The Navel of the World
By William Rawlings
(This article originally appeared in somewhat edited form in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on
February 26, 2006. Please see the Photos that illustrate some of the sites mentioned.)
Like mysterious and exotic places? A little uneasy with suicide bombers on London’s Underground, rioters in France and cruise ship pirates off the coast of Africa? How about a vacation destination that features some of the world’s greatest wonders and is two flight segments from Atlanta? It’s Easter Island, which is—or should be—among the top ten on every serious traveler’s list of places to visit.
Known to its inhabitants by the Polynesian name of Rapa Nui, this tiny volcanic island is located in the South Pacific some 2300 miles west-northwest of Santiago, Chile. It is one of the most remote scraps of land permanently inhabited by humans, almost completely devoid of regular contact with the rest of the world until the latter half of the twentieth century. Equally important, however, is the amazing civilization that developed there over more than a thousand years of virtual isolation from outside human influence.
It’s small. Roughly triangular in shape with a dormant volcano at each of the three apices, Rapa Nui measures only about 7 by 15 miles in size with a land area of less than a third that of Fulton County. Standing on the top of its tallest volcano Terevaka, one can see only an endless ocean horizon all around. It’s easy to understand why the original inhabitants referred to their home as Te Pito o Te Henua, “The Navel of the World.”
The name Easter Island (Isla de Pascua in Spanish) was bestowed by a Dutch explorer who “discovered” it on Easter Day, 1722. Without a written history, the date of its original settlement is unknown. Most archeologists agree that the first inhabitants were part of an eastward Polynesian migration that reached both Hawaii in the north and Rapa Nui in the south sometime in the fifth century AD.
Early Western visitors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries described amazing stone statues set on sea-side alters, apparently venerated as representing images of dead ancestors. In the mid-twentieth century, European writers advanced wildly disparate theories about their origin, ranging from Thor Heyerdahl’s hypothesis of Inca influence to Erich von Däniken’s assertion that they were created under the guidance of visitors from outer space. The truth, while more mundane, is no less fascinating.
The history of Easter Island’s civilization is one that was shaped by its location. The first settlers must have arrived to find a thickly forested, lush island paradise. The altars that they erected (ahu) and the statues of the ancestors (moai) that topped them show similarities to other Polynesian cultures. As time progressed and the population grew, the forests were cut down, and increasing amounts of land were used for cultivation and living space. Without trees, the inhabitants lacked the necessary material to make canoes for long sea voyages, assuring their isolation. At its peak, more than 10,000 people inhabited the island, with some estimates running as high as 20,000. Even at the lowest figure, this was a population density nearly 40% greater that the current figure for Georgia today.
The production and erection of statues reached an astounding rate. With an average six ahu for each mile of coastline about 400 statues were erected, some weighting tens of tons and as tall as a 3-story building. At its peak in the 15th Century AD, the production and erection of moai must have involved thousands of workers. At some point, perhaps in the late 17th or early 18th century, the quarries were suddenly abandoned. Partially carved statures lay half-revealed in stone, the workers’ tools dropped by their sides. More than 300 more remain as they did hundreds of years ago, awaiting transport to their seafront altars.
What happened? As elegantly outlined by Jared Diamond in his recent book Collapse (Viking, 2005), a combination of environmental exhaustion and internecine struggle brought the civilization of the stature builders to its knees. It the years that followed, warfare and hunger led to destruction, death and cannibalism. At the time of the arrival of the first Europeans, most of the moai that had stood as silent guardians of their people were still standing. By the mid-19th century, scarcely more a hundred years later, every one had been toppled in the course of warfare between the descendants of those who erected them.
Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1995, a number of the ahu have been restored and their moai re-erected. Most of the island’s coast and all of the major archeological sites are part of the Parque Nacional Rapa Nui, an incredible open-air museum.
When I first visited Easter Island more than 20 years ago, there were few paved roads with minimal preservation and restoration of the remains of altars and villages. I explored the island on a caballo arriendo (rental horse). Today, the major roads are paved, and there is a wide selection of guest houses and hotels to fit most budgets. Seeing the sites is now easy by guided tour or coche arriendo (rental car).
For the would-be visitor, a number of travel options are available. LAN Chile flights to and from Santiago run two to four times weekly depending on the season. Delta non-stops fly daily from Atlanta to Santiago. I’d recommend a minimum stay of 4 nights, perhaps taking organized tours for 2 days and spending one full day exploring the island on your own in a rental car. (Approximate cost $50 per day, including insurance and taxes for a 4-wheel drive vehicle.) A good option is to spend a few days before or after in Santiago, perhaps skiing in the winter in nearby Portillo, or taking a tour of the Chilean wine county to the south in the spring, summer or fall. Several well established tour operators offer packages that include Santiago and Easter Island from about $2,500 per person for a 9 day, 7 night stay.
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