SWANSONI Team Adventures: Easter on Easter Island: Moai Safari

When we realized we had a few days off for Easter Week, we took a look at both the map and the LAN flight schedule to see what would be the best locale for a short adventure. When we found incredibly cheap frequent flier mile flights to one of the most remote locations in the world, we were sold. Plus we determined that #easteroneasterisland would be a clever and (shockingly) underused hashtag.

We arrived on the 63 square mile island via a comparatively large Boeing 787 Dreamliner out of Santiago. The immense plane seemed out of place amidst the scenery, although it was less incongruous once we taxied along the runway to park alongside the one other commercial flight that occasionally lands on Easter Island – Air Tahiti. At least we didn’t need to worry that the runway would be too short for the large plane; NASA installed a world-class runway a few decades back, just in case a space shuttle ever needed to land on Easter Island. That’s never happened, but the runway is still there.

Even for those of you who don’t know much about this remote island, odds are you’ve heard of or seen pictures of its famous megalithic statutes. There’s a great deal of mystery regarding Easter Island and its people, both known as Rapa Nui. Myths surround the island's history, including the arrival of the first Polynesian settlers on the island, the rise of their civilization, and their eventual demise – but mostly, their famous statues.

The classic version of the tale of Easter Island is a story of environmental and societal collapse, of a civilization that used all of its resources to build, transport, and erect its now famous colossal statues. When the Rapa Nui arrived on Easter Island in their dugout canoes several centuries ago, the island was densely forested. (Side Bar: There were actually many more trees on the island than we expected – presumably they’ve all been planted in the past few decades.) The traditional story is that after settling on the island, the Rapa Nui began the process of deforestation – clearing the trees for farming, building settlements, and, of course, transporting and erecting enormous statues.

The climate on Easter Island is certainly hostile, particularly in the absence of shade and nutrient providing trees. There is no source of natural water other than the volcanic craters and there are only two natural beaches along the rocky shore.

More recent research, however, has shown that perhaps human-driven environmental devastation isn’t the entire story. For example, it’s likely that the rats introduced to the island when it was settled contributed significantly to its deforestation. Furthermore, it’s been shown that the statues could have been moved without the use of logs at all. (Take a look at this YouTube video for a great illustration.)

The final form of devastation to the island was actually contact with Europeans, who first arrived on Easter in 1722 (hence the name). Contact with this Dutch ship and later Europeans caused a downward population spiral, primarily due to the infectious diseases the Europeans carried with them. Meeting the Europeans for the first time also seems to have set off a vast disillusionment among the Rapa Nui, who, after that first meeting, toppled almost all of the megalithic statues standing on the island for no apparent reason. The coup de grace was the arrival of Peruvian slaving ships in the 1800s; they rounded up almost all of the remaining Rapa Nui and forced them into slavery on the guano-covered islands off the coast of Peru. The few survivors that ever returned to Easter Island brought along a small pox epidemic (small pox blankets anyone?) that caused the Rapa Nui population to dwindle to an all time low of just over one hundred people.

The tragic story does not end there, however. In 1888, the island was annexed by Chile by means of the “Treaty of Annexation of the Island” – a treaty that is still contested by many Rapa Nui as the designated “king” who signed off the island was actually appointed by the Chilean government. Easter Island was then rented to the Scottish Williamson-Balfour Company as a sheep farm, while the local population was confined under strict travel restrictions to the small town of Hanga Roa. It wasn’t until 1966 that the Rapa Nui were granted Chilean citizenship.

Because over 97% of the population died in the span of a decade, much of the anthropological history of the island has been lost. The stories and myths surrounding the enigmatic statues are limited, particularly because there was no written language. However, the massive statues, or moai, are generally believed to represent Rapa Nui ancestors. They face inland rather than out to sea, watching over the remains of Rapa Nui villages and are placed on platforms, or ahu, under which human remains are buried.

Side Bar: For those of you interested in reading more about Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, we highly recommend the following materials:

Collapse: The standard story of the environmental collapse of Easter Island. It’s also standard reading in at least one Williams College economics class.

The Statues that Walked: A more recent analysis of the traditional story of Easter Island – a must read for anyone visiting Rapa Nui.

A Companion to Easter Island: The best guidebook for the island, hands down. This book describes every archaeological site and serves as a tour guide all on its own.

We decided that the best way to explore the island would be to rent a car and find as many statues as possible, creating our very own “moai safari,” much like our “temple safari” in Bagan. We spent a total of 4 days and 5 nights on Easter Island and feel like we explored the whole island. We think that anything less than 3 days would be somewhat wasteful given how far you have to travel to get there, but anything over 5 days could get boring – it is a small island after all.

On our first day, we set off in our rental car to drive around a loop of the island and see many of its main sites. We recommend taking this drive in a clockwise direction as it seems that most of the larger group tours drive the other way. We also saved the larger sites of Rano Raraku and Orongo for early morning visits on other days.

It’s difficult to do justice to these impressive statues in a simple description, so we’ll let Giorgio’s fantastic photos speak for themselves.

We found moais at the beach…

…moais at the edge of the ocean…

…moais that were about to fall into the ocean…

…moais at sunrise…

…moais at sunset…

…moais that had toppled over (kerplunk!)…

…moais awaiting transport at the island's quarry, Rano Raraku…

(All of the island's statues were carved out of the rock at Rano Raraku and laboriously transported along moai roads to their final locations throughout the island.)

…hats for moais (also known as pukao)…

(These "hats" are probably designed to be the top knots worn by the Rapa Nui and were carved out of the rock at a separate quarry, Puna Pau.)

…inland moais…

…lonely moais…

…moais surrounded by wild ponies…

…moais and ahu that were erroneously believed to have been built by the Incas…

…hidden moais…

…a (comparatively) tiny moai visible in the distance from our bungalow…

…plus a few petroglyphs, caves by the ocean, cave paintings, and a stone that may or may not be the naval of the world.

One of our final stops was the ceremonial village of Orongo, the location of the Rapa Nui "bird man" ceremony, a more recent tradition which effectively took the place of moai construction. Competitors would swim off the coast of Rapa Nui to the adjacent islets in the hope of capturing the first manutara (sooty tern) egg of the season and winning the title of bird man. It's also the site of a pretty beautiful volcanic crater.