Day 4 – The end of the moai cult

Today is the last day of sightseeing on the island. And after today, I will have seen all the moais that have been put back upright.

The first stop today is rather close to Honga Roa, the capital of Easter Island and the place where the community of Rapa Nui lives. We go to Tahai where you can see beautiful sunsets with the statues in front of it. However we need a cloudless sky to see the sunset. Today our luck seems to be turning because there has been a lot of wind since midnight which chases  the clouds away. A blue sky is the result.The ahu's of Tahai were restored by William Mulloy in the late 60s. We find here three different ahu’s, including the oldest ceremonial site that dates back to the 6th century.

The statue of Ko to Riku is about 5 meters high and weighs 20 tons.

In this moai, the eyes  were also restored. Not with coral and obsidian but with cement. Until today only one pair of eyes has been found throughout the island. The material from which the eyes were made, was very porous, so when the images were pushed from the ahu, these fell immediately to pieces. A few meters from the first ahu stands the robust Ahu Tahai.

And a bit further Vai Ure with five moais. These five date from different periods. This is clearly to be seen from the different shapes : from the very robust to something more sophisticated. Also, in tallness, there is some difference.

The moais became bigger and bigger over time, yet in later time still little ones were carved. Here you can also clearly see that the natural landscape was leveled, elevated and reinforced along the back to make the ahu's.

We now leave the coast and go slightly inland. Ahu Huri a Urenga was restored by William Mulloy in 1976 and is the only image that has two pairs of hands. The hands were carved in the statue. The reason for these two pairs of hands is guesswork. Was it a  mistake and were the hands redone? Or was this deliberate? In earlier times people with disabilities were considered special. They were considered to have special talents. Maybe  this is also the case here.

Because the sun is now really beginning to take the upper hand and our tour of the island is actually finished, we're going to go back to the site of Tongariki. I can take pictures with the sunlight shining on the moais this time.

Some figures: a total of 887 moais were found and registered so far.  288 moais were on their ahu (or altar), 397 istatues were found in the 'factory'  of Rano Raraku, 92 were found on their way to the ahu's.

The scarcity of resources such as timber and food, and the subsequent ‘civil war’ between the tribes put a stop to this statue cult ending with the destruction of the statues around about 1700.

Today, only 5,000 people live on Easter Island. The final blow however of the culture was not the ecological crisis, but by horrible slave trade. In 1862, Peruvian ships took more than a thousand residents to sell them as slaves to operators of guano mines along the Peruvian coast. At the insistence of the Tahitian bishop Etienne Jaussen 15 survivors were released after a few months. But what should have been a celebration, turned into yet another nightmare. The returning islanders brought deadly diseases with them, such as smallpox and tuberculosis, which cost the majority of the remaining population their lives. In 1877 only 111 of the original inhabitants were still alive. ‘It is not even the internal struggle, but especially the contact with the outside world that forever ended the Rapa Nui culture’, said Jo Anne van Tilburg, American archaeologist at UCLA. ‘Imagine the shock which the islanders underwent when they met strangers. How would you feel when after centuries of seclusion suddenly an alien spacecraft landed?’

And so for me a piece of mysticism was unravaled and a childhood dream became a reality.