Easter Island

Easter Island is one of the most spectacular and enigmatic places in the world. If you love travelling, put in on your bucket list. Some call it the most isolated inhabited island in the world and it certainly feels like it when you fly there - it's either a five hour flight west of Santiago or five hours east of Tahiti. Believe me, the trip is worth it. This is just one of those places that is stamped upon the collective psyche of the human race - and for very good reason. Any archaeologist would probably put this site in their top ten of places around the world to visit because of the megalithic statues (called moai) that are dotted all around the island's perimeter and the traces of the "bird-man" cult that have been left around Orongo Crater. For many years, since discovered by Western civilisation, the culture that carved the gigantic statues was a mystery - shrouded in myths, some of which have probably carried on to this day. How were the statues moved? Why were they built? How did a primitive culture move these massive blocks up to 25km away? Why were they erected on the coastline and why do all the statues face towards the island and not out to the ocean? Why were most of them toppled? Was there a war? Some of these questions have now been answered with a fair degree of certainty, but a lot still remain in doubt and even to this day discoveries are still being made. This magical place features in the first chapter of "Goodbye, Mr. Descartes", so here I've inserted an excerpt to give you a taste of its magic:

Looking out over the island, almost the whole island in fact, I can’t help wondering if the Rapa Nui had reached some sort of critical mass in 1680, hemmed in: ‘enclosed within the walls of society and peace.’ Had their instincts been reignited? Had they suffered a diminishing motivation to survive? And then, when their resources had dwindled, this same diminishment had triggered all out warfare, their instincts flushed with value once more, leading to the toppling of statues and the start of a new order – the birdman cult.

Vian gives us a couple of hours to walk around while he returns to his car, no doubt to have a siesta. We walk past El Gigante, Easter Island’s largest stone moai, lying at forty-five degrees, its back still attached to the caldera, deprived of mana, forlorn and wasted; on the verge of becoming something of culturally-attributed value, but not quite making it. Still, celebrated in a way, twenty metres long and weighing one-hundred and seventy tonnes, one of almost four-hundred moai littered here in Rano Raraku’s inanimate graveyard.

We continue along a narrow path until we meet the lip of the caldera. Of course, I’d read that Rano Raraku was an extinct volcano, but it’s not until you reach the edge of the mountain and peer into the crater that you fully cognise the reality of its volcanic origins. The inside of this substantial basaltic bowl is lush with tall, green grasses, and more moai are dotted around the gently-sloping inner sides. We carry on down the path towards these statues and are thankful that we are here out of season. I can only see two or three people, but I know that when the cruise ships come in the summer, this place can become relatively crowded. Yet here we are, having this place almost to ourselves. I know that we will get some good, unobtruded images.

I’m here, standing nonchalantly, looking into the sullen eye-sockets of Easter Island statues. You can always imagine being somewhere, have expectations of what a place will look like, what it will smell like, and what feelings it will imbibe upon you when you finally get there. This, however, bears no relation to actually being in the scene, none whatsoever. Being here, existing in an image which is so familiar, is anti-climactic from the point of view that nothing is really that much of a surprise: it is devoid of ‘newness’ - if you can define the feeling as such. The surprises are purely spatial most of the time in relation to your imagination: ‘I didn’t imagine that would be there,’ or, ‘these are much larger than I thought.’ In terms of day-to-day sensations nothing has changed either. I can still see, hear, touch, feel, smell and taste as I did the day before: my sensory perception mechanisms haven’t changed in any way. I don’t feel the need to get permanently externally excited either. If I whoop and holler, all I’m going to remember is whooping and hollering for an extended period which will only detract from what I think I need to do. I need to absorb this scene. I just need to be quiet and look at it, and let my eyes take it in so that I can remember it. At the end of the day, all we have ever got is the here and the now. I’m in the here and the now of Easter Island and I might never get to experience that ever again. I tend to block those thoughts out though, being the eternal optimist. What makes me think I’ll come here again? This is Easter Island for crying out loud. Chances are I’ll never come here again. So I have to remember it. I just have to. I don’t know why, I just do. One day, there might come a time when that’s all I’ve got. You can always imagine the future and remember the past, but the here and the now never lasts.

It’s the looking back, the remembering, the memories, that end up having so much meaning attached to them. They become emotionally loaded to the extent that a photograph or smell, or a familiar scene, can flush these memories to the surface and get you all choked up for no reason. You can’t express the reason because language just can’t. It’s not that any of us aren’t skillful enough to express in words the sensations and perceptions of a particular event, it’s just that those words are wholly inadequate. You can never describe everything in a scene. You can’t translate the essence of what made that moment so special. You can’t describe a subtle smell and then expect the person to understand exactly the smell you’re talking about. You can’t describe the minutiae of delicate tones that the wind is playing upon those lush grasses and expect someone to completely know the sound you are trying to evoke. You can’t translate the subjective feeling you experienced for a fleeting moment when you looked upon a scene so hauntingly beautiful and familiar, and yet so distant and unknowable.