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.

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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.”

 

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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.

Eclipse 2

On yesterday's eclipse:

- Photos from National Geographic. They write, "Eclipse chasers on Easter Island were blanketed by cloudy skies over the weekend, raising fears that the eclipse would happen behind a veil of water vapor. But winds picked up on Sunday morning, blowing away the clouds and revealing clear blue skies just in time for the sky show."

- three photos from Easter Island from The World at Night: 1, 2, 3

And while we're here talking about Easter Island, two not entirely related things:

- How many days should you visit? An honest review.

- The Explora Rapa Nui Hotel, where rooms cost $1520 - $2020 per night.

The Eclipse Gods, Teasing Again

Yesterday a total solar eclipse was visible across parts of the South Pacific.

About a year ago we wrote "Nothing is quite so forlorn as eclipse photographers all turned out, gear at the ready, with nothing but clouds to photograph." That was in response to the disappointing weather along the path of the huge 22 July, 2009 eclipse across Asia (which had a maximum totality of 6:39 off the Japanese coast).

After our abortive trip to see it, we studied the maps and reluctantly decided that the odds of cloud cover were too high for yesterday's eclipse, visible across the South Pacific, Easter Island and coming ashore at sunset near Patagonia's magnificent Torres del Payne.

Mere odds, naturally, didn't stop people from trying their luck. Japan's Wakayama University sent a team, which has posted an eight minute video from the time around totality. In case you're an eclipse fan, or just enjoy a good adventure, I won't dare tell you how their adventure ended, you can watch here. If you don't feel like you have the eight minutes to spare, I'll tell you after the jump.

Rapa Nui Trip Review

An honest appraisal of a recent trip to Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island, including how long you should stay and a look at gaming an award ticket: Here, here and here, from Online Travel Review.

Incidentally, there are about a billion companies offering travel there for the 11 July total eclipse next year, and some still say they have availability. Average July cloud cover is over fifty per cent, though.