From: "Philip Merryman" <phil_merryman@hotmail.com>

Date: Mon Apr 29, 2002 05:43:50 AM Etc/GMT

Subject: Easter Island

Hi everyone,

I am now in Seattle, though how I got here is another epic within this whole saga!! However, before I tell you about that, and today's trip to Mount St. Helens, I need to catch up with the story of Easter Island. So I have compressed all of the 7 days exploration into one, albeit long, mail. However this means that it is more of a documentary on what is there rather than my adventures in seeing them.

Anyway, here it is.

Share & Enjoy

Phil

Easter Island

Easter island is an amazing place. It is famous for the enigmatic statues which exist all over the island. However there is so much more to it than that. Consequently, although I had a week and a half there, by the time I had lost a few days, due to the previously mentioned reasons, the remaining week was not enough to see everything it had to offer!

Easter island has another claim to fame other than the statues: it is geographically the most remote inhabited island on the planet. It is basically triangular in shape with an extinct volcano on each corner. The sides of this triangle are 22, 18 and 16 km (13, 11 & 10 miles) and are the S, N and W coasts. There are a couple of uninhabitable rocks for islands some distance away, but the nearest inhabited places are: Pitcairn (only 3km, 2 miles long and famous for the Mutiny on the Bounty) which is 2250km (1400 miles) away to the West; and the Juan Fernandez islands (famous for being where Alexander Selkirk was marooned: the inspiration for the Robinson Crusoe story) which are 3140km (1960 miles) to the East. Youíll need a big atlas and a magnifying glass!! The nearest point on mainland Chile is 3747km (2342 miles) distant. However, as it has a twice weekly scheduled air service and satellite links for the telephones it is no longer the most isolated. The airport has a 3km (2 mile) runway and the regular service is a 767. The runway is so long because in 1985 it was designated as an emergency landing site for the space shuttle, when launched from Vandenberg airbase, and so the runway was extended. It would be interesting to see the Shuttle get in there, and even more interesting to see how it would get out again!!!

However, back to the statues, known as Moai. All together there are between 800 and 1000 of them all over the island. They were erected by the islanders prior to the 1700ís and seem to be symbols of ancestors or great leaders, though they are all stylized designs. No two are the same. They were carved in the main quarry and somehow transported to the sites were they were erected on platforms, known as an Ahu. The Ahu are the cemeteries of the various clans and the Moai stood on top of them. It seems that the more or the larger they were was a symbol of power. The ahu were all placed, with one exception, around the coast and the moai all faced inland. They are all much bigger than you expect, being typically 5 - 8 metres tall. The largest ever erected was nearly 10m tall and weighed 82 tons! One platform has as many as 15, but typically 3, 4 or 5 was more usual. All of the statues on the Ahus were toppled by the islanders in tribal warfare in the 1700s and those which are standing today have been restored in the last 20 years or so. The only statues remaining in there original positions, including upright, are those in an around the quarry. These never got to there designated place. In the quarry there are many half carved from the rock, many who are half way down the hill from the quarry and many who had fallen and broken, including some more about the same size as the largest one erected. However there is an unfinished one, only half carved out of the rock, which would have been 20m tall!! How they were ever going to get this monster out of the quarry and down the hillside and moved can only be imagined. Some of the statues have another huge rock on their heads! This ìtopknotî was cut from a different place on the island. They are like hats and about 3m in diameter and 3m high.

However these statues have just been abandoned were they were and in whatever condition at the time. The whole culture of their creation just ceased. There are many theories for this. One is that the islanders cut down all the trees to make rollers, or sledges, or some system to move them and when all the trees had gone they could not move them any more! Fossil records show that the island was once totally covered in trees but when the Europeans found the island in 1722 (a Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen found the island in Easter Sunday, hence its name) all the trees had gone! With the loss of such a resource the whole ecology and social systems began to collapse, which is probably what triggered the clan warfare. It is estimated that the corresponding ecological disaster resulted in a population drop from around 10000 to less than 3000, its current figure.

After this the culture changed to that of the ìbirdmanî. This is the largely unknown aspect of the islandís history but is equally astonishing. This phase resulted in some amazing rock carvings all over the island. This is what I did not know about until I arrived and it was this aspect which I did not get to explore to the extent it deserved. Just off the southwest corner of the island are a couple of small rocky islets which are the home for seabirds. The birdman culture arose from the challenge whereby each chief had a designated representative and these representatives all swam out to the islands to get a birdís egg and bring it back. The first one back with the egg for his chief meant that that chief was the leader of the whole island for a year. However he had to spend the year living alone with a helper to look after him. He had no contact with the outside world. On the cliff tops above these islands is a remarkable village full of elaborate stone carvings, or petroglyphs, depicting the bird man symbol and many others of canoes and other subjects. These carvings are also found all over the island, some around the moai and ahu which by then had been toppled. This culture was more rooted in the value of life and resources, as symbolized by the egg, rather than larger and larger statues which consumed all the resources. Hence the islanders had learned their lesson regarding sustainable existence, however at great cost.

The geography of the island is also remarkable. The location of the above village lies on cliffs overlooking the sea. However these cliffs are also the side of one of the volcanoes which formed the island. The crater of this volcano is a perfect circle about a mile (1500m) across! Over the millennia the sea has eaten away so that there is now only a narrow strip of rock which forms the crater rim on the seaward side. The village is at one end of this narrow strip of land, so from one side you look down to the sea and the other down into this crater. At the bottom of the crater is a lake almost entirely covered in floating peat bog!! It is an incredible sight!! Eventually at some time in the forthcoming centuries the sea will eat away at the cliff enough for the rim to collapse at the narrow point and the lake will then drain out. There is no surface water on the island other than in this crater and another crater lake at the quarry, another astonishing place. They are only filled with rainwater. There are no springs or streams. The rock is all volcanic and porous, so any rain just immediately soaks away underground. The whole island is ringed with cliffs or low rocks. There are only a couple of small beaches on the North coast.

I explored the island on foot for two days and in a small hired 4WD (Suzuki Jimny) for four. You really do need some from of transport to get about as the island is just a bit too big to walk to the far places and back. You can get round the coast by walking in a couple of days if you do nothing else and camp, though camping is not encouraged, save one or possibly two designated sites. Also as there is no water available you would have to carry all your supplies for the whole trip. The crater and bird man village, called Orongo, are within walking distance of the village, but this will take a couple of hours or so to get to. I know because I walked it! There are a couple of paved roads outside the village to the north and south coasts, but other than that it is dirt roads, and the smaller tracks are no more than that, you really do need a 4x4 to explore those!

The beach on the North coast is the location of an ahu with 5 moai which is the image most often used in the publicity pictures and other such productions. This beach is surrounded by palm trees (recently planted as they are in lines) and is the favoured place to visit even for the islanders, as it has a water tank, toilets and a BBQ!! The sand is clean and almost white, the sea a lovely blue, the sky was another magic blue with white passing clouds. A few people were on the beach and some in the sea. So having taken a few pictures of the moai this was just irresistible! However without my swimming trunks I had no option but to go for a swim in my shorts!!!! So I left my rucksack and boots on the beach and went in! There was no real threat of anything being taken, but I stayed within sight of it anyway. The sea was warm enough and still shallow enough to stand up in even some distance out. After some minutes I came back on shore and lay on a rock to dry out!! Lying on this beach, with the blue sea and sky, pristine sand, palm trees, and the statues of some lost civilization really made this feel like the classic exotic island!!!!!

I used the jeep to get to the highest point on the island. It was a lumpy, bumpy ride to say the least, genuine 4x4 territory!! At the top I was engulfed in a couple of heavy showers, so all I could do was sit in the car and wait for them to pass. Eventually they did and there was enough time to get out and look around before the next one came in! There are several little summits at the top, so it took a while to work out which one was the actual top. From here, other than the little bit covered by the nearest little summit, you can see the horizon for 360 degrees!! It is a truly sobering though, even today, that there is nothing out there for at least 1400 miles in any direction! For the original islanders this was there entire universe!! To be able to stand in one place and see then sum total of your existence must have been even more profound.