The moai, the stars of Rapa Nui
pau hitor descends from the clan of those who read the sky. "By following the stars and looking at the clouds you can get anywhere" , he assures me with the accent of someone who is used to lengthening the vowels in their native language. corpulent and with a fierce face in which the well-known explosive temperament of the rapanui Pau, on the other hand, has a frank gaze and exquisite manners. Besides, he knows what he's talking about. His ancestors came to this small volcanic island , the loneliest on the planet, from some point on the french polynesia . An epic feat of more than one hundred days of navigation for which they only had his knowledge of the sky and the sea and the blind faith in the visionary dream of the sorcerer Haumaka , trusted man of King Hotu Matu'a.
They called the then exuberant island Te Pito Te Henua , translated as the 'Navel of the world', although its real meaning is 'Where the earth ends' or, viewed another way, 'Where the earth begins' . It was like that for a long, long time. Officially named as Easter Island by some Dutchmen who appeared on its shores on Easter 1722 , the descendants of Hotu Matu'a prefer to call their island, their culture, their language and themselves Rapa Nui , the Great Rap.
"Westerns always want to know, but they don't understand anything." Pau speaks knowingly again. He works in the national park (which actually occupies almost the entire island), guarding his stone ancestors in the Rano Raraku quarry , the megalithic sculpture workshop from which they came, the Rapanui say that walking, almost all the moai that make this island a unique and exceptional place. Pau is a direct family of the venerable gentleman whom he represents the largest moai that once stood on a platform: Pito Kura , 11 meters and more than 80 tons. He was also the last. Today it is broken in half and quite eroded. So much so that it is difficult to distinguish their forms. In the 1990s, money was raised to restore it but, also as if by magic, it disappeared.
The moai of Ahu Nao Nao turn their backs on Anakena Bay
The other moai that exceed it in size (12, 16, 21 meters) they never made it out of this quarry . Some, the most enormous, did not even separate from the bedrock . Three centuries after its mysterious abandonment, walk among the hundreds of heads of colossi that emerge from the bowels of the mountain is the closest thing to following clock rabbit to Alice's country. Some heads look straight ahead, others at the sky, others touch the ground with their noses, some only show their faces, others show part of their torso. Elongated and with an aerodynamic nose, they all remind me of Clint Eastwood in those movies Cinemascope.
In Rapa Nui there are 270 platforms or ahu and around thousand moai , one for each inhabitant of flesh and blood. The first to be built, back in the 9th century, measured 57 centimeters , but over time they became more voluminous, heavier, until reaching the colossi that we have just seen. Why? Well, think of yourself: Don't you want a bigger house or car? A taller boyfriend? Why? Almost half of these thousand moai are in the quarry and on its access roads. The rest are scattered along the coast, here and there, broken like the one in the Pau's great-great-grandfather , lying more or less near the platforms on which they had once been carefully placed.
Rano Raraku, the quarry from which almost all the Moai came out
On the island there are so many loose and piled stones that one sometimes does not know which are monuments or just monumental. You have to walk carefully so as not to disturb your ancestors and, above all, so as not to break an ankle. For now there are only a few 50 restored moai . Destruction is an important part of the story. Fueled by a childhood memory and that 'broken phone' into which the oral tradition sometimes becomes, that of the Easter Island is a story of telepathy and metamorphophis , of men who transform into birds, of statues that function as antennae of a supernatural power, of magnetic stones that open doors to other dimensions. But above all it is a parable of the earth, a mirror in which to look at ourselves and reflect.
Since it was discovered a few years ago that when the king Hotu Matu'a arrived on the island, the palm tree forests reached the sea, Rapa Nui has been pointed out as a clear example of the consequences of excessive growth and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs . A cautionary tale: "greed broke the sack." Now it seems that the responsibility is not only human and that the collapse did not occur because of mismanagement of resources but because the rats who arrived as stowaways on the boats of the first settlers ate the seeds of palm trees during a series of relentless droughts.
But each discovery is accompanied by new questions. Actually, everything is written and well explained in the enigmatic rongo rongo tablets , a kind of life diary printed on wooden sheets. Most of them, however, were never heard of, and the few that are known are insufficient to reveal anything other than an incomprehensible hieroglyph . Without them, the only thing we can hold on to is the results of carbon 14 testing and to the theories and assumptions of archaeologists. The dates and data vary depending on who tells you. That is why it is worth visiting the island with several different guides. Thus, you will complete the puzzle by yourself.
Sunsets are especially beautiful from Tahai
So much interest is awakened by a volcanic rock the size of the city of Segovia surrounded by the eternity of the Pacific Ocean. Rapa Nui it is so small and isolated that, since the planes land here, no ships arrive. It has the shape of a isosceles triangle with an extinct volcano at each point and a population that could fit on one of those big cruise ships. Here everyone has always known each other or is directly family. They love each other, they envy each other, they deceive each other, they get entangled. Like everywhere. "Here we are all with everyone, but nobody is with anyone," they say. Slightly less than half of the population is Rapanui, the rest are Chileans from the 'with you' , as they call the continent, and the occasional foreigner who was 'contaminated' from the island.
It's weird the 21st century rapanui who hasn't lived off the island for a while. Stranger still is the one that does not return. Most of the islanders live in the capital, Hanga Roa , where the action is, although almost everyone has a plot in the countryside to escape from the 'chaos' of the city. The church, the hospital, the post office, a handful of shops selling souvenirs, sarongs and tiare oils made in Tahiti , a couple of discos... Hanga Roa It is a town with two main streets and hardly any traffic lights where no one is surprised to see horses ridden by bare-chested men riding by. Share space with some 7,000 horses and an unknown number of dogs who adopt tourists for a day, looking for some leftovers, be it food or love.
The Rano Kao Crater
Last year the island received 50,000 visitors . The LAN office is one of the liveliest places. The center of playful activity corresponds to the Cove . There is the soccer field, two of the three diving centers, the best ice cream parlor and two small beaches. While some sunbathe on the sand, others catch waves either they train in their Polynesian canoes. Throughout the year they prepare for the Tapati competition , in which, every beginning of February, a the queen of Rapa Nui . This year she has only presented herself as a candidate Maeha Leon . “My family has always helped prepare the participants. To make the cars, the mahute suits, to study...”, she explains to me, "I guess that's why nobody wants to compete with me now."
Orphans of a snatched culture, The current Rapanui are determined to recover their folklore. Not so much, however, as to accept Red Bull's proposal to recover the life or death competition of the Manu thong , the 'bird-man'. 90 percent of the island lives in one way or another from tourism: they rent cabins, sell handicrafts, work as guides. The mayor himself, the same one who a few years ago encouraged the population to invite tourists to his house, has just opened an exclusive hotel backed by the know-how of the Noi chain. The largest hotel, the Hangaroa Eco Village, with 70 rooms camouflaged in the volcanic environment, It would be a boutique hotel anywhere else in the world. Shortly after its opening, now a couple of years ago, the hotel was taken over for several months by locals claiming their ancestral right to the land. The creation of an indigenous foundation seems to have silenced the protests, and today who else, who least has passed by its cinema, to have a drink in its bar or to try the benefits of its spa, with an amazing salt and sand sauna brought from Antofagasta.
The luxury of the essentials at Hotel Explora
The first luxury hotel on the island was the Explora, surnamed Mike Rapu's Inn , for being in the lands of what some call 'the Pharaoh' , also owner of one of the two diving centers and several other businesses. He is the most entrepreneurial person on the island. A true local celebrity. I imagine that if we continue to build moai , yours would be one of the largest. If the main attraction of Hangaroa is to be in the town, the explore is precisely to be outside of it, eight kilometers away, where the firmament looks even more infinite and the first rays of sun sneak into your pillow at dawn. In the middle of an idyllic setting of emerald green fields with views of the sea, the horses roam at will and the crickets make up his particular symphony.
Inside the beautiful volcanic stone construction, the Pisco Sour They help plan the next day's activities. In the infinite silence of the night it seems to be heard the movement of the stars. In 2010, the POT gave a star to Rapa Nui, number 221,475 , and baptized her with her name. It seems that the location of the island is allowing the discovery of several stars that are difficult to see from other points on the planet. Here, so far from everything, you see things that are invisible in other places. Suddenly, the roar of an engine provokes the howling of all the dogs on the island. I am scared too. Never before had the passing of an airplane impressed me so much. After several days on the island, the ballast of our condition as a modern and civilized man begins to loosen. It is curious that so far from the rest of everything, one manages, at last, understand yourself better and, by the way, accept that the best tool to explain this island, the world in reality, more than science is poetry. I completely agree with Neruda, who also "It took so long to get here and now it's so hard to leave."
This report has been published in number 61 of Conde Nast Traveler.
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