Day 97: Finally! Easter Island! (April 14, 2011)

I was so worried I wasn't going to make it here, and now that I'm here I'm so glad I made it a stop!  It's at least as cool as I expected, because there's a lot more to the Island than I thought there would be.

Easter Island is a tiny place.  Smaller than Washington, D.C. and with only 5,000 people living here (as recently as about 1999, only 2,000 people lived here).  And a lot of the land is taken up by the four volanoes that created the Island.  Here's one:

I don't know where I got my mental images of Easter Island, but in my imagination it was pretty flat and open, with a big city along the edge and the famous Moai heads dotting the edges.  The "city" is more like a loosely grouped village -- with no streetlights or stop lights -- and there are a lot more trees than I expected -- almost all imported.  And I also didn't expect how mountainous the island would be, or how much volcanic rock is out for viewing.

The shores look really dangerous, filled with large rocks, but the surfers don't seem to mind.  We saw several of them.

Onto the cool stuff.  Today, my inn's owner took me and the other guests (seven of us in total) to a half-day tour of the southwest corner of the Island.  It's home to the volcano pictured about, and was a center of the "Birdman Cult," which sprang up a few hundred years ago as the cult that built the Moai heads was winding down.  (Note how that website copied my photos!  Hmph!)  From what I gather, as the early people of Easter Island built all those heads, they also cut down nearly all the trees, both for fire and to transport the heads to the beaches.  As most of the trees disappeared, so the did the birds, and this cult sprang up that worshipped birds and the myth of birdmen.  I'm sure I'm getting details wrong, but that's the gist of it.

So for a while, the native Easter Islanders had this cult and one of its things was an annual (?) race across the land and through the water, to bring back a bird egg.  Whoever won became leader until the next year's race.

The competitors swam out here to fetch the egg.

So the natives carved petroglyphs of the birdmen, and built low stone houses (for sleeping only) atop the mountain where the runners would bring the eggs.

Many pictograms are half-bird, half-man.

The stone homes (recreated, a few originals are elsewhere).

This corner of the island has only a few of the stone heads.  Across the island generally, some have been stood upright and some are still left lying face down, where they were pushed when Christian missionaries converted the people of the Island to Christianity.  Fortunately, the many of the statues were not badly damaged, so they are able to be set up again.

A knocked-down Moai head.

After the tour, five of us went out for lunch.  Somehow I became the cruise director, rounding people up and knocking on doors.  Probably another manifestation of my vague desire for the company of other people.  The other two guests, who were on the same overnight flight from Tahiti with me, needed to sleep.  Frankly, I did too.  I was sick to my stomach from lack of sleep.  But I needed to eat more than I needed to sleep.  So the five of us -- Jose, Erick, Ian, Jackie and me -- went to one of the sea-side restaurants and had a good meal and good time talking. 

Jose, Erick, Ian, Jackie, me.

Tomorrow, everyone is doing different things during the day, but I expect I'll bump into all the other guests here or there.  [As I was typing that, the other two men, who currently live in Peru, stopped by to give me some tips about the country.  I lucked out that everyone staying at my inn is so friendly and fun to talk with.]  The Island looks like it has enough to occupy me for four days even on my own, but it's nice to have people to share it with too.