Easter Island: The North Coast

We finished filming the first part of Eating up Easter with our cinematographer this week! Although it was a huge challenge to work in an environment where everything happens day by day and minute by minute (i.e. appointments cannot be made with anyone, or certainly will never be kept if they are), we were able to film a ton of great content and capture lots of beautiful b-roll. What an awesome team we have! We’ll share more on that later, but for now we want to show you this beautiful hike we took just before filming began. I can’t believe I got this many photos to load here.

So, here we go…..beware, this might get a little archaeology-sciencey/tour-guidey, but I just can’t help myself. I want to teach you all about this fantastic little place.

Last week we hiked the north coast of Easter Island. While there are roads around the south coast and through the middle of the island, the north coast consists of steep slopes ending in rocky cliffs and is only accessible by foot or on horseback. The coast forms the northern base of the island’s largest and youngest volcano, Terevaka. We got a ride to the end of the road, just a few miles north of town to begin our hike, which ended at Anakena, the only sandy beach, where the road picks up again and heads back to town. With the rocky terrain, a nice stop for lunch and our zigzagging up and down the hillsides looking for interesting remnants of past life, it took us almost 7 hours. A good, full, beautiful, and refreshingly exhausting day.

**Please Note: If you are a tourist considering doing this hike, make sure to hire a guide or go with a local person on the island. There have been cases recently in which tourists have become lost on the hike and had to be rescued during the night.

When you are out there, the landscape and the ocean are vast, breathtaking, and humbling. The stillness and quiet give a sense of complete isolation, yet at the same time are strangely comforting. You feel completely alone and tiny yet simultaneously one with all around you – as if you are the ocean and the sky and the land itself. We had to do a little ducking and maneuvering under and over fences that have been added over time for sheep and cattle. But otherwise there was little reminder that we were on a currently populated island. The osteologist in me got excited about the amount of bone we found out there, mostly of the cattle, horse, dog, and maybe sheep variety (there were over 70,000 sheep on the island during the sheep farming days in the early 1900’s). Despite the large quantity of remains, we only encountered the animals themselves a few times. I found this calf sleeping among the rocks and thought it was dead, but as I got closer I must have startled it and it jumped up and took off running. I hope it found its mamma. We climbed high up the hillside to a little rock shelter area for lunch to get out of the direct sun. Because of the lack of vegetation out here, and the complete absence of trees, any shade you can find is very welcome. While we were up here we saw a motorcycle passing far below on the coastal path, and thought it was strange someone was out here on a bike. More on that story later….While we found little evidence of present day life, we found many remnants of the ancient Rapanui (or Easter Islanders). Above is a manavai, which is a wall of stones built in a circle usually within a natural depression. Food crops were then planted inside the circular wall, which provided shelter from the wind, while the natural depression collected and concentrated water and minerals for the plants. It was one of a number of ingenious solutions the Rapanui came up with to deal with a harsh, windy, and often dry environment. We found many ahu, or ceremonial platforms that once held the moai, or statues. Above is the back wall of one of the larger ahu we stopped to admire along the way. Some of these back walls have dressed stones that were cut and fit together so perfectly many people have confused them with Incan walls in Peru. However the walls on Easter Island are thin facades holding in the rock fill of the ahu, while Incan walls were built with huge stone blocks, often at least 1 meter deep. Moai made it all the way out here, crossing over a mountain after leaving their quarry. Nearly 900 statues have been found on the island and many more are likely still buried. We found many house foundations like this one. Even though this location felt so remote, because no modern roads reach it, it was well populated during ancient times. We didn’t know what the feature above was until we got back and showed Ta’u’s dad the photo. In ancient times, it was a birthing platform. Grasses would have covered the rock pavement to make it softer and there probably was a hut or roof built over it. The women would give birth here and they would put water in the red stone with the hole in it. The stone would warm the water and as soon as the baby was born they would put it in the “bath” water to keep it from getting cold. Above is an umu pae or an earth oven. They are usually outlined by five stones and inside the hole, rocks would have been placed, a fire built on top to heat them, and then the food placed on the rocks and topped with banana leaves and sometimes soil to keep in the heat and cook the food. This method of cooking is still used today for parties and ceremonies. This is another angle showing a hare paenga or a hare vaka (boat house) foundation. Branches would have been stretched from one side to the other to create a curved ceiling and then grasses would have formed the walls/roof. The finished home looked a lot like an up-side down canoe, which is why they are often called hare vaka today (hare = home, vaka = boat). We found a few ana, or caves to explore, some of which were actually rock shelters (or rock overhangs that create a shelter underneath) that had then been built up with walls and sometimes the roofs were even extended to create larger caves with fortified entrances. The entrances were made into tiny little corridors that you could only get through slithering foot or head first, which made you vulnerable and completely exposed to anyone inside of the cave. Pretty smart way to keep your family safe, right? We found some beautiful petroglyphs, some of which had recently been traced with soil, making them a lot easier to see. This spread included a tuna fish, lots of Make Make (pronounced maw-kay maw-kay), the creator and fertility god which is represented by two eyes and a nose, and some komari, or female vulva. We even found some Make Make petroglyphs in a cave. Although we missed a more famous cave with lots of petroglyphs on the ceiling, because after a while we got tired of zigzagging off the path so much and we realized we were getting behind on time. Here I’m walking next to what is called an ahu poe poe, which is usually filled with a series of burial chambers. Finally, we came to Hanga Oteo, a huge valley and bay with palm trees, a small house and lots of cattle. It’s still an active ranch, but there’s no electricity or water out there so I don’t think people live out there permanently. We saw a few people fishing along the coast but otherwise it was just us and the cows. And there were a lot of them. We had to walk between them and the coast and they were all staring us down, which freaks me out. But they didn’t charge at us, and we made it through the valley. Finally Anakena, the beach, was in sight! We were almost finished, although an hour late for our pick up.Ta’u’s dad was waiting for us in Anakena, and was very relieved to see us. He is fiercely protective of his family and had been very worried about us on the hike because Ta’u had never been out there before (I’d been there twice before). He had sent his cousin to look for us, and because his cousin didn’t have a horse available, he’d come on his motorcycle….so that explained the strange sight at lunch. We had been so far up the hill that he hadn’t seen us and had continued on to Anakena where he left some extra food for us with another cousin running a small food stand. When my father-in-law heard he hadn’t found us he got worried and came out to pick us up an hour early. So when we arrived an hour late we had no idea he’d been trying to find us all day. Poor guy. We knew him well enough to know being late would worry him, but we didn’t recognize how far behind we were until it was too late to do anything about it. We were joking along the end of the hike that we should be looking for the helicopter he sent to find us…..little did we know it was actually a motorcycle and it had already been out there searching for us hours before! Moai anyone?