Common Sense and Whiskey

Finding Rapa Nui

We'll be off at the end of the week on a trip that will take us to Istanbul and Kyiv, so we'll close the book for now on Easter Island. Here's just a portion of an article, more of which will show up later in a much longer form.

Oral tradition has it that Rapa Nui’s first colonizers arrived in two ships, one led by Hotu Matu’a, the other by Ava Reipua, either Hotu Matu’a’s wife or sister, probably in double canoes, although petroglyphs like the one at Orango are the only evidence.

The little museum outside Hanga Roa town points out that navigation solely by the stars has long been supplanted by charts, science and precision, except in Micronesia, where the by-the-stars tradition is still handed down orally.

The stars needn’t have been an ancient Polynesian navigator’s only tools, however. If they’d spent the previous centuries sailing from island chain to island chain, farther and farther out from indonesia to the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga, the Societies and Tuamotus and Hawaii, a fair encyclopedia would have accreted to their collected body of their lore. There are many ways the ancient navigator would have been able to see land before he could see it.

Strictly speaking, for discovery, a precise location isn’t required. The curve of the horizon limits islands’ visibility to a distance of about 60 miles at best. At 510 meters, Rapa Nui’s highest peak was spotted from 35 sea miles by a 1882 German expedition.

Voyages of Discovery, Polynesia Edition

Here's a little weekend reading, an excerpt from a coming article on Easter Island:

Conjuring up the downfall of the civilization can drive you mad. Puzzling out the timeline of Rapa Nui’s colonization can cause fits. Then there’s the whole moai thing, the conundrum of their abandonment.

Thankfully, imagining how the settlers got here is a beautiful thing, thanks to the work of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and a canoe called Hōkūle‘a, the inspired project of an artist and historian elected a Living Treasure of Hawaii in 1984, a man named Herb Kawainui Kāne.  

Precious little evidence remains of the physical form of original Polynesian canoes of exploration. Drawings from the same 1773 Cook expedition that called at Rapa Nui show double-hulled canoes at Tonga. Fragments of ancient canoes have been excavated on New Zealand.

A bog on Huahine, near Tahiti, has yielded pieces of a canoe. A petroglyph of a canoe found at Orongo on Easter Island (the center of the birdman cult, about which more later) suggests the possible ancient design. Beyond these tantalizing bits, as Herb Kane tells the story, there is no hard evidence.

So in designing the Hōkūle‘a, Kane made some guesses. He came up with a double-hulled voyaging canoe 62 feet four inches long, 17-1/2 feet abeam with a draft of two and a half feet and a total sail area of 540 square feet. This is the vessel that, since 1975, has traveled the Polynesian Triangle, New Zealand to Hawaii to Rapa Nui.

A member of the crew named Sam Low kept a dairy of the sailing to Rapa Nui, and it’s a gorgeous thing to read. Freedom and expansiveness flow from Low’s pen as he writes of the measure of a sailor’s days - sunrises, stacks of cumulus, “smoke,” a gray haze of salt and seaspray stirred into the atmosphere by strong winds, and sunsets.

Seeking to "discover" Rapa Nui, the Hōkūle‘a sailed from Mangareva, and called for a few hours at Pitcairn Island, Rapa Nui’s nearest inhabited neighbor, where the entire island, 42 inhabitants, put on a potluck dinner. Low writes of “VHF radios squawking in every home -- the island’s only reliable telephone service,” of “freezers and shelves crammed with tinned goods to tide people over between supply ships, which arrive once every 4 months,” of how mail is delivered by passing freighters, in watertight containers thrown overboard.

Pitcairn was the refuge of the HMS Bounty mutineers in 1789, and Fletcher Christian’s Bible survives in the 7th Day Adventist church. Brenda Christian lives on Pitcairn still, generations on.

Nainoa Thompson, the Hōkūle‘a lead navigator, devised a scheme for finding Rapa Nui at once ambitious and straightforward. Approaching from the west, the canoe would target a block of ocean starting 300 miles from Rapa Nui and extending two degrees on either side of 27 degrees south latitude, the island’s latitude.

Targeting a box 300 miles by 240 rather than a 64-square-mile speck would compensate for any mistakes the crew may have made in dead reckoning how far east the Hōkūle‘a had sailed from Pitcairn, or in estimating the canoe’s latitude. Beginning at the western edge of the block the Hōkūle‘a would sail up and down to the top and bottom of the box, zigzagging back and forth, and eventually, the crew hoped, pass within sight of Rapa Nui.

Sam Low's diary is written with grace and no affectation, and we’re as thrilled as the crew members when, just before dawn on October 8th, seventeen and one half days out of Mangareva, Max Yarawamai, standing lookout, spots Rapa Nui as a vague black line on the horizon, and the crew celebrates with garlic eggs for breakfast.

•••••

See more photos from Easter Island here.

One More Wednesday HDR from Easter Island

Click this photo to make it much bigger. These statues on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) are called moai. They stand on ahus, stone platforms, some of which are ossuaries. The moai on the right in this photo is Ahu Ko Te Riku. Farther out is Ahu Vai Uri and in the distance, that's the island's only town, Hanga Roa.

This photo is an HDR created with Photomatix, Nik filters and Photoshop CS5. It's overlaid with a texture. See more photos from Easter Island here and more HDRs here.

More Moais - Three Last Wednesday HDRs from Easter Island

Three more fancied-up moais from Easter Island:

Top, the quarry at Rano Raraku, where these guys were carved out. It's a long way and a lot of effort to finally stand in this quarry, but if you ever make the trip, it feels like pretty much no other place. Too many mysteries. How did they move these guys all over the island with no modern tools? Why did they stop as if in mid-hammer blow, put down their things and walk away, leaving dozens and dozens of these guys at the quarry? And what happened to cause the downfall of Rapa Nui in the first place?

Middle, This is one lone guy standing by himself near Ahu Tongariki, the biggest single collection of standing moai on the island. It's as if he just didn't get along with the rest of the gang. The long ahu is sort of behind and to the right of this shot, and looking away from them like this makes for a pretty desolate scene, don't you think?

Bottom, Ahu Ko Te Riku, near Hanga Roa town. This fellow's eyes are replicas. He's the only moai with eyes, and it's to demonstrate how much more imposing (creepy?) the moais all must have looked back when they all had eyes. There is one moai fragment with its original eyes in the Father Sebastian Englert Anthropological Museum near Hanga Roa.

All are HDRs processed in Photomatix and CS5 using Nik plug-ins. The top two are texturized. The texture in the middle photo was shot on the same trip, in Lima. Click them to make them bigger. There are 50-something photos in the Easter Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

More Moais - More Wednesday HDRs from Easter Island

Top: Sunset at Ahu Ko Te Riku, the ahu nearest the only town on Easter Island, Hanga Roa, which explains that the ship would be there. There's no port. Ships offload with cranes to shallow draft barges. Middle: The seven moai facing the sea at Ahu Akivi. All the other standing moai face inland. Bottom: Detail of the moai at Ahu Tongariki. All HDRs shot with a Nikon D700 and post-produced with Photomatix, Nik plug-ins and Photoshop. Click these photos to open larger versions.

The collection of photos is expanding by a new photo or two a day at the Easter Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

More Moai - Wednesday HDRs from Easter Island

The internet connection at the Altiplanico Hotel on Easter Island was a little wi-fi transmitter that worked best if you sat at the table directly beneath it and had all day. Nobody had all day, but now that we've been back for a couple of weeks I've had enough time to put several photos through a proper post-production process in Photomatix, for HDR processing, and Photoshop, so I'll post two or three a week here each of the next few Wednesdays.

This week, three of everybody's favorites, the moai. Click these to link to nice, big, full-resolution versions:

Top: The fifteen moai at Ahu Tongariki. We had the good fortune to be on the island on the night of a full moon. Center: Sunset at Ahu Vai Uri near the island's only town, Hanga Roa. Bottom: Back at Ahu Tongariki. Easter Island is so remote that no matter where you are or when you're there, you share the view with a handful of people at most.

Find a new photo or two a day at the Easter Island Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

The Cold War Comes (Briefly) to Easter Island

The daily LAN flight to Mataveri airport, Easter Island

At 27 degrees south latitude the trade winds blow across Easter Island from the east, so every midday, the daily flight from South America overflies the island, way out beyond it, then turns to descend into the prevailing winds on the NASA-widened air strip. And since it’s the island’s only interaction with the world that day, you watch.

It’s a favorite guidebook story to mention that NASA elongated the airstrip so that the space shuttle could land here in an emergency. I don’t think you’ll find a guide that doesn’t mention it. The runway needed 1,420 additional feet to run it out to the 11,055 feet required for a shuttle landing.

When NASA proposed its scheme some saw it as an evil imperialist plot, and it was met with resistance and even derision by some. In a June 30, 1985 article headlined “Lonely Easter Island Will Be Emergency Shuttle Landing Site,” the L A Times wrote: “Critics claim the United States will turn the remote island into a strategically placed military base that could drag Chile into the forefront of superpower conflicts and make the country a sitting duck in a nuclear war.

In a 1986 article the Times quoted Rado Miro Pomic, a former Chilean presidential candidate, in an interview in Santiago: "The real purpose of the airport expansion is to enlarge the strategic possibilities in the event of a war with the U.S.S.R. It is logical."

Times were different, and it may be worth noting the Chilean government that approved extending the runway in 1985 was a military one, headed by Augusto Pinochet. Maybe that gave some people the jitters. But the objections weren’t just that the Soviets would rush to bomb Chile. Their was also the “Easter Island is an open air museum” criticism. Any criticism in a storm, I guess.

The Times wrote, “the project has come under fire from Chileans who fear it will damage the island's unique archeological heritage.” And: "’The NASA plan is absurd. It's like building a dance floor in the Natural History Museum,’ said Chilean historian Oscar Pinochet de la Barra, one of the critics of the space shuttle landing project.”

For all the angst, as things turned out, the Rapanui today rue the passing of the shuttle program. Chile doesn’t reckon on any more NASA-funded airport maintenance.

Wild Horses

 

The coast is always close on Easter Island, and waves get up a good head of steam before crashing in. Drive out of Hanga Roa, the only town, and horses graze along the shore. They're self-sufficient and unfettered by fences. With the surf pounding behind them they make you feel free, too.

Sourpusses say they should be culled, environmentalists and preservationists, mostly. Those people say their hooves do more environmental damage than human feet.

Some Rapanui keep horses domestically and none of the horses, even the ones out on the coast, are wild, strictly speaking. They all belong to somebody, and they’re branded. But since there’s nowhere for them to go, they go where they will.

They sustain themselves and they look hardy enough, but you wish that with ownership came responsibility. Water is hard to come by for humans and animals alike, but no one provides for watering the “wild” ones.

They told me that if a horse dies on its own, more often than not its owner is nowhere to be found and it will decay where it drops. Everyone who passes will endure the flies and the smell.

There’s a curious driving habit on the island: Traffic maintains the center of the road, moving right only for oncoming cars. It’s because if you accidentally hit and kill a horse, shortly comes the profiteering outrage of the bereaved owner.

“They’re not valuable until you kill one. Then you might as well have murdered the king.”

 

•••••

More photos here.

Not Many Choices Around Here, Frank. How About We Try Easter Island?

Happy New Year 2013 from Lima, Peru

Back in Lima for a day. The internet was prohibitively slow on Easter Island, but now that we're back on the continent, here are a few more photos. First is a detail of some of the fifteen moai at Ahu Tongariki. In the middle, some of the wild horses found all over the island. It looks like their health and well being varies, but some of them are just beautiful. At the bottom is sunset at Ahu Vai Uri. These and a few more low-res photos are in the Easter Island section at EarthPhotos.com. More to come.

Moon and Moai, Easter Island

Positive Worldview version: It's incredible they have internet way out here on this tiny island.

Practical Reality version: It's barely-crawlin' slow. More photos when we get back to South America but for now, here's what we did last night.

Ahu Tongariki, Rapa Nui

Easter Island Trip Report

We're off to Lima today. Meanwhile, here's a trip report from Easter Island via Points, Miles and Martinis, a frequent flyer blog. They visited a few months ago. We'll be there Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to all!

You Won't Know Until You Go

Easter Island, as they'll tell you, is the most remote inhabited spot on the planet. Its nearest inhabited neighbor, Pircairn Island, is about 1300 miles west and home to under 100. Barely inhabited.

It's hard to get a feel for all that. Maybe flying five and a half hours out from Lima will help.

The more I read, the more I buy in that it really is a mysterious place, having confounded just about everybody since 1722, the date of the first known non-Polynesian contact. What's great is, everybody has a theory, so you might as well develop your own, too.

In this corner, Jared Diamond, he of the Pulitzer Prize, asserts in his well-argued book Collapse that whatever calamity befell Rapa Nui (the local name) was of the islanders' own making. In the other corner, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo play iconoclasts in a newish book that's almost belligerently insistent that everything you know is wrong.

There are multiple mysteries. First the huge statues, called moai, and how (and why) the islanders moved them from quarry to perch. Archaeologist (and the first indigenous Easter Island governor since European colonization) Sergio Rapu seems to side with Hunt and Lipo on this one.

He describes how he thinks it worked in a YouTube video. You can watch a new (November 2012) episode of the PBS series Nova that sets out to demonstrate how the moai got down from the quarry at a place called Rano Raraku to the beaches all around Easter Island.

Then there's the question of the society's apparent collapse. Did they squander resources (Jared Diamond)? Was it European contact, and the diseases thus unleashed (Lipo and Hunt)?

Seems to me as a layman that both the Diamond book and Lipo and Hunt's have weaknesses, which, if you want to keep a few good mysteries going, is as it should be, after all. Diamond asserts without attribution, summarily declaring that the moai "represent high-ranking ancestors." That may be true but it would be good to know if he has that on any authority beyond his own conjecture.

Hunt and Lipo's weakness is that they're relentlessly revisionist. They have an anti-conventional new theory for every last thing - when Rapa Nui was settled, how society worked, how the moai moved around, how society collapsed.

So who knows?

At least the question of how Rapa Nui was originally colonized seems to have been answered. Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl pointed to the Incas and Spaniards via Peru. The Swiss author Erich von Daniken put it all down to spacemen.

Clearer heads traced the larger colonization patterns of Polynesia via pottery, back originally to today's Papua New Guinea via the Solomon Islands. The distance between the Solomon Islands and Easter Island, though, is some 6000 miles and even Terry Hunt says colonization took around five centuries.

The work of a group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society established a plausible route to the farthest east Polynesian island by sailing from Mangareva to Pitcairn to Easter Island over some 23 days in 1999.

In the end, it's just hard to get a non-academic feel for the place from home. For now, it's all words in books. They say the tallest moai weighed 82 tons and the heaviest weighed 86. How can you tell what you think about how they hauled those things around until you stand under one and look it in the eye? So we'll go and see.

Off we go. Watch this space for comment and we'll be putting up the photos here starting in about a week.

Finally Almost Time for a Road Trip

Time to hit the road again. Click the map to make it bigger. We're heading out to good old "A" next week, via a few days in Lima, Peru and I promise ample photo coverage. Photos from Lima will be here, and from "A" will be here.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Chilean Patagonia, Chapter Seven

Here is Chapter Seven of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We'll publish each chapter over the course of the year (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book direct from EarthPhotos Publishing, or at Amazon.com. Photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the Chile Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

 

A band of cold rain swept over the Hotel Cabo de Hornos, churning the Strait of Magellan dirty gray. Punta Arenas’s “oldest and grandest” hotel was, well, it was just a hotel, all of its walls painted a determined shade of mustard. A bare minimum of staff kept the Cabo de Hornos open and we all watched cold squalls spray over the strait.

The Pan American highway stops at Puerto Montt, 816 miles of Chilean coastline to the north, so there are no roads here. There is little tourism. You have to be damned determined to get here.

Feliz Navidad. Punta Arenas was closed tight, for we came in on Christmas night.

•••••

I think I snared the last car for rent in southern Chile.

I bought coffee and stopped on the plaza to rub the shiny toe of a statue of Magellan, then I found Hertz.

“Buenos dias. You have a car?”

“No.”

A happy smile.

“If I go to aeropuerto?”

“No.”

I looked across the street. “Budget?”

This “no” betrayed a smug certainty, and at the same time a creeping regret that he wasn’t helping. He allowed that I could always “ask the question” across the street at Budget and furthermore, the man down the street at Santander might have uno auto. He wouldn’t open until ten and it was only 9:30. Still, that was something, so I bid him and another man who was washing cars adios.

At Budget they had big smiles but no cars.

“For today!?” He acted amazed.

He phoned around, but nothing. At least I had “asked the question.”

•••••

It’s hard to imagine that the nearly Antarctic tip of South America came to be known as Tierra del Fuego, or land of fire. It’s likewise hard to imagine being so far from home – so isolated – as Ferdinand Magellan and his crew were, sailing through appalling weather where nobody they’d ever heard of had been, five centuries ago. Especially when they spotted huge bonfires onshore.

Common Sense and Whiskey: The Book

Common Sense and Whiskey, the blog, was born less than two years ago to compliment the photo site EarthPhotos.com. From time to time since, we've published stories from the eventual book, also to be titled Common Sense and Whiskey. It's a compilation of short stories about the photos that found their way to EarthPhotos.com.

We're happy to say that finally, we think, Common Sense and Whiskey is only a couple of months away. Here's a mock-up of the cover, which will immortalize a gaucho and his sheep on the very desolate road to the Torres del Paine in Chilean Patagonia. Below is a short bit of the Patagonia story from the book. Watch this blog for the publication date.

 

 

The Alps are massive and majestic. The Torres del Paine only reach three thousand something meters versus Mont Blanc’s 4260. But the Alps have been domesticated, everywhere you go, all the way up onto the slopes. Cowbells tinkle so farmers can keep track of their livestock in every prim village.

It’s the vastness around the Torres, the silence. There are no houses, no farms. Land isn’t delineated by perpendiculars. No fences to keep anything in or out. Nothing, except for the snow and the big rocks, and the water and the animals and the silence.  That’s just what you’re after when you come to a place like this, but too often you find yourself in the common room with strangers, hearing about Kurt’s blister.

“It’s out to here,” Kurt said several times, showing a distance between his finger and thumb. Each time the wife of Kurt would chirp something like “He’s not very athletic,” the more galling because she clearly never auditioned for Buns of Steel.

There’s always people like that, though, and Kurt was a good enough old guy, running a party of five, some of them sullen kids.

Maps was what Kurt liked and he’d sink his head farther into his maps to ignore his wife. The wife of Kurt liked showing people things. She’d go back to the room (“Wait right here,” she’d command) to get some page that she’d printed off the internet. Or she’d inflict her sack of trail mix on a very dubious little boy.

Each time Kurt would move his face closer to his map and trace lines on it with his finger.

The wife of Kurt had a running disagreement with Kurt over the price of gas, or benzine as they called it here. Kurt had heard they were getting six dollars a litre out of jerrycans back at Posada Serrano and the wife of Kurt wouldn’t hear of it.

She worked herself up to high dudgeon (although high is pretty much the only way dudgeon comes) as she asked the dubious little boy’s father if he knew the price of benzine, and he allowed that he’d got some and it was close to the normal price.

“See Kurt! Six dollars a litre is impossible! I thought six dollars a litre was impossible. Did you hear that Kurt? I told you six dollars a litre was impossible. Kurt, this man says it’s not any six dollars a litre. Kurt thought gas cost six dollars a litre!”

And Kurt pulled the edge of the map nearest his wife nearly to his ear and the little boy’s father, who had a naturally puzzled, disheveled look, tried to find somebody else to talk to.

•••••

From Common Sense and Whiskey: Modest Adventures Far from Home, available soon.

Chile's Natural Beauty

Chile is a wild, gorgeous country. This is Mt. Osorno, in the lakes district roughly 500 miles south of the capital, Santiago. Enjoy ten more photos from Chile after the jump.

UPDATE: In the aftermath of the earthquake, here's a useful article in case you're planning a visit: Where in Chile is it Safe to Travel Now?

Christmas in Patagonia: A Story

A band of freezing rain swept over the Hotel Cabo de Hornos, turning the waters of the Strait of Magellan dirty gray. Puerta Arenas’s “oldest and grandest” hotel was, well, it was just a hotel. All of its walls were painted a determined mustard. A bare minimum of staff kept the Cabo de Hornos open and we all watched cold squalls spray over the strait.

The Pan American highway stops at Puerto Montt, 816 miles of Chilean coastline to the north, so there are no roads to get down here and there is little tourism, because you have to be damned determined to get here.

Feliz Navidad. Punta Arenas was closed tight, for we came in on Christmas night.

*****

I think I snared the last car for rent in southern Chile.

In the morning I stopped for coffee and touched Magellan’s shiny toe (this was so destiny would bring me back), on the plaza, then I found Hertz.

“Buenos dias. You have a car?”

“No.”

A happy smile.

“If I go to aeropuerto?”

“No.”

I looked across the street. “Budget?”

This “no” betrayed a smug certainty, and at the same time a creeping regret that he wasn’t helping. He allowed that I could always “ask the question” across the street at Budget and furthermore, the man down the street at Santander might have uno auto. He wouldn’t open until ten and it was scarcely 9:30. Still, that was something, so I bid him and a man washing cars adios.

At Budget they had big smiles but no cars.

“For today!?” He acted amazed.

End of the Earth: Extreme Southern Chile

It’s hard to imagine how the nearly Antarctic tip of South America came to be known as Tierra del Fuego, or land of fire. It’s likewise hard to imagine being so far from home – so isolated – as Ferdinand Magellan and his crew were, sailing through appalling weather where nobody they’d ever heard of had been, five centuries ago. Especially when huge bonfires appeared onshore.

Tribes called Ona and Yaghan kept them constantly stoked for warmth. The Yaghan wore only the scantest clothing despite the cold.

Canoeists, adept at navigating the labyrinthine channels and tributaries around the straits, they hunted the sea and smeared fat over their bodies as protection from the wind and rain. As recently as 1834, on the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin noted, “these people going about naked and barefoot on the snow."

The Ona lived across the strait, on the island I could see through the spray and mist. The books call them fierce warriors who adorned themselves with necklaces and bracelets of bone, shell and tendon, who hunted rats with bow and arrow, and who, wearing heavy furs and leather shoes, intimidated the bare-skinned Yaghan.

Darwin gave them their backhanded due, calling them “wretched lords of this wretched land.”

On Antipodean Weather, and a Story of Australia

The northern hemisphere marked the Summer Solstice at 1:45 a.m. EDT yesterday. In the southern hemisphere, of course, winter and summer solstices are exchanged, so that as we bask in these longest sunlit days, it's the middle of winter and days are short down under.

Conditions today in Punta Arenas, Chile and Ushuaia, Argentina, both at the southern tip of Patagonia, are forecast to be similar. Punta Arenas looks for a 30% chance of snow the first part of the week, with temperatures just either side of freezing, while Ushuaia expects about the same, with perhaps just a little more snow.

Moving east, there's a fifty/fifty chance of rain today in Stanley, Falklands, with snow likely later in the week. Cape Town, too, is wet, but positively balmy by comparison, with a forecast high tomorrow of 57 (14). Farther east into the Indian ocean, next stop the very remote French Kerguelen Island (previous posts on Kerguelen: 1, 2), it's wet every day, with an even chance of snow on Wednesday. Finally, at Hobart, on the southern tip of Tasmania, temperatures stay shy of 60 (15), with a chance of rain the entire last half of the week.

(Incidentally, find your own personal antipodes with this handy tool. Here's ours.)

Photo of Hobart, Tasmania from EarthPhotos.com. See photos from Chile, Argentina, South Africa and Australia on EarthPhotos.com, and here are two stories (1, 2) about our visit to southern Patagonia.

Read on, after the jump, for a new story from our visit to Tasmania: