Galapagos - Easter Island

Galapagos - Easter Island in Google Maps

We’d love to visit Isabela Island before leaving Galapagos, but we are not allowed to anchor there without an expensive cruising permit. But we get ‘lucky’ – the water stay of the Gennaker bowsprit breaks and Moni gets an ear infection. With this we are allowed to stay for a few days, but are not allowed to make tourism. It is not too bad, because the main reason to come, the penguins, is not there. I can fix the water stay with high tech rope and Moni recovers fast, too. At least we can see a more relaxed and authentic angle of Galapagos than Puerto Ayora.

It’s a long and rough passage from Galapagos to Easter Island. After a quiet first day the wind increases to 20-30kn abeam with waves of 3-4 meters and lasts like that for a week. Blue Bie excels flies every day 200 nautical miles towards Easter Island. It’s a rough ride with the waves abeam and we don’t do much more than the bare necessities – navigation, cooking and eating. The movements of the boat feel okay during the day, but become quite fearsome at night. Particularly Moni suffers; she can’t read or write without feeling sick. Blue Bie is doing well, only the (furled) Gennaker rips in a gust in excess of 30kn. How much nicer are the last few days with lighter winds on our stern! We can read and relax and immerse ourselves into the Polynesian culture which we are encountering on Easter Island. After 11 days and 1900 nautical miles we reach Easter Island on a stormy rainy day.

It has been a long dream of mine to travel to Easter Island, to see the heritage of the ‘Rapa Nui’ culture and to understand why this society has all but erased in such a short time. There is so much to see on this small island and we are surprised how lush Hanga Roa, the only settlement on the island is.

The history is really fascinating and we are learning every day another fascinating aspect of it, be it from the small museum, park guides or from other cruisers and tourists. Easter Island has been settled around 400 AC by a family which sailed from the Marquesas (French Polynesia). Over time, the island has been divided between 10 clans, who worshipped their ancestors with statues (Moai) on the burial sites (Ahu) overlooking the villages. The population grew up to an estimated 15’000 people and the construction of the Moais got more frantic. It is still unclear how the transported the up to 10m high statues, with their basic tools. They used a lot of wood to build houses, for fire and to transport the Moais. They completely deforested the island during the 17th century, destroying their food resources, which lead to a very fast disintegration of the society. Of the 900 Moais some 400 have been erected on the burial sites, 100 have been in transport and a staggering 400 are in different stages of construction in the quarry. It must have been an exponential construction growth and a very abrupt end of it. The largest one in the quarry was 21m tall, further demonstrating megalomania of Rapa Nui’s rulers. With the declining food resources, the chiefs were unable to feed the workers, which put down the work on the Moais more or less at once and which led to civil unrest and fighting between the clans.

Jacob Roggeveen, the first European to arrive in Easter Island in 1772, did not report any destroyed Moais. James Cook reported in 1774 many destroyed Moais and subsequently all the Ahus and Moais have been destroyed. Some of them have been painstakingly re-erected and are today a national park.

We tour the island by car and sail with Blue Bie to the other side of the island while northwesterlies make the main anchorage untenable. It is one of the most beautiful anchorages I have ever seen: We are anchoring all alone in the middle of the national park in front of the 15 Moais of Ahu Tongariki and the volcano Rano Raraku, where the Moais are sculptured. We soon make it our ‘own’ Ahu, where we relax, read and dream after the other tourists have left for the day.