We spent our last afternoon on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) enjoying some much needed beach time after a long three weeks of work. And it was the most perfect day, meaning the water and air were both warm enough that we could play in the ocean much longer than usual. So we got out the GoPro and decided to have some fun. 
I kinda love using our GoPro camera these days because it doesn’t have a view finder (and it’s waterproof). The lens is wide angle enough that if you point it in the general direction of what you want to photograph or film, it will get it. So it brings back a lot of that mystery and excitement film cameras used to have for me, in that you never quite knew what you were gonna get until you picked up the prints. And then flipping through them was full of anticipation as you looked to see if you got one of those perfectly composed and lit shots. The one you saw in your head, but didn’t know if the camera captured quite as well. 
Continue Reading →
Finished with production! (mostly)
We spent three weeks in February shooting the rest of the documentary we are working on, Eating Up Easter.* While it started out as a film about food and resources on Easter Island and the importation of food, it has shifted and drifted quite a bit since that starting point. Now, we are following three main characters and a few secondary characters, highlighting their daily life on this most remote little island, and the many ways in which they are working to move their community forward in a positive, loving way that nurtures their island’s unique and invaluable resources. There is much to learn from their stories and we are thrilled to get to share them.
*Eating Up Easter is getting an overhaul and will soon have a new website. In the meantime, we have a facebook page, where some of you may have been following our progress during the shoot. Like our page, Eating Up Easter, to stay informed about the everyday happenings of the film. 
When we first arrived on the island, it was the tail end of the Tapati Rapa Nui Festival, a two week long celebration of the culture of Rapa Nui, in which sporting competitions, singing and dancing fill the days and nights and culminate in a day long parade in which locals and tourists alike are painted with soil-based paint and dressed in traditional clothing (which isn’t much). Above, Mark, one of our cameramen, shoots our main character Mama Piru as she leads a group of women pulling a float. 
The only beach on the island, Anakena, was overloaded with tourists in February, the busiest month for tourism on the island. 
Continue Reading →
We’re Back (again)
Some of you may have seen on our facebook post a few weeks ago that our blogging computer decided to take a diving vacation (aka, it got some serious water damage) while we were headed to Rapa Nui. And since our other computer was downloading and processing filming footage just about 24/7, internet is sporadic and only available in about a 10 x 10 foot square within the hotel, and we rarely were sitting still unless we were sleeping, we decided to let the blog go for a bit.
But we are back in business. The computer has been rebuilt and we saved (wince) half the price of a new computer! And we are back in the land of decent internet speeds, also known as the frozen tundra of Minnesota. We have a lot of fun posts planned for the next few weeks, starting with an update on our filming progress. We just about finished all the filming we need for the documentary, so endless nights and weekends of editing are in our future. But, we are so excited about the footage we got that all the work ahead actually sounds fun.
I was worried I might not take well to the whole filmmaker career switch, but I have to say, so far so good. Being on a film shoot these last three weeks was exhilarating and included everything I love: being outside everyday, switching fast from task to task, jumping at spontaneous opportunities as they arise, and of course, getting to direct people and make decisions and, well, be in charge. Cue a big sigh of relief that this whole husband and wife documentary team thing might just work.
{photo of Tahai archaeological site by Pineapple Tree, adapted to watercolor using the iphone app Waterlogue}
Production Phase II begins
Yikes, time has run away from us again. We are already about to head off to finish phase II of production on Eating Up Easter on Easter Island. We are heading down with a team of four this time. The two of us and two cameramen. 
We very excited to be bringing some special toys to try out! By allowing us to get unique angles and heights, we hope they will help capture the context of where we are – on a tiny, rugged island, alone in the middle of the Pacific. 
We have so many posts we want to share, but again are getting overwhelmed with what is in front of us. But, we will update posts as often as we can and share how the production is going. Continue Reading →
Overwhelmed
Well, Happy New Year! We are back. Finally. After quite a long absence. We hope you didn’t completely give up on us. We are still here, still excited to tell our stories as we travel about and try to make a life out of what we love. We promise to keep up the posts much more frequently now.
So where did we leave off? Somewhere around here, am I right? 
We were on Easter Island working on production for our documentary. And then we weren’t. Sometimes airplane travel just blows my mind, because not more than a day after having that above as our view, we were staring out the window at this. 
Talk about contrast, and don’t get me started on lack of color. Anyone who travels to warmer climes during winter in Minnesota knows what we are talking about. That sinking feeling you get when you look out your window and realize the beaches have become snow and the long winter is still here, dragging on, and there’s no longer anywhere to hide. Continue Reading →
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.
A little awards gala in NYC
Our main purpose for being in New York last week was to attend an awards gala for the Princess Grace Foundation-USA. Ta’u had been chosen as one of the award winners for a grant that will provide the funds for us to begin production of the documentary we have been developing called Eating Up Easter. You can find more info and the full trailer for our video on the Eating Up Easter Blog. The film will look at the rapid development of Easter Island in the last ten years as we follow four characters each concerned with the future of the island in different ways. We will also look at how the islanders adapted to their changing environment in the past and the ways in which this knowledge can inform present day plans for sustainability.
The gala was held for the foundation’s largest donors and was a bit out of our comfort zone, dining with New York high society and all….so we just called it our Halloween. These were our costumes…
Ta’u had to arrive at the gala a few hours before me, to rehearse walking on stage, to take photos with Princess Charlene, and to get his award, a beautiful little pin symbolizing the three arts that Princess Grace supports – film, theater, and dance. Continue Reading →
Kon Tiki
Are you looking for a movie recommendation for the weekend? Have you seen Kon Tiki yet? It’s a fictional retelling of the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s real life adventure into the Pacific on a Peruvian raft. The cinematography is gorgeous and the story really brings alive the adventurous spirit of Heyerdahl and the men that he convinced to follow him on his crazy journey. Together, they built a replica of an ancient coastal raft used by native peoples from Peru and attempted to sail across the Pacific toward central Polynesia to prove the Pacific Islands could have been settled from South America. He wrote the book, Kon Tiki to document their voyage, which took place just after the end of WWII in 1947.
photo from the new movie Kon Tiki, a re-creation of a Peruvian coastal raft
Most Pacific scholars today scoff at the mere mention of Heyerdahl’s name – how could he disgrace the ingenuity and highly skilled navigational capability of the Polynesians by suggesting South Americans, using coastal sailing rafts and with no knowledge of voyaging across open oceans, were the ones to sail 2, 3, 4000 miles to settle Polynesia? We know today that there absolutely was contact between South America and Polynesia….it just wasn’t in the direction Heyerdahl thought. The Polynesians were highly trained navigators after all, so why would they discover nearly every spec of land or rock throughout the Pacific but miss the continent at the other end? And, although much of the “evidence” Heyerdahl cited as proof of a connection between the two peoples has been proven inaccurate, there is, in fact, evidence piling higher every day that the Polynesians made it to South America, introduced the Polynesian chicken, likely settled some of the islands along Chile’s coast, and brought back the sweet potato along with it’s Andean name, Kumara, and spread it throughout the Pacific.
re-creation of a traditional Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe
So, even though Heyerdahl has been proven wildly inaccurate in his theory that South Americans settled Polynesia, his story of adventure still stirs up my love of uncovering the past. And this movie depicts that spirit of exploration in the most simple yet beautiful manner, while bringing to life some of the fanciful aspects of the story such as encounters with mysterious undocumented sea creatures and giants of the deep ocean. It’s available now for rent or purchase on iTunes, Amazon or Netflix, and probably in your local movie rental store (if you still have a local store), so check it out. I highly recommend it. It’s a fantastic journey of a movie.
And just as an aside… I can’t ever think of Heyerdahl these days without acknowledging to myself that despite his less than stellar reputation in academic circles, my life today would not be what it is without him. When I was in junior high, my English teacher gave me a copy of the book Kon Tiki as a prize for getting good grades on my papers that month.
I quickly devoured the adventurous story (which, now knowing more about Thor Heyerdahl, was a rather gloriously embellished re-telling of his journey. His books, although sold as non-fictional accounts of his exploits and adventures, are known for their fanciful accounts, not all of which are based in reality). I was hooked and immediately began searching for more wonderful tales of adventure mixed with archaeology and interpretations of the past. I had wanted to be an archaeologist since age 7 when I took an egyptology class at my magnet school and fell in love with the story of Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb. It wasn’t until college, like most kids who are star struck by the Indiana Jone’s style treasure hunting stories, that my understanding of archaeology was crushed and re-molded into the less than fantastic reality it actually is….staring at tiny nicks on rocks for hours on end trying to see the difference between two types of flakes discarded during tool making….or digging holes in the ground for days only to discover dirt, dirt, and more dirt, and maybe the occasional rat bone (although I do still love digging in the dirt). But, back then, after reading Kon Tiki, I found another of Heyerdahl’s books, Aku Aku, about his expedition to Easter Island in 1955.
This book, like his others, is not exactly historically accurate, but it solidified my fascination with that little island and eventually led me to choose to go there for my first archaeological field school the summer after my freshman year of college. Little did I know that teacher who gave me Kon Tiki back in 7th grade was actually leading me to meet my husband, Ta’u…..isn’t life incredible in retrospect? Not only did I meet Ta’u there, but my father-in-law is a native Easter Islander and the first to be trained as an archaeologist by one of the scholars that Heyerdahl brought with him on his 1955 expedition. Small world, right? Ta’u has childhood memories of Heyerdahl staying with them in his father’s hotel. The one thing he remembers most about Heyerdahl is the baby blue safari suit he always wore. You can still find photos of him from his various visits to the island wearing that exact outfit.
Moving between here and there
Coming and going is always a strange phenomenon for me. You’d think after the amount of upheaval and change that has permeated my life from the very beginning that I would be a pro at smoothly moving through change. And perhaps on the outside it appears that way….but moving from a life that you are used to, comfortable in, to another life, another home, another place, always comes with the same feelings of panic and nostalgia and sadness and loss. I call it a change-attack instead of a panic attack…it’s a feeling so specific to changing my environment and the people around me that I feel like it deserves it’s own name. The feeling of panic usually hits first as a shock rushing through my body upon waking up, often from a nap (because everyone needs a nap after a big trip, right?). 
I open my eyes and in those first few moments of waking, when the world doesn’t quite feel stable again yet, when you still aren’t quite sure if you are really here, if everything around you is reality or still a dream, that’s when the feelings of nostalgia and sadness set in. I feel a tremendous longing for where I was and no longer am. Suddenly everything around me feels so wrong. Even if I’m in the most comfortable, familiar place — a place I missed terribly and had been begging to return to, I still get that feeling of loss and sadness for wherever I’d been.
Some of what I’m missing about my time on Easter Island…
the view we love so much from our “home” on Easter Island
enjoying “once” on the lanai
a parking lot just for watching the waves…where one stops for a break on a lazy drive home
the town “beach”
enjoying guava ice cream after a day in the field
renovations of the soccer field….prepping for artificial turf
a stare down between car and cow….an everyday occurrence on the road
gorgeous sunsets
a new decorative rock wall on the newest addition to the family hotel
Abuelita’s bucket cilantro garden
take-out ceviche from Hetu’u
waiting to board the plane….of to another home
So I’ve come to realize I just need to allow myself time to move through that stage of transition from one place to another — that place of sadness and loss for the daily familiarity of what was. I have to let myself trust that the comfort of an everyday routine with the people I see on a daily basis and with the places I inhabit, will return in this new location….and it always does. Within only a few days, where I was becomes a distant memory. Until I travel again, and the whole process starts anew.
Has anyone else ever felt something like that? It’s such a hard feeling to put into words.
Another corner of home
Photo by Yann Arthus-Bertrand
This weekend I’m heading off to another corner of home…..Easter Island, or Rapa Nui. One of the smallest, most remote inhabited places on the planet, it is nearly 2000 miles from any other populated land and it has a surface area of only 60 square miles – about the size of Washington D.C. But, unknown to many, it has a thriving population of over 6000 people, not to mention the 80,000 or so tourists that visit each year.
This is the first time in 10 years that I will travel to the island without Ta’u. I will miss his presence very much, but I’m getting excited to take on this new challenge. I’ve definitely let him lead the way with his huge extended family there – he’s related to most of the islanders which can get pretty confusing trying to keep them all straight and remember who’s related to who. Knowing who someone is there means knowing how they are related to you, so when you get introduced it’s not just, “this is so and so” but, “this is so and so, he’s your cousin, he’s the grandson of my father’s brother’s daughter.” You’ve got to learn fast, and as someone who’s terrible with names anyway, this is the ultimate challenge. When in doubt I know to smile and wave at everyone I see just in case they are family (which most likely they are) and try not to let on that I can’t remember who’s cousin’s wife’s brother-in-law they are. So being there on my own, I hope, will force me to learn by doing, shall we say.
I won’t have too much time to see family, though, because for most of my visit I’ll be leading and guiding a tour on the island. They will meet me in Santiago, Chile, and then we’ll head to the island together where I’ll get to share the statues, or moai, in all their glory, as well as the less glamorous, but just as important everyday features like house foundations and rock walls. This group is all about lecturing and continuing education so I’ll be doing a lot of this fancy posing while I discuss the details of life in the past.
I’ll also get to enjoy views like this. Oh, I miss this little island so much. I can’t wait to get there.
We have some exciting posts planned for while I’m away, so keep checking in. One of them may or may not include an epic video about our recent log rolling experience, and we have a whole week of Boundary Water Canoe Area (BWCA)-themed posts including survival skills and gourmet food.
Happy weekend!