Our trip to Easter Island was serendipitous in many ways: adding such a highlight to our trip at the last minute, being there at the finale of the annual festival, and finding a knowledgeable guide.
I remember reading about Easter Island in National Geographic when I was in elementary school. I was captivated by pictures of the moai. I can’t say that finally being there was a dream come true because it seemed far too remote to even dream about for a girl from Iowa.
The island is a Chilean territory, but is not just a little off the coast of Chile. It’s 2,334 miles from Santiago and takes about 5½ hours to fly there.
The island covers 63 square miles. That’s 3/4 the size of Des Moines, Iowa. There’s only one real town, Hanga Roa. Easter Island consists mainly of three extinct volcanoes which have combined to form one island.
In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with much of the island protected within Rapa Nui National Park.
Easter Island is a special territory of Chile that was annexed in 1888. According to the 2017 Chilean census, the island has 7,750 residents, of whom some 60 percent are descendants of the original Rapa Nui.
The name “Easter Island” was given by the island’s first recorded European visitor, a Dutch explorer who encountered it on Easter Sunday in 1722. He named it Paasch-Eyland (18th-century Dutch for “Easter Island”). The island’s official Spanish name, Isla de Pascua, also means “Easter Island”.
After decades of scientific investigation, the history of Rapa Nui continues to be very controversial. However, the main oral tradition with respect to the origin of its first inhabitants is supported today by scientific findings in different fields.
Archaeological excavations reveal three distinct cultural phases: the early period (700-850 A.D.), the middle period (1050-1680) and the late period (post-1680). Between the early and middle periods, evidence has shown that many early statues were deliberately destroyed and rebuilt as larger and heavier moai for which the island is most famous.
During the middle period, ahu,(stone platforms) also contained burial chambers, and the images portrayed by moai are thought to have represented important figures that were deified after death.
The late period of the island’s civilization was characterized by civil wars and general destruction; more statues were toppled, and many obsidian spearpoints have been found dating to that period. Internal warfare, the dramatic impact of Peruvian slave raids, and the introduction of unknown diseases to the population almost completely exterminated the Rapa Nui people in the second half of the 19th century.
The Rapa Nui sponsor the Tapati, an annual 2-week festival in February, held since 1975. The festival began as a way of maintaining and promoting the Rapa Nui culture among the islanders, and in particular for generating interest and a sense of identity among the children. February is now very much high season on the island.
The festival consists of numerous dancing and singing competitions, as well as traditional sporting. Each year, two young females compete with each other to become the Queen of the Tapati for that year, and all of the above competitions carry points, meaning that the candidate with the most points at the end of the festival is crowned the Queen.
By chance, we arrived the day of the big parade and had dinner on the deck of a restaurant along the parade route. The parade consisted of several floats.
and many local participants in native dress.
After dinner, we watched the dancers and listened to their music.
It was quite an introduction to the island.
The next morning our guide picked us up at our hotel. He is an American who studied anthropology and archeology. Because of this interest, he went to Easter Island to do research. As fate would have it, he met a local girl, started a family, and has lived there for 18 years.
The archaeological site of Tahai is one of the oldest settlements on the island whose earliest remains date back to 700 AD. The occupation of Tahai by the first settlers was well-planned. In this place they had easy access to the sea to go fishing and a regular supply of fresh water from underground springs.
Nearby is Ahu Ko Te Riku, the only remaining moai with eyes made from coral.
According to oral tradition, the island was colonized by a group of villagers from a Polynesian island led by Hotu Matu’a, an ancestor of the Rapa Nui people. The tradition says his landing place was Anakena, a beautiful beach of white coral sand.
Ahu Ature overlooks Anakena beach.
Nearby is Ahu Nao-Nao, one of the best preserved sites.
Te Pito Kura meaning “Navel of the Earth” is a perfectly round sacred stone. It supposedly emits spiritual power to those who sit on the small rocks and place their hands on it. It is thought to have magnetic qualities.
Here lies the largest moai ever moved to an ahu. It weighed 80 tons and is no longer standing. The topknot weighed another 12 tons.
Tongariki is the longest (200 feet) ahu on the island. It has 15 moai.
and two newer additions the day we were there 😉
The moai were toppled during the civil wars and swept inland by a tsunami in 1960. The setting is beautiful with the Poike volcano, the oldest on the island, in the background.
We walked among these giants in the quarry Rano Raraku.
A total of 887 monolithic stone statues have been inventoried on the island and in museum collections. The quarry at Rano Raraku is where the majority of moais were created on a hillside before being transported to all corners of the island. This 300 foot volcano remnant provided the stones for the great figures and is where a visitor can see various stages of the carving, as well as partially-finished figures scattered around.
The native islanders who carved them used only stone hand chisels, mainly basalt. While many teams worked on different statues at the same time, a single moai took a team of five or six men approximately a year to complete.
Many statues at Rano Raraku are buried halfway or more into the ground.
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This is where the misconception of calling the moai statues “Easter Island heads” comes from. In fact they all have bodies, even though sometimes only a head is sticking out of the ground.
At the end of the path is the only moai with legs, known as Moai Tukuturi, meaning “kneeling moai”.
After the decline of the moai culture, a new cult of bird worship developed on Easter Island. It was centered on a ceremonial village called Orongo, built on the rim of the crater of the Rano Kau volcano looking out towards the sea.
Rano Kau is the remains of a volcanic cinder cone which is filled with fresh rainwater and nearly covered by reeds which give it an unusual mottled appearance. The crater measures a mile across.
Houses at Orongo are not the common hare paenga, a house with an elliptical foundation, made with basalt slabs and covered with a thatched roof that resembled an overturned boat,
but are hare oka, made entirely out of flat stones. Being of this material makes the houses survive the strong winds at the top of the volcano.
Settlements also contain hare moa (“chicken house”), oblong stone structures that housed chickens. The houses at the ceremonial village of Orongo are unique in that they are shaped like hare paenga but are made entirely of flat basalt slabs found inside Rano Kao crater. The entrances to all the houses are very low, and entry requires crawling.
The annual “birdman” competitions took place here in which a representative from each of the tribes fought.
Each year competitors would dive down dangerous cliffs, swim out to the islet called Motu Nui, retrieve a newly laid egg from the manutara bird (sooty tern), swim back with the egg carefully lodged in a special headdress, and climb back up the 656-foot cliff. The first competitor to return with an intact egg was declared winner and his elder, or patron, would earn the privileges of the king for the next 12 months.
There are distinct variations around the island in the frequency of themes among petroglyphs, with a concentration of Birdmen at Orongo.
The wall at Vinapu is perfectly fitted together with irregularly-shaped stones, and has rounded edges, and small triangular stones filling in gaps. It is by far the most perfectly fit ahu rock wall of Rapa Nui. The flawless fittings are made with a different engineering philosophy than virtually all other ahus: the stone blocks were constructed and polished for a perfect fit, as opposed to randomly trying to fit naturally shaped rocks. The back wall is still in perfect condition, except for the center.
It started to rain while we were at Aku Akivi, but it was only slightly inconvenient. The site has seven moai, all of equal shape and size, and is also known as a celestial observatory that was set up around the 16th century. The site is located inland, rather than along the coast. The moai are looking out towards the Pacific Ocean.
A particular feature of the seven moai statues is that they exactly face sunset during the spring equinox and have their backs to the sunrise during the autumn equinox. Such an astronomically precise feature is seen only at this location on the island.
This report would not be complete without including photos of a few of the many outstanding dinners we enjoyed of seafood and wine.
And we end this portion of our trip as the sun set outside the patio of our hotel room.
Don will take back his blog to report on Punta Arenas.