This is an article I wrote upon my return to New Zeland from my 1996 trip to Easter Island.
One of the first things which struck me about Easter Island is that it is a lovely little island in its own right. It has rolling pasture lands, patches of bush, a gloriously savage coastline, the occasional beautiful beach, friendly locals, a cruisy, laid back atmosphere and - at least when I was there - very few tourists. From the island's only town, Hanga Roa, you can walk north along the coast all day and never see another soul, with any number of craggy little bays to choose from for a quick splash.
For me, one of the most stunning places on the island was entirely natural: the volcanic crater of Rano Kau in the Island's south. I was utterly flabbergasted by my first glimpse of this extraordinary feature. The crater, around two kilometres across, is almost perfectly round to the eye, and its steep sides drop dizzyingly to a fresh-water lake almost completely choked with totora reeds. The rim of the crater is mostly level, except to the south where it plunges down to a knife-edged ridge called Kari Kari: crater lake on one side, two hundred metre drop to the ocean on the other.
But of course people don't cross thousands of kilometres of Pacific Ocean for the island's natural charms. They come, inspired perhaps by Thor Heyerdahl's gung-ho adventures or Eric von Daniken's fantasies, to see the statues, the moai, of which around a thousand dot the tiny island. Many of the how questions of the moai have answers: how were they sculptured? How were they transported? How were they erected? Many of the why questions will probably remain unanswered forever: why were they built? Why were they nearly always placed with their backs to the sea? Why were most of them pulled down well before first contact with the outside world? The reason why these why questions have no answers is one of the most miserable and depressing stories associated with the island.
In 1862 Peruvian slavers kidnapped perhaps as many as 2000 of the island's natives, hauling them off to mine guano on the Peruvian coast. The king, his son, and most of the society's scholars and priests where among the victims. Some time later the Bishop of Tahiti heard about this atrocity, and led a public outcry. An attempt was made to repatriate the Easter Islanders, but only around 100 could be found alive. They were put on a ship homeward bound, whereupon smallpox promptly broke out. Only fifteen of the wretched souls made it back home alive - just enough to ensure that the disease would be transferred to the general population. This and other disasters reduced the native population from perhaps 10,000 people before contact with the outside world to just 111 in 1877. This all happened well before the first serious studies of the Easter Islanders and their beliefs were undertaken, and so almost no information about the motivations of the moai-builders has come down to us.
There is perhaps one faint glimmer of hope that some of these beliefs might yet be recovered, in the form of slabs of wood carrying a curious inscribed form of writing called rongo rongo script. Around twenty-four boards carved with rongo rongo characters are known to exist, although none remain on the island. (Even the island's museum only has replicas.) The antiquity of this script is in some doubt: some scholars think that it represents the only known aboriginal form of writing in Polynesia, while others think that it is a post-contact development, an attempt to emulate western-style writing. Whatever the truth, the rongo rongo script has never been deciphered, although it is thought that it is partially phonetic and partially pictographic in nature.
One bizarre feature of the script has no known parallels in any other form of writing: every second line is upside down. Unless adept at reading upside down, one is therefore required to turn a rongo rongo board through 180 degrees at the end of every line.
Though not very likely, it is possible that one day an Easter Island Rosetta Stone will be found and the meanings of the 700 or so characters which make up the rongo rongo script will finally be revealed.
In terms of archaeological sites, by far the most astonishing is Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater from which nearly all of the moai were quarried. Of the thousand or so statues on the island, around 400 are still in the quarry, in various stages of construction. So many moai are packed into such a small area that you see giant faces and torsos everywhere. Why there are so many unfinished statues is yet another of the island's mysteries: were the sculptors really working on 400 statues simultaneously when they stopped work, or did they work on a few at a time and regularly give up on half-finished statues only to start new ones? No-one knows for sure.
From the abundant evidence at Rano Raraku the moai construction process is fairly well understood. The statues where hewn out of soft volcanic rock using granite picks. They were carved lying on their backs, so when nearly finished all that connected them to the surrounding rock was a slender keel running along the spine. This keel was then smashed out and the statue lowered down the crater's flanks into a waiting pit. There the statue was set upright, and its back was finished. The moai were then moved along roads specially constructed for the purpose to coastal ceremonial platforms called ahus and erected, backs to the sea. Sometimes a large red cylinder of stone, quarried from a different part of the island and variously interpreted as a topknot or a hat was added to the statue. The final stage was to open the eyes of the moai: eye sockets were carved and eyes set into them. The white of these eyes was fashioned from coral, while the iris was made from red volcanic rock or obsidian. Only a single original example of such an eye is known to exist, and it is now housed in the island's museum. Heartbreakingly, all the other eyes are thought to have been ground up into whitewash during a 1930s coral drive.
Precisely how the moai where moved from the quarry sites to the coastal ahus, without benefit of wheels, beasts of burden, or even the smallest flying saucer, is one of the most enduring mysteries. Suggestions range from the prosaic (wooden rollers and ropes) through to the surreal (wait for convenient volcanic eruptions to hurl the moai to their destinations). One of the more intriguing suggestions is that the moai were walked, in the same way that you or I might walk a fridge - by using one corner as a fulcrum to advance another. The reason for this proposal lies in a common local legend: that the statues walked on their own by swivelling about on their bases, animated by the mana (spiritual power) of the king. Whatever the technique actually employed, it almost certainly involved vast quantities of wood, rope, and elbow grease.
According to the standard archaeological chronology the most active period of moai construction was from around 1000 AD to 1500 AD. After this came two hundred years of strife and dissent, during which period nearly all of the moai where knocked off their ahu to lie face-down in the dirt. The reasons for what seems to us like wanton destruction are as unclear as the reasons for building the moai in the first place. Most commentators posit some form of class or tribal warfare, instigated perhaps by dwindling natural resources, with the overthrow of the moai representing the overthrow of the old order. But like so many things about Easter Island, no-one really knows for sure.
While the precise function of the moai is not known, many scholars think that they were probably supposed to represent gods or deified ancestors, and were erected to watch over their communities. This interpretation explains one aspect of the moais' positioning which always fascinates modern visitors: the statues where nearly always erected with their backs to the ocean. The moai gazed out over their builders' villages and ceremonial sites, not out over the sea. Personally I was not convinced by this interpretation, as my strong subjective impression was that the moai had been placed in a defiant, arrogant, scornful manner with respect to the ocean. For the most part the ahus were built as close to the sea as possible - so much so that in many cases massive earth and stone works where needed to stop the moai from tumbling into the waves. If the relationship to the sea was of no significance in the placement of the moai you would expect to find them at any orientation, but with very few exceptions the moai had their backs to the sea and gazed inland.
Most of the moai today are face down and broken on the ground, lying where they fell during whatever social upheaval caused them to be overthrown. Some of these sites were used for other purposes after their destruction: for example at some stage stones were packed around the overthrown moai at Vinapu, forming a cave in which a small group of people lived.
All the moai which are now standing have been re-erected in modern times. By far the most spectacular of these sites is Tongariki, on the east of the island. The site has a checkered history: it originally contained around 30 statues, which were all overthrown at some stage before contact with the outside world. The statues lay in orderly rows for many years before being blasted apart by a tsunami in 1960. Finally an attempt was made to restore the site in 1994, and now fifteen statues of varying sizes stand together in a jaw-dropping array.
One of the aspects of the old Easter Island culture which survived longest into the post-contact era was the birdman competition. Off the southern-most point of Easter Island are three tiny islands. The largest of these, Motu Nui, plays host to large numbers of sooty terns each year during the nesting season. The birdman competition involved men swimming the three kilometres to Motu Nui (aided by reed boogie boards), and then waiting - sometimes for weeks - for the sooty terns to land and start nesting. The man who recovered the first egg laid was birdman for the year. The benefits of being birdman are not obvious to the modern mind: the birdman was not allowed to cut his hair, to cut his nails, to bathe, or to have sex for the whole year of his tenure (although one is tempted to speculate that the reason for the last restriction can be traced back to the others!). Nevertheless much honour came with the position, and by all accounts the event was fiercely contested.
Easter Island today is part of Chile, and has a permanent population of around 2000 people, catering mostly to the tourist trade and the running of the airport. The airport, which cuts a swathe across the south-west of the island, has the distinction of having been enlarged by NASA in 1985 to allow emergency Space Shuttle landings!
Life on the island is relaxed and slow, and in the town traffic travels at a self-imposed speed limit of about 30km/h, which is just as well, considering the state of the cars and motorbikes. Items which we consider important aspects of road safety (crash helmets, headlights, seatbelts, side panels, doors), all are considered strictly optional on Easter Island.
There is no public transport on the island, so most tourists rent small 4-wheel drive vehicles (most of the roads are unsealed). Personally I opted for renting a mountain bike: the island is small enough that you can cycle clean across it in an hour and a half, which leaves plenty of time to explore the various delights Easter Island has to offer.
There are several hotels on the island, but I opted to stay at one of the numerous small guest houses. Fifteen US dollars a night got me a pleasant-enough room which was passably clean and didn't have too many plate-sized cockroaches. (There's nothing quite like the feeling of a cockroach crawling up your leg to get you started in the morning!)
Although the prices for accommodation and basic foodstuffs are not too bad, prices for touristy things are completely bonkers: from $60 for the slimmest of guide books (I bought two such, on separate days so that it didn't feel like quite so much!), up to $1000 for some of the statues and carvings on offer.
If you decide to travel to Easter Island, you may have trouble working out how to get there. The first travel agent I approached had no idea how to get me there, and when she rang around her various contacts in the biz the single concrete piece of advice I was offered was to rent the movie Rapa Nui (which is set on pre-contact Easter Island). Whether this was supposed to be instead of or as well as actually going there I didn't hang around long enough to find out! I eventually discovered that LanChile, the Chilean national airline, flies across the Pacific twice a week in each direction between Tahiti and Santiago (the capital of Chile), stopping to refuel for fifty minutes on Easter Island.
Easter Island is an utterly bewitching place, and anyone with a love of magic and mystery is sure to enjoy a stay there.
