Common Sense and Whiskey

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.

The Things You Miss When You're Away

Catching up on a few things, since we've been away:

- It seems that the archepelagic nation of Kiribati has bought 25 square kilometres on Viti Levu, the main Fijian island, in case, well, Kiribati disappears. Climate change insurance.

- Nice piece from photographer Tim McKulka on the two Sudans. He spent five years traveling and taking pictures there. That's dedication.

- The closest land is Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, 1,090 miles (1,750 km) away. It's the most remote island in the world.

- This looks pretty terrible, even outdoing Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World (which, by the way, is free on Kindle).

- Looks like the northern - and southern - lights were active while we were away from the internet in Cuba. It's hard to believe this photo is real.

Jet Lag Standing Still

Leaders have the power to set budgets, try to make the trains run on time, that sort of thing, but the ability to make an entire day completely disappear? THAT's power.

There will be no 30 December in Samoa, or Tokelau, a group of three atolls in the Pacific that are territory of New Zealand. They will redraw the international date line at midnight on 29 December, with both jumping straight to 31 December. It's to facilitate commerce with New Zealand and Australia. Wellington and Sydney will now be one and three hours earlier than Samoa and Tokelau, respectively.

Here's how the Samoan Prime Minister explains the rationale: "In doing business with New Zealand and Australia, we're losing out on two working days a week. While it's Friday here, it's Saturday in New Zealand, and when we're at church on Sunday, they're already conducting business in Sydney and Brisbane."

Interestingly, American Samoa is staying right where they are, so although the two territories are only 30 miles apart, the time difference between them will be an entire day.

(Thanks to timaanddate.com for the story, and the photo is actually Rarotonga, the main island in the Cook Islands. Haven't made it to Samoa yet. We'll get to work on that.)

Atlas of Remote Islands

Here's a pleasing little book for dreamers and inveterate travelers.

They say members of Washington's political class turn straight to the index of new bestsellers, to see if they're mentioned. The hard core traveler will turn to this atlas's contents straightaway, to see how many of the islands they've visited.

Atlas of Remote Islands is subtitled Fifty Islands I have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, suggesting its author is an armchair traveler. She gives each island a map and a little vignette.

Three samples:

- Howland Island: "She is tall and thin. Next to her, standing lke a shy, diligent girl, is her navigator, Fred Noonan."

- Napuka: "When they finally sight land after fifty days, they find nowhere to drop anchor, and the boats that they land on the island discover nothing to satisfy either hunger or thirst. They name the islands the Disappointment Islands...."

- Amsterdam Island: "No one is allowed to settle here, so the personnal at the research station changes constantly. Some of the men stay for only a few months, but most for a year and a half.... There is no boat. Where would they take it?"

Paradise Found, After Considerable Effort. But It's Not Paradise.

Reading up on Circle Pacific fares last week on Flyertalk (and this site for an overview), I hit upon an idea I've had before - to visit some really remote Pacific destinations. Specifically, the Pitcairn Islands, a destination we've looked at here before. Last time we posted on the possibility of Pitcairn, in an article called Really Remote Travel, we linked to "several expeditions you can take to the Pitcairn Islands over the next couple of years."

Hmmm. It seems that link is dead now. Maybe because there's a new dedicated passenger/cargo vessel called the Claymore II plying that route regularly, and able to accommodate twelve passengers. It's $4000 per person from the island of Mangareva in the Gambier Islands, French Polynesia, which in turn is accessible by air from Tahiti Faa.

I found that late last week. Remarkably, an email popped into my in basket today from a friend named Laurent we met on our recent sailing up the South Atlantic to St. Helena and Ascension islands. Laurent's a fellow photographer, living in France, and he and I pretty well scoured St. Helena's tiny capital, Jamestown, inch by inch for photos. I don't suppose you could guess where Laurent is this very minute?

Yep. His email says he's just been visiting Pitcairn Island on a cruise for an hour or so. But that's not all he says. I hope Laurent won't mind my quoting him a little bit:

There ore only 45 people on Pitcairn!
3000 miles from New Zealand....
No money, no banks, nothing....boring....raping their children....
No lawyers....
That they are not very fond of visitors is easy to understand....
Far from a paradise!

He goes on to link to the book in the photo above, called Serpent in Paradise. Its author's web site, DeaBirkett.com, links to a few additional stories.

Great Hotel Door Hangers We Have Known

Pidgin is the mostly missionary-imposed form of English used originally to communicate with the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea.

In a land where as many as 800 different languages still exist, sometimes changing from valley to valley, a common form of communication became essential as proselitysing, travel and economic activity between the island inhabitants and Europeans increased.

Tok Pisin, as it is officially known is "now considered a distinct language in its own right because it is a first language for some people and not merely a lingua franca to facilitate communication with speakers of other languages."

Here's a web site that does translations, and here's a dictionary.

Sometimes Tok Pisin will make you smile. We brought this hotel door hanger back from our trip to the highlands Goroka Show several years ago.

(The next time you can manage to be anywhere near PNG in September, take your best camera gear and attend the Goroka Show. It's one of the things you really want to see in life. The next Goroka Show is 17 - 19 September, 2010.)

*****

"You no can come inside." Tok Pisin is a language even I could learn.

And while we're here, proving that there's just about everything somewhere on the internets, check out this really fine hotel door hangers collection as shared by Michael Liebowitz. He writes that his grandfather "had been in the foreign service and he had filled a whole wall of his study with hotel door hangers from all his travels throughout the world. They're really beautiful, in aggregate, and I wanted to share. Enjoy."

Tremendous.

See photos from the Goroka Show and elsewhere in Papua New Guinea in the Papua New Guinea Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. And read a story about our cruise up PNG's very wild Sepik River.

Dodging the Cyclone: Vanuatu

Excerpted from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey:

It’s 6:15 on the Erakor Lagoon near Port Vila, Vanuatu. Women in bright print skirts paddle canoes across the lagoon from villages into town. Small, yellow-billed birds call from the grass by the water’s edge, roosters crow from somewhere, and the low rumble of the surf hurling itself against the reef is as much felt as heard.

Like every morning, the sky is grayer than blue. Clouds hang close to the hills and the water is green glass, reflecting jungle. We’re staying on a tiny island near the capital city, Port Vila. This is the morning of our third day and after snorkeling from an outrigger in the midday sun yesterday, we're well burned already.

**

Thursday in Vila was a rainy day. Every other morning was heavy with water, too, but on Thursday in Vila, the cloud never gave way. Offshore, south beyond the reef remained seductively blue but clouds swept from the east over our little Erakor Island and before long delivered over-ripe drops driving across the lagoon which, when they arrived (and we could watch their progress in waves from the far shore), fell with real heft.

A partnership of 2 yellow-billed, yellow-eyed, yellow-legged birds with a remarkable range of chirps, clicks and warbles and endearingly monogamous, toward whom we came to feel proprietary, worked a 10 meter radius of our back porch the whole time we lived there, building a nest with all the languor of the people of Vanuatu, until the rain forced them undercover.

It didn't rain non-stop though, and since we were horrified at the splotchy crimson we'd turned in maybe 40 minutes of sun, we decided on the only rational course of action for the day. Go to town for beers.

Don't Try This at Home: Wild Papua New Guinea

New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland. With less than one per cent of the planet's land area, it contains up to "10% of the total species on the planet." In West Papua, part of Indonesia, there may be as many as 44 uncontacted tribal groups. A trip to visit any of the people on the island is a real eye opener (See photos from the Goroka Show, an annual tribal show in the PNG highlands).

Based on conversations we had on a trip along the Sepik River, which is in the country of Papua New Guinea, on the eastern side of the island, we wrote earlier about male initiation rites, here. Here is a brief excerpt:

    “We believe the father gives us the knowledge but the blood comes from the mother and so it must return to her. So my mother’s brother came from another village.

    “The night of the skin cutting we stayed up all night. When it was very late the men made us go into the water and stay for one hour so our skin would get soft. Ohhh, it was so cold!

    Lawrence massaged his temples.

    “When it was time I laid down on top of my mother’s brother. So the blood would fall on him. And they cut me.”

    With a flourish he raised his right sleeve to show the results.

    “Sometimes they cut your back but I asked they only cut my arms because I had to go back to work. “

    He had to have time to heal. But he didn’t heal. He was infected.

    “I asked for medicine but my grandfather refused. He asked me, ‘What have you done wrong?’ I said nothing, nothing over and over but he kept asking me until finally I admitted I had stayed with my girlfriend the night before.

Read the entire article on the "Sepik River, Papua New Guinea."

That's male initiation rites. Now comes a video describing female initiation rites. Have a look:

(See photos from Papua New Guinea in the Papua New Guinea Gallery on EarthPhotos.com.)

The Latest Tsunami that Didn't Happen

The NOAA Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami warning yesterday for Tonga, Niue, Kermadec Is., American Samoa, Samoa, Wallis-Fortuna & Fiji in the South Pacific after what must have been an entirely startling event: an underwater volcano erupted about ten kilometers off the Tongan coast, sending debris hurtling into the air out of the open sea.

Unsettling, yes. But the AP quotes David Bellwood, a marine biology professor, as saying "But an underwater explosion is really a wonderful thing, it's creating new land. This kind of activity helps develop reef systems and helps preserve marine life."

The tsunami warning was subsequently canceled.

All the Latest South Pacific Guidebooks in One Place

MapSouthPacific.com is a simple South Pacific travel resource. You might use it as a starting point in picking your destination.

There's a thumbnail history and map of each island, and most usefully, a nice compilation of the latest guide books and maps to the various destinations and links to where to buy them online in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.K., Germany & France.

(Photo from the Cook Islands Gallery at EarthPhotos.com).

"It's up to each country to determine its own time zone."

The Chatham Islands east of New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji and Kiribati all promoted themselves as first to welcome the new millineum back on January first, 2000. According to Aimee Harris, writing in Honolulu magazine in 1999 via Steve Trussel,

"The National Geographic Society recognizes the Catham Islands east of New Zealand as the first inhabited place to see each sunrise. But, the Tongan government has considered implementing daylight-saving time to beat the Catham Islands to the millennium. However, Tonga pulled out and remains one hour behind the finish line. Fiji, on the other hand, claims to be the leader of the Pacific pack since it straddles the 180th meridian, which was designated as the halfway point around the globe in 1884."

But wait: Here comes Kiribati. Kiribati (pronounce this "Kir-a-bas"), whose thirty three specks of land spread across 2000 miles of the Pacific, already had a problem. Stretching across the International Date Line, opposite sides of Kiribati labored under a 23 hour time difference. It would be theoretically possible to pass your driving exam, then get a traffic ticket on the other end of the archipelago - the day before you got your driver's license.