Visiting Easter Island was a somewhat unlikely thing for me to do.
I had never any significant interest in the myths and stories that are attached to that place. My closest connection to the statues on Easter Island had been a visit to Legoland in Windsor.
And (near-)tropical islands are not really my favourite habitats. I had been on a tropical island in Mozambique two years earlier. It was a fairly luxurious all-inclusive hotel resort and while it was quite nice and I had no reason to complain, it just wasn't "my thing".
So why did I go to a subtropical island and stayed in a (even more) luxury all-inclusive resort?
Well...
Mostly because Easter Island is quite far from almost everything and can only be reached practically from Chile. (There is a flight from Papeete as well, but then there's the problem of getting to Papeete. The route makes only sense if you're on a round the world trip.) Since I was in Chile anyway, so why not go there?
And I didn't want to regret not having gone there.
And, three years ago, I had gotten an e-mail from the people with whom I visited the North Pole. They had travelled to a lot of places and wrote "Then we flew to Easter Island. If you have not been there we recommend it highly. The island is still in its unspoiled condition and the Stone sculptures ( Moai ) are something to see. To give the space shuttle an emergency landing strip the US extended the runway on Easter Island. Now 767's are landing there every day and tourists will soon flood the island. We stayed in a 5 star hotel, the only one so far, but another one is being built. "
So I had one recommendation from people who have seen many places and specifically recommended Easter Island. Combined with the advice to rather go sooner than later. So why not visit, since I was going to be in Chile anyway?
From a practical point of view, the trip was a bit counter-productive. Since the dates for the Antarctic flights are sometimes a bit unreliable and I had a bit of trouble re-booking the flight home when I was at the South Pole in 2006 and my flight out of Antarctica was delayed, it seemed like a sensible idea to have the flight home from Chile at least a week after the planned return from Antarctica, so that I'd have enough 'buffer space' in case something was delayed.
And I didn't want to stay in Punta Arenas the whole time, so it seemed like a good idea to spend that week somewhere else (since there are a lot of flights between Punta Arenas and Santiago, I figured that I would probably be able to change that flight if needed). And going to Easter Island was something that could be done in that week. And if there was some delay in Antarctica, then that part of the trip would be dropped, but at least the flight home would happen as scheduled.
But then the side-trip took a life of its own. And, given the cost of the flight and the hotel, both of them having been pre-paid and would not be refunded upon cancellation, it caused me to leave Antarctica earlier than planned (instead of allowing me to stay longer), just to make sure that I didn't miss the Easter Island part of the trip.
So it better had to be good. Or I would be moping for days about not having remained in Antarctica.
Luckily it was.
Easter Island has more to offer than statues, so the trip didn't turn into a three day 'museum visit' with long explanations of the historic significance of every moai encountered.
And they did get the mixture right at the hotel. They didn't have a subservient liveried butler attitude, but also not a snotty self-important Maitre d'. On the other side they also avoided a "we're all buddies here" chummily attitude.
The whole place pretty much felt like this: Imagine you got a couple of friends, cooks, who emigrated to some distance place. You go and visit them and they show you around and cook for you.
In the early evening, there was usually a planning meeting where the guide suggested possible walks and tours for the next day, so they could be adapted to the interest of the guests. They also tried to keep the same groups (three or four people) together, but since they got multiple groups parallel, there was also the option to switch.
For example, I wanted to do a boat tour, but the other two in my 'usual group' didn't like boats, so I went with two other people, while they went to the highest point of the island instead.
The first exposure to the moai were a group of toppled statues.
I wasn't aware that this was the state of most of them. At some point in history all of the statues had been toppled and all those that are decoratively standing somewhere have been restored in recent time.
And I was surprised by the shoreline and the clear waters there.
The southern night sky was also amazing, but I didn't have any proper equipment with me, so this is a 30 second exposure and the stars streak a bit over the sky.
Next day it was time to see some standing statues, visiting the largest group of them.
Tours were usually done in a way that we would start some distance from an attraction and then walk along the coast or some other path to get there. So it wasn't just driving from attraction to attraction, but there was the chance to relax, walk a bit, enjoy the day and see the scenery, so it had a good 'vacation feel'.
In the afternoon, we walked along the northern coast, visiting the 'navel of the world' (or maybe navel of light) and ending up at the two beaches for a swim in the Pacific.
The 'Navel of the World' (the five stones in the second picture above) is a good example of the impreciseness of Easter Island history.
Depending on who you listen to, they are either stones that have always been there, it is from the ballast of the first ship that arrived at the island or it has been built as an attraction for gullible tourists in the 1960s.
So, given that it's not even clear whether something has any historic significance at all or was just built a couple of decades ago, almost everything about the statues on the island is pretty much conjecture, guesswork or just making up stories.
Which is nice as a projection site for fantasies (no wonder that the place is so popular), but every bit of 'history' should be taken with an implied "Maybe," in front of it. So you might as well invent your own. (It seems that many did anyway.)
There are some things that are fairly definite, but that makes ethnographers and archaeologists look even worse. For example, there had been a long debate about the origin of the inhabitants of Easter Island (whether they arrived from Polynesia or from South America), with both sides listing evidence for their position. But that was never really resolved based on anthropological or archaeological evidence. It's now known that the inhabitants are descended from Polynesians, but that was based on DNA testing, not on historic evidence.
DNA testing also showed that a big part of the background story of the history of the people on Easter Island (featuring two tribes, the "Long Ears" and the "Short Ears") is just a fanciful invention and not borne out by any genetic evidence.
So while there are some nice stories around, there's very little indication that any of these describe actual history.
I was also surprised (though it fits the pattern) that 'Rapa Nui' is not an ancient name for 'Easter Island'. There are many places where the attempt is made to restore 'tribal names' for places or people that had been formerly named by Europeans (like Uluru for Ayers Rock, Inuit for Eskimos, Iran for Persia, Toronto for York), but "Rapa Nui" was coined more than a century after the name "Easter Island" and has, at best, very spurious historic grounds.
One thing that was without much doubt as far as history was concerned was the place where the moai came from. There's a quarry up in the hills that has moais in various states of completion.
The moai had been produced pretty much on a commercial assembly line, so it seems not that likely that they were made 'to order' or really represented individuals.
At some places, it looks more like a sales room presentation, with dozens of sales samples to choose from.
While this might look like a 'heads only' selection, these are just statues that have been partly dug in. Just a couple of days earlier some archaeologists had carefully dug two out to study them. While the volcanic rock of the statues gets eroded fairly quickly (in terms of centuries), the parts that are covered by earth are still in pretty good shape and show more details (like the hand and fingers near the lower end of the statue).
Not really related to moais was the following sight - honeycombs of wild bees.
Whatever brought the end to the manufacture of moai on Easter Island, it must have happened quickly. There are a number of them half-hewn out of the stone, so they didn't bother to finish the last ones they were working on, but just stopped working on them at some point.
My take on the whole thing is that it was something silly that escalated and at some point it just got out of fashion. Like Christmas decorations. Someone starts with a decorated tree in the garden, the neighbour adds some electric lights, the next one adds an illuminated Santa Claus, then there's a whole set o blinking reindeer, then there are animated reindeer with moving heads, suddenly music is added and the lights are synchronized with the music, then the whole house is covered with lights. And the Christmas decoration make late 80's discos look restrained by comparison.
Probably someone just built a little stone statue. And the neighbours put up a larger one. So a second one was added. And a third, larger one. While the neighbour added an even larger one, but balanced another stone on top of it. So the next one was built on a pedestal. And so on. Until someone decided that the whole thing was ridiculous and not fashionable any more (or maybe someone decided that, if you want to have fashions, it might be better to apply them to clothing, since that's more useful, easier to make and simpler to change) and just stopped doing it.
Of course, I have no evidence for any of this (except the general trust in the consistency of human nature), but on Easter Island hardly anyone has.
But whatever the reasons for the moai are - they look quite decoratively in the sunset.
Next day it was time to visit a volcano crater. Easter Island is of volcanic origin (though there is no active volcano - the last eruption was about a 100000 years ago) and there are two craters (the third volcano doesn't have an obvious crater).
We started at a moai some distance away (well, just the face was visible), mainly because of the structure of the ahu (the pedestal for the moai to stand on) nearby. The stones of this ahu are cut fairly precisely and researchers did see similarities with stone walls in Machu Picchu. (A large part of the claim that Easter Island was populated by people from South America rests on these stones.)
From there it was a walk along the coast and up to the rim of the crater.
And then further on along the rim.
The destination was Orongo, a place connected to the birdman cult.
As far as Easter Island history goes, the birdman cult seems to be reasonably well established. It also seems to have been made up mostly from scratch.
There doesn't seem to be any earlier bird related myths, so it seems like someone just sat down and constructed it. Basically it created a system of government based on the performance of a champion.
Every family/tribe would annually travel to Orongo (where there were special houses for the head of the tribe - the rest would stay somewhere nearby) and selected a champion to swim to a small island nearby and bring back the egg of a specific bird. Whose champion brought back the first egg to Orongo would be the ruling tribe for the next year.
These are the islands as seen from the crater rim - the relevant one is the last, flat one.
The houses for the chieftains to live in were flat and round and quite unlike anything else on the island (where the 'sleeping houses' were in the shape of an inverted boat).
There were petroglyphs nearby which presumably refer to the birdman cult and illustrate it, but even with interpretative assistance, it's hard to discern more than some arms and heads if you don't have any prior experience with petroglyphs.
Lunch that day was special. Instead of having it at the hotel, they set up lunch near the coast.
While we were sitting there, enjoying the food and looking out at the Pacific Ocean, the wind was getting stronger and we could enjoy the sight of some spectacular waves while remaining (mostly) dry. (There's a bit of a rocky ledge, so the waves break there and only a bit of spill water reaching the place where we were sitting.
We were sitting around at that place for a while after lunch. All the gear was transported back to the hotel, but since our afternoon excursion would bring us past this place anyway, we just stayed there instead of going back to the hotel and being back an hour later. It was sort of fun looking at the sea and after a while it was noticeable that the waves were breaking in specific patterns, so there was a bit of an (successfully suppressed) urge to 'direct' the waves "sorcerer's apprentice" style...
Starting point for the afternoon walk was another group of moai. It's a good example for 'meaning overload'. The statues are north-south aligned. Since the statues look at the sunset at spring/autumn equinoxes, it must be of astronomical importance. And they look out to Marquesas Islands, where the Easter Islanders came from.
That the statues are intentionally north-south aligned is quite likely. They are the only ones not at the coast, so, unlike most other statues, their placement is not constrained by geography. And north-south and east-west are the easiest directions to determine, so if you have free choice, why not use these?
But once you align the statues north-south, they will automatically be looking at the sun on spring/autumn equinoxes. That doesn't mean that this was the reason for choosing the direction. And while the Marquesas Islands are somewhat to the west of Easter Island, they are actually quite a bit closer to the equator. So if the statues were built to be looking there, shouldn't they be a bit off the north-south axis? (Or, inversely, if the direction in which the statues are looking is really the where the inhabitants came from, does that mean that they're like to be from Brisbane? Going directly west from Easter Island, the next landfall would be at Moreton Island, next to Brisbane...)
But the statues were just the starting point of the walk.
And while we passed by a stone garden and a significant ahu wall, these weren't the purpose of the wall either. (The significant part of the wall was a bit of brownish stone that formed part of it. It was a broken piece of one of the statues and gave the strong indication that they didn't have any particular cultish significance, since then they would probably not have been casually used as a building block somewhere else, but that they were primarily decorative objects. To stay with the Christmas lights example above - you probably wouldn't think twice to take a chain of lights and attach it to some other part of the house. It doesn't have any particular significance or meaning.)
The walk was mainly to visit some caves.
I was originally a bit surprised that there were any caves at all, since Easter Island doesn't look like a place that might have them (being too young and volcanic). And while they are no 'cavernous' caves as such, there are a lot of long caves, which are former lava tunnels. (There is one that's about 700 meters long, but we didn't visit that.)
We were first heading to one that was originally used as a natural stone garden. It acted as a natural water reservoir (there are no rivers or streams on Easter Island) and provided shelter from the sun and humidity.
The main attraction however was a lava tube that ended at the side of a cliff, so there were two 'windows' looking out from the cave over the sea.
From there on it was further along the coast and to the edge of the only town on Easter Island, to see some statues that I had already visited at sunset two days earler.
The next day morning tour was up Poike, the oldest volcano on Easter Island. It is devoid of any statues or historical sites, but provides a great panoramic view of the island.
In the afternoon it was time to see the island from the seaside. This was the one case where our little 'group' was split up and the Swiss couple went up to the highest point of the island instead. (Something I could well live without, having already walked up one volcano in the morning and one the previous day. For them, being Swiss, it turned out to be a case of "What do you mean, this is already the summit?")
And it was (kind of) understandable why they didn't fancy the boat ride. The boats were fairly small. (Which makes sense. There's no deep inlet or large harbour in Easter Island, so large boats can't dock there. And since there's really nowhere to go for smaller ships, it doesn't make much sense to have boats with cabins.)
And seeing one of the small boats in comparision with these waves is kind of daunting.
Realistically, there's not much too it. You just stay in front of the point where the waves break, wait for one wave to break and then go full speed through the critical area before the next wave arrives. But seeing one of the big waves coming right at you is still impressive. (And getting out of the harbour must have been really tricky back in the days of rowing boats.)
Once you are out at sea, everything is calm.
Since Easter Island is in the middle of nowhere, there's only one place to go if you are sightseeing by boat (unless you are fishing, diving and snorkelling - and even for the last two, there aren't that many places, since the ground drops quite quickly, so you need to stay close to the coast for anything interesting). So we went to the three small islands associated with the birdman cult.
Something that's hard to tell from the pictures is that the water next to the islands is really blue. Usually the ocean looks kind of greenish and only seems blue on photographs if the angle is low enough so that the 'blue ocean' is really just the reflection of the sky on the surface. But here the ocean was even looking blue when looking directly down. Impressive when you're there, but difficult to see on photographs.
Next day it was already time to leave. My flight was in the early afternoon, so I checked in my luggage early and then had about two hours to walk through town, watch some more waves and surfers and a couple of more moais at the harbour before walking back to the airport.
And then I was on the plane back to Santiago.
Here's an overview of the walks on Easter Island:
Walking: 52 km
Boat tour: 15km
Before going home, I had one more 'buffer' day in Santiago. Since I already did a lot of walking around on the day before going to Easter Island (and there didn't seem to be any significant attractions that I missed in the city), I wanted to go whitewater rafting.
A nice feature of Santiago is that it is really close to the Andes and there are a couple interesting day tours. A few looked interesting and I liked the idea of going rafting. So I tried to book the trip while being on Easter Island via a web page. The web page accepted the booking, but I got no confirmation. I tried to e-mail the next day, but got no reply either.
So when I arrived in Santiago in the evening, I didn't know whether I would be rafting the day or not. (As I have specifically mentioned the booking attempt and since the pictures below clearly don't show rafting, the outcome should be obvious.)
So I was sitting in the hotel lobby the next morning at the pick-up time. About half an hour later it was clear that the booking hadn't worked and I would not go rafting. But at that time it was too late to book any other tour, so it was clear that I would spend the day in Santiago itself.
Not much of a problem. The rafting was an ad-hoc idea anyway, so it would have been nice if it had happened, but it wasn't something important and after a vacation like this, it was just a minor thing.
And while there weren't any big attractions to look forward to, Santiago is a nice city and I could happily spend the day just walking through the city and looking at the shops.
Well...
That might have worked if December, 8th wouldn't be a public holiday in Chile (celebrating the Immaculate Conception). So not only were all the small shops closed, most of them are located in various 'galerias', which were closed as well. So there wasn't even the option of window-shopping.
So I spent some time at 'Parque Arauco', a large shopping mall that's open on public holidays, but it's hard to spend the whole day at a shopping mall (well, at least for me).
I looked what else was in the vicinity. There isn't much, so I ended up at a place that's a bit unlikely for me (but then again, the point of a vacation is to do things you wouldn't normally do), so I visited the 'Museo de la Moda', the Santiago Fashion Museum.
As it is sometimes the case if you end up somewhere that's fully outside your usual areas, it turned out surprisingly interesting, though it probably helped that the current exhibition was about 'the 80s' and thus reasonably accessible. (Even though one of the standard tricks when being in odd museums, namely pretending you could select one of the museum pieces to take home, failed, since most very few pieces were for males. And those that were, were quite clearly not my size. Not even remotely. Though the 'Terminator' leather jacket might have been ok, if not for the bullet holes...)
A bit more randomly walking around, then to the hotel pool bar for a 'Pisco Sour' to end the day and the last vacation day was over.
Next day it was time for the long flight(s) back.
At least I had a window seat and the weather was nice, so I could enjoy the view of the Andes and the scenery beyond (first Argentina, then Brazil) for some time.
