Rapa Nui: Exploring Easter Island's Moai and History

The sky is still dark and the windscreen wipers are working furiously. I’m being driven across Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island — a chunk of volcanic rock some 2,200 miles off the coast of mainland Chile. “Lovely weather,” says guide Tamaragi Arevalo Tuki as she turns to face me, half smiling as her attention flicks back to the rain beyond the windows. “Let’s get out.” As if by magic, we walk only a few torchlit paces before the clouds break and it subsides. Through dawn’s half-light comes the sound of pounding waves — and then I see the silhouettes. Fifteen statues, their backs to the sea, their silence and size intimidating, the largest standing at nine metres tall out here in the middle of wind-whipped, watery nowhere.

Like many locals, Tamaragi has spent time studying on the Chilean mainland, more than a five-hour flight away. She snaps me back to reality. “Ah!” she says with delight, pointing out a fork-tailed seabird in the gloaming above. “It’s a frigatebird,” she explains. “They can fly huge distances, and sleep on the wing.” It’s a wonder even the frigatebird found Rapa Nui, out here in the Pacific wilderness. Even the truth surrounding how humans found it is slippery — estimates of its settlement by Polynesian seafarers range from 400 CE to 1200 CE. It was 5 April 1722 when it was sighted by Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen. The day was Easter Sunday, so he named the place Paasch-Eyland (Easter Island). Further European ships followed, then South American slavers and Catholic missionaries, before the island was annexed by Chile in 1888. Today’s 7,000 or so inhabitants call their home by its native name. “For us, it’s always Rapa Nui,” says Tamaragi.

By the time the island appeared in Roggeveen’s telescope, much of its story had already been written. At some point in the preceding centuries, close to 1,000 moai — the rock-hewn figures for which it’s famed — had been carved in the Rano Raraku quarry in the island’s east. Some weighed more than 85 tons and each was sculpted in tribute to a deceased chief, in the hope that their mana, or life-force, might protect their descendants. For uncertain reasons, hundreds of moai remain in the quarry itself, half-submerged by grassed-over sediment. Many more, however, were hefted by rope to now-deserted villages around the coast. All were eventually toppled by the islanders themselves, the dominant theory being they lost faith in the statues’ power. The 40 or so that stand today have been re-erected in more recent decades.

In parts of Rapa Nui, the moai stand alone. Almost all of the island’s inhabitants are based in the laid-back town of Hanga Roa to the south west, where cockerels crow, dogs flop in the sun and chocolate moai are sold from corrugated-roofed shops. That afternoon, I sip island-brewed beers at a coastal bar, watching surfers ride the swell, and visit a 20th-century Catholic church where a stained-glass Jesus is depicted with tribal face-paint. But out of town, the island feels rugged and remote.

The next morning, a jog to the rim of Rano Kau, a kilometre-wide extinct volcanic crater on the island’s southern tip leaves me breathless in more ways than one. The crater’s outer wall is a sheer cliff plunging into the waves. Between the decline of the moai and the arrival of Catholicism, this was the site of an important annual contest which saw the island’s fittest men scaling down the perilous crags and swimming in shark-infested waters.

Later, with local conservationist Sebastián Yankovic-Pakarati, I spend hours hiking the cliffs of the north coast, without another person in sight. For mile after mile, we wander rubbled villages where moai lie horizontal, crawl into fern-filled caves to peer at age-old carvings and watch birds ride the thermals. At one point we see a small pile of balanced rocks, the kind a walker might construct on a whim. Sebastián, who wears his hair in a topknot, dismantles the stones without fuss. “We don’t like new things,” he says quietly.

When we pass another fallen moai, face down in the turf, I ask if he finds the upended statues upsetting. “No,” he says with a smile, gesturing at the clifftops and the boundless panorama of sea. “Look where we are. Everything here — the bays, the ruins, the rocks — it’s all just part of our story.”