Splendid isolation: Easter Island

Three hundred years since its discovery by European sailors, a journey to Easter Island offers visitors the chance to immerse themselves in a hidden world

Travel and Wellbeing 15 Mar 2022

Easter Island: many of the island’s moai are partially buried in the sides of the crater

Easter Island: many of the island’s moai are partially buried in the sides of the crater

What fabulous choreography. As the dying sun slips beneath the South Pacific, silhouetting five ancient statues against a violet sky, an islander strums a Polynesian guitar and, right on cue, a breaching humpback erupts from the Prussian-blue ocean.

Heavens, it’s beautiful. But of course, you’d expect something special from Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island. It’s unique, a land apart. Its treeless moors suggest Northumbria’s fells, yet they’re washed with soft trade winds, dotted with dormant volcanoes and littered with 887 vast monolithic stone statues: the legacy of an ancestor-obsessed civilisation that suffered
a catastrophic and mysterious decline. 

It makes 2022 a pertinent year to visit. Not only is it exactly three centuries since the first Europeans stepped ashore but many anthropologists see the collapse of Rapa Nui’s society as a microcosm of the modern world’s environmental peril. Its demise is a warning to humanity. Adapt or die.

One of the Ahu Tongariki Fifteen, a collection of 15 ceremonial stone moai that make up the largest monument on Easter Island
One of the Ahu Tongariki Fifteen, a collection of 15 ceremonial stone moai that make up the largest monument on Easter Island

Unfortunately, your flight won’t help global warming. Easter Island is seriously isolated: 2,200 miles from South America, 1,200 miles from the nearest inhabited island – and that’s Pitcairn where the Bounty mutineers went to disappear. On the five-hour flight from Chile, I study the unrelenting Pacific and ponder how the Polynesians, without satnav, sextant or landmarks, first found Rapa Nui 1,200 years ago.

Did I say 1,200? The island doesn’t do certainties. Some historians say 1,600, others 800. On landing, the plot thickens. Blame the moai. The statues’ legless torsos with prominent chins, long ears and blank eyes – originally filled with red lava and white coral to channel the energy of ancestral spirits – are everywhere. All are otherworldly, slightly disturbing.

Lead by Singa, a local guide with a chiselled face and Oakley shades, I embark on a two-day moai crawl. How else could I begin to unravel the dark puzzle of Easter Island? At several sites, the smashed statues are restored to their former upright glory. We start at the west coast’s Ahu Akivi Seven, their heads reattached with white collars creating a line of dour supersized vicars. We then drive across the island to the Ahu Tongariki Fifteen, ransacked by a 1960s tsunami but since re-erected on their altar backed by towering cliffs and barrelling surf. The crawl ends at the Ahu Vai Uri Five and their memorable sunset.

While a visual feast, they’re a mere aperitif for next day’s main course: Rano Raraku volcano, the moai factory. Singa leads me across strangely silent moorland, along tracks where newly-carved statues, some weighing 88 tonnes, were once “walked” on tree stumps towards their altars. Fallen heads, overgrown with guava, line the route like slowly decaying corpses.

Ascending slopes speckled with moai, all tilted at crazy angles as if emerging from a reckless party, we stop before a vertiginous wall of hardened ash, studying its mottled surface. Slowly, I detect noses, ears, foreheads: half-finished faces carved into the volcano.

Rano Raraku, a volcanic crater, was the main source of the stone
Rano Raraku, a volcanic crater, was the main source of the stone

A few more hacks and their umbilical cord of rock would have been cut, the statues released. The earth literally gave birth to the moai.

But all these fallen figures, cracked heads and unfinished sculptures indicate something went wrong on the isolated island. Terribly wrong. Conventional wisdom believes the Rapa Nui committed slow ecocide, a fate hastened by their monomania for ancestral statues. As the population reached 10,000, the lush forests were gone, cut down for moai transportation and crop cultivation. No trees meant no fertile topsoil, no birds to eat, no wood for canoes. People couldn’t fish. Or escape.

Instead they fought. The 17th and 18th centuries witnessed inter-clan battles, moai smashing and cannibalism. Hiking back to my lodge, Singa slips a camera into a cave’s slender entrance and pops the flash. The screen reveals a human skull severed from its skeleton.

There’s another theory, however. Some now believe Rapa Nui’s collapse was far faster – and that outsiders were to blame. When the first Dutch sailors landed in 1722 they introduced unfamiliar pathogens, releasing lethal disease. Each arriving ship, including a Peruvian slave raid, added to the carnage. By the time Chile annexed the island in 1888, just 111 locals remained.

The view out over the Rano Kau volcano
The view out over the Rano Kau volcano

Small wonder, claim the revisionists, that at some point in the 18th century the desperate islanders lost faith in their ancestral deities. Cue iconoclasm. The last report of an original standing moai was in 1838.

Whoever’s right, the ravaged island re-emerged with a new form of athletic democracy. To understand its extraordinary
rules, I trek to Orongo on the narrow rim separating Rano Kau’s volcanic cauldron from terrifyingly high sea cliffs – the starting line of a brutal spring event: the Birdman Race.

Competitors scrambled down the sheer drop, plunged into the Pacific and swam a mile to the Moto Nui islet to collect an egg from a tern’s nest, returning to present it to the king. Drowning or concussing your rival was perfectly acceptable. The victor received a pale-skinned virgin while his clan governed Rapa Nui for the following year. Red Bull considered reprising the race, minus the virgin, before settling for a cliff-diving contest on the photogenic coastline.

Today’s islanders still chase an adrenaline rush. February’s Tapati Festival includes surfing gnarly waves on reed bodyboards and riding sledges made from banana tree stumps down a shockingly steep slope at 50mph. ‘People fracture arms and legs,’ says Singa casually. ‘But no one has died. Yet.’

On my last day I opt for a less frenetic activity, joining a locals’ fishing trip. Rod and reels do not feature. Instead, we wrap raw fish around volcanic rocks, creating “sashimi bombs” that explode on the seabed, attracting giant tuna to the bait on our hand-held lines.

Bobbing beneath Rano Kau’s immense cliffs, I ponder one final question. Our prey can weigh more than 1,000 pounds. How will I wrestle one into our small boat without dislocating my shoulder or severing several fingers? It’s yet another unnerving mystery. What else did I expect from Easter Island?

12 nights on Easter Island and in Chilean Patagonia costs from £9,985pp including flights and transfers; abercrombiekent.co.uk

 

Images: Explora Rapa Nui, Getty Images, Alamy