We had our three days in Santiago, re-acclimatising to the unfamiliar, negotiating the banking and payments system and it all ran fairly smoothly.
Until, now on Rapa Nui, we accidentally left our card behind in a cash machine - we hoped!
Also hoping that it was one that took your card back in! They are rare, but I have had machines warn that they do not retrive the card or money if not taken and on one of the remotest islands on the planet that was surely a possibility.
A fraught twelve hours and an early morning visit to the bank. The teller waved a thick pile of similarly abandoned cards at us - at least we had the reassurance that if we had left it in the machine at least it was one of those that retrieves. Still we’d have to wait until 2pm to find out, as that’s when the man that opens it comes.
We had a lost card incident early in on this trip, the ‘lost’ card that you find within an hour of reporting it lost. We have plenty of backup, but no other card has quite the benefits for travelling. We had quite a time getting the replacement last time and we didn’t want to go through that again. In the end it had been in the machine and we were very relieved to have it repatriated.
Now we are headed back to Santiago having spent four days on Rapa Nui. I remember its fascination from my childhood days and the adventures of Thor Heyderthal, but can hardly believe we have now been there.
The island itself is small and has little to offer in the way of real beaches, real surf, dramatic scenery or distinctive culture. It has some of all of those things, but I’m sure there’s not enough to attract many visitors.The real attraction to Easter Island is the Maoi, but not so much the Maoi as the enigma they represent.
Everything I am about to say will be nowhere near an a accurate representation of the history or ancient culture of Rapa Nui, but I hope it will inspire you to do your own research. Indeed, if I get anything wrong it will only help illustrate the enigma that is Easter Island. The more I looked the more I concluded that no-one really knows all that much about some of the biggest questions.
It’s been pretty much accepted that the original people who settled the island travelled thousands of miles from Polynesia. When did they come here? Accounts vary, from 200 - 800AD. Although these people came all this way (possibly together), this small island fairly quickly developed into an island nation of various tribes. There is evidence of some kind of competitive relationship between the tribes, but certain aspects of life point to the possibility of some sort of co-operative enterprise. In the end, however, here was a culture that almost completely destroyed its environment through what appears to have been nothing more than what I would call a cult, the cult of the Maoi.
These enigmatic figures that have come to represent Easter Island and its ancient inhabitants appear to have started out quite innocuously. The earliest examples where fairly small and somewhat related to their culture of ancestor worship, but they eventually became an obsession. Each tribe tried to build a larger one than the other tribe. Over a period of no more than two hundred years, it is thought that they felled every single tree on the Island. All of this just to drag and erect these ever bigger stone sculptures.
A visit to the ancient quarry where all of these sculptures where hewn from attests to the obsession that had overtaken these people. The Maoi weren’t made in the way we conventionally know sculptures to be made. These figures where carved in situ, gradually hewn out of the rockbed and finally carved free from it. In this quarry there are figures still embedded in the rock, the most extravagant of which it is estimated would have weighed something like 250 tonnes, probably more than twice the size of any other ever carved. Not only this, there are hundreds of fully hewn Maoi that litter the lanscape of this quarry. Although fully hewn each one is still ‘unfinished’. Each of these Maoi was not destined to be displayed in this quarry, their destiny was unfulfilled and as such they were quite unfinished.
It has often been posited that the complete collapse of this society and its culture was directly related to this destruction of their environment. As devastating as this destruction no doubt was, it is probably too simplistic an explanation. Alongside the environmental destruction came a complete collapse of the social order. What caused that collapse is uncertain. The Peruvian slavers capturing fifteen hundred people along with the king and his family, to work the nitrate mines, could be part of the explanation. Whatever it was this tiny island in the middle of Pacific Ocean eventually became a nation of warring tribes, that set out to destroy everything that they had previously built.
Eventually it was reported that not a single Maoi was left standing on Easter Island.
Later on some three hundred of the stolen slaves were to be returned to the island, but almost all perished from smallpox enroute. Those few who survived then devastatingly infected the resident population. At some point it was recognised that life on the island had become so miserable that the few remaining inhabitants were offered transport to Tahiti to work on the plantations there. It seems that most took up the offer.
I have not researched how the island became what it is today, the many research groups and archaeologists who came from all over the world and helped restore some of the sites. But I am glad they only restored a few of the sites. Those sites where the Maoi lie face down and broken are sometimes the most poignant. To have restores all of them would have been to erase history.
This post is not a well researched article on Easter Island/Rapa Nui. It is an attempt to capture the impression that this island made upon me. I would like to acknowledge The Bradshaw Foundation, their articles were a wonderful resource and I apologise for every misquote and misrepresentation. I had never meant this journal to be an information resource for the places we’ve visited, that’s why I haven’t checked my facts. If it has interested you, then I hope it inspires you to check my ‘facts’.
Was it worth coming to this remote island with not much on offer but it’s largely devastated Maoi sculptures? For us it was. Standing in that quarry…
