be carved onto the back. They know this because several are still in place vertically, buried into the ground with the detail intact below the surface. Many more of the Moai lay in pieces around the site, or in a face plant position on the routes to the Ahu around the Island. The assumption is that either the important men that these Moai were created to represent stopped being important enough, or the more likely explanation that once they fell, they were just too difficult to get back up again.
We visited several more of the sites over the next few days, including Ahu Akivi, the only statues raised that face out to see rather than inland. Seven Moai of equal shape and size exactly face the sunset at the spring equinox.
We also learned a lot about the birdman culture of the Island, which it is believed replaced the Moai based religion. This involved swimming gathering the first sooty term egg from a nearby island, and returning to Rapa Nui with it intact, if you were first, you were the birdman for a year... Bizarre.
A couple of other interesting facts about the Island - NASA were responsible for building their 3km runway, the Island was a potential aborted landing site for the space shuttle! Concorde also landed here twice, an event which we were told most of the Island showed up to witness.
We were lucky enough to see a couple of the most incredible sunsets we ever have while on the Island. Zero pollution means completely clear visibility - clouds drifting over the horizon made for some amazing colours and shapes.
Rapa Nui is without a doubt one of the lost intriguing and magical places that I have visited, it is stunningly beautiful, the people are wonderful, and even though you can get wifi in every cafe, it remains very unspoiled. The history and culture surrounding the Moai is something you could delve into for years and still make no more sense of, we really will never know. We are both so glad we managed to fit a visit to the Island into our trip, it is somewhere that I have wanted to go since I was little, and Andy has always been similarly intrigued. If anyone ever gets the opportunity (and being somewhere in Chile is close enough - make the trip if you can!) it is well worth a visit.
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