Gone but not forgotten

The itinerary of our third day on Easter Island was focused on the island's most globally recognised locations including the enigmatic Rano Raraku and the iconic Ahu Tongariki. It's fair to say that Garry loved every moment of it. The tour also featured a few additional, less well-known, highlights that were special for me. 

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I first visited Rapa Nui in November 1998. I spent 2.5 days on the island and got to see its most popular sights. However, I missed several locations including the lava tube caves at Ana Te Pahu and the long-since abandoned quarry at Puna Pau. I got to see both during this second visit.

Puna Pau supplied the crowning "topknot" or pukao stones that adorn the island's moai. Each pukao is carved from red scoria stone, a soft volcanic rock. While intuitively, these stones look like a hat for the moai, they were in fact carved to represent how the men of that time tied their long hair in a topknot bun. These days the quarry is little more than a grassy depression on a hill overlooking the Hanga Roa township. However, its original purpose is still clear as there are more than a dozen decaying pukao scattered around its rim and within the grassy bowl.

Our next stop was Ahu Akivi, an ahu platform located further inland than most of the others on the island. It was our first real taste of the majesty of Rapa Nui's moai culture. This 38-metre-long platform, restored in 1960, has seven moai statues all of a similar height, around four metres tall.  

Unusually, the statues look towards the sea. Elsewhere on the island the moai traditionally face inland. According to oral tradition, these seven figures represent seven explorers who surveyed the island for King Hotu Matua, before it was formally settled.

Our tour then headed for Rano Raraku, the volcanic hillside quarry where all of the island's moai were crafted. It's impossible to fathom how remarkable the moai culture is until you visit this site. The volcano's eastern rim was home to a bustling quarry where more than one thousand giant statues were carved and  transported up to 18kms across the island, all without the aid of modern tools and transportation.

When I first visited in 1999, tourists were free to wander among its remains without restriction. I recall we even climbed onto one of the incomplete, partially carved statues lying in the quarry. I'm pleased to say that sealed paths have now been introduced and tourists are forbidden to venture from them at any time. However, you can still wander freely along the shore of the reed-lined lake that fills the volcano's crater.

Rano Raraku is a fascinating place. Towards the top of the quarry site, you encounter large, empty spaces in the rock wall. These are the remaining shells from which moai have been carved, extracted, and moved away. Surprisingly, not all of the statues have been carried away. There are two unfinished statues visible within the quarry site, each still attached to the mountain.

The guided path then takes you on to Te Tokonga, the largest statue ever built. This monster made by an optimistic group of carvers has a height of 21.75 meters and an estimated weight of 200 tons. It was never finished. When it was abandoned, the carvers were still working on carving trenches along its sides to detach it from the surrounding rock face. It's unclear whether this statue was abandoned because the Moai era ended, or because the workers simply thought it would be too hard to transport.

However, Rano Raraku's most iconic sight is its "forest" of partially buried moai. These giant heads protrude from the ground awaiting transportation that ultimately never came. The islanders originally buried them as part of their non-mechanical erection process.

Once detached from the volcano's elevated rock face, each statue was slid down the hill onto the soil-filled lower slopes of Rano Raraku. Here, a great pit was dug. As the statue reached its designated pit, gravity was used to tilt it until it was fully erected. The moai was then transported in a vertical position across the island to its final resting place.

Our final stop before lunch was Ahu Tongariki. Without a doubt, this sight is one of the most enduring and instantly recognisable images of Easter Island. Ahu Tongariki is the biggest stone ahu on the island. It consists of 15 moai statues including the island's tallest and heaviest moai. Ahu Tongariki is located on the east side of Rapa Nui, about 1km away from Rano Raraku.

This impressive ahu was restored in the 1990s, funded by a $2 million donation from the Government of Japan and the donation of a crane by Tadano, a Japanese crane company. Its tallest moai, measuring 9 metres, is also the heaviest statue successfully transported and placed on an ahu anywhere on the island. Its weight of 86 tons was verified by the crane used in the platform's restoration.

The remainder of our day was spent visiting what I'd consider some of Rapa Nui's more kitsch sights. This included the navel of the world, Anakena Beach, and Ahu Nau-Nau. The navel, or Te Pito o te Henua, sits just above the high tide mark on the island's west coast. It consists of a large stone sphere, framed by four smaller spheres and encircled by a low rock wall. 

Archeologists believe it is a symbolic navel, denoting the island's location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I must admit that despite seeing it twice, I still struggle to believe these seamless spheres really are an ancient structure rather than some more recently installed kitsch tourist attraction.

Anakena is the island's only real sand beach. Tour guides always take you here. Someone, somewhere, at some point in time, has clearly convinced the local tour operators that all tourists want to swim. I suspect it's a tradition encouraged by backpackers over the years. However, aside from a small plantation of shady palm trees, the beach does have two other redeeming attributes - a pair of ahu platforms.  

The first of these is Ahu Nau-Nau which has seven restored moai statues, two of which are broken. The platform sits just above the sand line making for an interesting juxtaposition with the beach's modern palm plantation, picnic tables, and body-surfing tourists.

The second platform, called Ahu Ature Huke, contains one forlorn moai. This lonely figure is the first moai statue ever to be restored and raised. Its restoration was undertaken by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl in 1956. He successfully raised the moai using only rocks, logs, and rope. The logs were used as levers to lift the statue and rocks were put underneath, raising the statue little by little.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of Ahu Ature Huke. However, I did capture an image of Ahu Te Pito Kura while on our way to Anakena. This is the resting place for the island's largest successfully transported moai configuration, i.e. it's the largest if you include its pukao topknot stone in the final calculation. The pukao alone reputably weighs 12 tons and is the largest of its kind successfully relocated and erected anywhere on Rapa Nui.

The following morning we caught a flight back to the mainland arriving shortly before 7:00pm. I booked us into the nearby Sheraton using loyalty points, ready for another early morning departure at 7:15am to Calama and the next sector of our Chilean adventure.