Rapa Nui/Easter Island, Chile

Mostly recovered from the Peruvian stomach bug… and a quick purchase in Cusco before getting under way – negotiating the purchase of textiles from a friendly and enterprising weaver.

Rapa Nui is almost 2,000 miles from its nearest inhabited neighbor. The approach reveals one of several caldera on the island…

…this one the starting point for the Birdman cult, an annual competition that determined allocation of power in the society… not practiced since the mid-1800s.  Participants had to run from the heights to a mid-point on the cliff, leap into the ocean, swim to the smaller island (seen here just under the aircraft wing), secure an egg from the sooty tern nesting site there, swim back to the main island and scale the cliff with egg intact.

The winner was awarded a virgin and other special rights for the following year.  Quite a feat!

Use of the land our hotel is on has been contested by a group of indigenous residents, who believe that this and several other parts of the island are sacred to ancestral spirits, the presence of tourists and commercial interests violating their sanctity.  For what it’s worth, the hotel folks say they won the legal challenge.  Sorry for those who are still unconsoled.  

The island is made of volcanic rock, with only one teeny little beach conducive to swimming.  Henry found a fine bunch of coconuts there!

Of course, the big attraction here are the moai, statues built between about 1200 and the mid-1700s, representing the ancestors who were thought to protect the people from harm.

Most of the statues were never set upright, or had been toppled by residents (the actual reasons are unclear) or natural disaster.  Almost all of those now seen erect had to be resurrected in massive projects over the last few decades.  The vast majority remains recumbent.

And of course, tourists have to be cautioned….. NOT TO WALK ON THE MOAI!

Local dance troupe.. incredible energy and enthusiasm, fun music…

But this type of performance invariably goes on way too long, requiring constant clapping and manic grinning – culminating with the dreaded recruiting of often elderly and/or overweight tourists from the audience to convulse awkwardly to the music with the tautly-muscled performers.  Yuck.

As someone said, from the ridiculous to the sublime – a sunrise visit to the largest stand of moai, pulled from the messy residue of a 1960 tsunami by a task force in the mid-1990s.  A colossal feat!

A truly fabulous bit of Rapa Nui history was the presence of tablets with hieroglyphic writing on them, making this the ONLY island in the entire Polynesian chain with any sort of history of a written tradition. (Pictured here a replica.). No one seems to know when they were created or what they say.  Another apparent mystery for the ages.

And so, mimicking departures of notable characters past and present, we board the plane for our next destination – Samoa.