Rapa Nui

Where to begin?

I think we started thinking about Easter Island because Kevin and Lynn came here on their National Geographic tour. When we were planning our trip, Declan felt strongly that this should be a stop.

We are staying at the Air BnB of Delphine, a Belgian anthropologist who married a man from Rapa Nui. She spend ten years in French Polynesia on the island of Vanatu; she met her husband there and they have a daughter named Hiva. Her husband Keva, who was a renowed local artist, died five years ago, at the age of 42, of a heart attack. Hiva is the hypothetical place from which the ancestors of the Rapa Nui arrived.

We took an all-day tour of the island with Kava. He is Rapa Nui, a former park ranger married to a social worker; they have a two year old daughter.

Rapa Nui is a tiny island; you can drive around the perimeter in about two hours. It is a volcanic island, very windy and dry; very few trees, and difficult to cultivate anything. One day, Declan and I hiked to the top of Terevaka, the highest point in Rapa Nui. From the top, you can see a 360 view of the island; they call it “they navel of the world.” It is an interesting feeling, to see the whole of the island below you, surrounded by endless sea all around.

Right now, Rapa Nui has a population of about seven thousand. According to Delphine, this is about three thousand Rapa Nui people and four thousand Chileans/other foreigners. Both Delphine and Kava say that the current population is too large. Everything that is not produced locally must arrive from Chile, by boat or by plane. Kava told me that for years, the population was stable at around four thousand, and a certain shipment of gas containers for cooking would arrive each month. But the population grew, and the supply of gas containers did not, and so the supply of gas was not enough, and people would stand in line for a chance to get gas.

Delphine worries about the trash, about the strain on the small island. There are seven thousand people on the island, but two hundred thousand visitors every year. And visitors use water, and produce trash. Apparently they are pretty good about recycling (most of it gets shipped to Chile to be recycled) and plastic grocery bags were recently outlawed on the island, but plastic is everywhere. Delphine says the sand is full of microplastic, washed up from far away. She told me about an internet cartoon, where a customer is buying a fish and asks for a plastic bag to take it away. “The plastic bag is inside the fish!” the storekeeper explains. One of Delphine’s guests came from Chile. Like many guests, he brought a whole suitcase full of food with him to cut down on costs while he was here on vacation. But unlike other guests, he packed up all of his garbage with him and brought it back to Chile.

There are too many cars on the island. All the Rapa Nui people want to rent a car to a tourist, but now there are parking problems. “When I arrived here,” Delphine told me wistfully, “we went everywhere by horseback.”

It is expensive to stay on Rapa Nui. A lemonade at the store would cost about $4; one pineapple might be $6. But the standard of living on Easter Island is higher than in many parts of Chile, so Chileans would emigrate to Easter Island. “Some Chilean women come here, get pregnant with a Rapa Nui man, and then they have a lifetime entitlement to live here, with their Rapa Nui child!” Delphine grumbled. Now they are very strict on entering the island; you are allowed 30 days, you must show your return ticket, and you must show written proof of the guesthouse where you are staying.

There is one hospital on the island, and “the doctors are no good”, according to Delphine. Coming from Santa Clotilde, I know a little bit about working in an isolated setting, but I think that if you live on Rapa Nui, you have to accept the reality that there is no trauma surgeon, no neurosurgeon. The daughter of Delphine’s friend died at the age of six; she had suffered a severe dog bite to her face, and she was given a large overdose of anesthesia in error. LATAM will not take very ill passengers on its commercial flights. When Delphine’s daughter had a skull fracture and intracerebral hemorrhage after falling off her horse, the only reason that she could be flown to Santiago was that the President of Chile happened to be visiting the island at the time.

People are proud to be Rapa Nui. The language is alive and well. Maururu  is about as far as I have gotten; it means “thank you.” Kava tells me that he leaves the island to go to “the continent” every two or three months, to prevent himself from going stir-crazy. For Rapa Nui people, there are apparently a limited number of very low-cost seats on LATAM. He will leave for awhile, and then get all nostalgic for the idyllic life of the island. His stories about his wife’s social work remind me a little bit of Santa Clotilde, the problems of a small, isolated community. Lots of alcoholism (“the scourge of indigenous people everywhere”) and domestic violence; most people are related to one another or connected to one another somehow, and it is hard for justice to be served.

Declan was grumpy at the end of our all-day tour; “are we going to another stupid platform?” “These are my ancestors; do not insult them!” Kava answered sharply. He talks with pride about his ancestors, and about participating in local competitions of traditional sports. In one annual event, competitors would swim across the lake of a volcano crater, and then have to run races with a big bunch of bananas hanging from each shoulder. These local competitions, of course, are nothing compared to the Birdman culture.

The last Birdman competition was held in 1867. After years of tribal warfare, the Birdman culture gave new hope and leadership to the Rapa Nui people. Contestants would swim to the small island of Motu Nui carrying provisions under one arm, and await the arrival of the migrating sooty tern. The contestant would try to be the first one to snag the egg of the sooty tern, swim with it across the channel back to Rapa Nui, and scale the cliff with the egg intact. The winner’s chief would rule the island for the next year.

I went to the Rapa Nui church (Mom, don’t be shocked!), which is mostly Catholic but has a fascinating religious syncretism. The outside of the church is adorned with traditional designs; inside the church are Rapa Nui statues. There is one large wooden stature of Birdman in the corner. It was surrounded by flowers and incense and offerings, much as a statue of a saint or the Virgin Mary might be. I was fascinated that this stature was allowed in the church! With all the things the Catholic church does not allow, they allow offerings to the Birdman within its walls!

The Birdman cult, apparently, grew out of a need to create something new after all the tribal warfare. Rapa Nui was first settled around 1000-1200 AD, probably by explorers from the Marquesa Islands in French Polynesia. The classic period of moai (those giant stone statues) building took place as the civilization grew. Supposedly, the moai represented a specific elder in the community, and the moai was a way to keep his mana,  or spirit, alive and strong. The statues that we see mostly do not have eyes, but there are a few examples of the moai with white coral eyes, and it does change their appearance a lot. There are almost a thousand moai on the island; only about four of them are women. Only about a third of the moai made it to the coast from the quarry in the middle of the island; was it that they were too difficult to transport, or were they meant to remain in the quarry?

I had always heard the transport theory that the moai were transported via roller logs, and that the chopping down of trees contributed to part of the ecological collapse of the island. “No, there were no trees. The moai came walking to the platforms. This is what my great-grandmother told me,” said Kava, the Rapa Nui guide. At the Rapa Nui museum, a British tourist told me that his Rapa Nui guide had told me the same thing. But everything I have read about Easter Island says that there is archaeological evidence for various species of trees, including very tall trees. Easter Island was first discovered by a Dutch explorer on Easter Sunday 1722; the Spanish came next, in 1770. All of the moai were apparently standing at that time, but some time afterward almost all of them were toppled in internecine wars.

Years ago I read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, talking about the collapse of the Easter Island society. They chopped down all the trees to move the moai, and then the birds left or died, and then there was erosion and warfare and societal collapse. I think about our bumblebee as an endangered species, our monarch butterfly, our coral, our climate change.

At some point, the population of Easter Island was about 15,000, but by the time the Europeans arrived, the population was down to 2000-3000. Peruvian slave raiders abducted more than 1500 people in 1862, including the chief, his heir, and those who knew how to read and write the Rapa Nui script. Smallpox, leprosy, and tuberculosis arrived with the Europeans, and by 1877, only 111 people lived on the island. The population slowly recovered, but with more than 97% of the population dead or gone in less than a decade, much cultural knowledge was lost.

There is a little map in the Rapa Nui museum, with arrows pointing to all the places in the world where the cultural treasures of Rapa Nui have gone. With the arrival of the Europeans, a great majority of the archaeological treasures of Rapa Nui are housed in museums around the world, and not in Rapa Nui.

All of the standing moai on the island have been restored, by various archaeological teams. It is haunting to be in their presence, and wonder how they got there, and how the civilization collapsed. Easter Island is such a metaphor for what is going on in the rest of the planet.

It was nice to have a few days to take it all in. We saw the Rano Ranaraku “moai factory”, and Ahu Tongariki, the largest collection of moai, facing east for the sunrise. We swam at the beautiful Anakena beach, with its moai  and palm trees and white sand beaches and aquamarine water and fresh pineapples to eat like popsicles. Geocaching at Anakena, we met a Rapa Nui man on horseback, with traditional Rapa Nui music blasting out of his bluetooth speaker. He was curious about the geocaching: “Why do all the tourists come to look at this specific collection of rocks?” We have seen the Ahu Tahai moai at sunset, and taken the ATV up the Orongo crater to see the islets where the Birdman competitions took place.

And now it’s on to Cambodia, via a short stop in New Zealand, another gift from the travel gods as an obligatory layover turns into a free four day stay…