Tag Archives: South America

Surprise-o Valparaiso

30th March 2018

The next major segment of our wanderings around the left-hand side of South America will be a trip to Ecuador and (of course) the Galapagos Islands, which will challenge the abilities of my brain to accept and retain an even greater density of information than was on offer in two days on Easter Island. A return to Santiago with a day of conventional tourism (wandering round taking photos of stuff) seemed a fairly restful way of bridging between the two. First of all, we had to get off Easter Island. Malena got us to the airport nearly three hours before the departure, which on the surface of it seems a bit excessive, given that the airport, small as it is, only has to deal with a maximum of two flights a day. As it turned out, it was no bad thing, as it gave us the chance to claim a reasonable place in, you guessed it, a queue.

This wasn’t the check-in queue, though; it was the queue to get into the check-in queue as your bags went through the X-ray scanner. Then we could join the check-in queue. Then we could go and sit outside whilst waiting for the chance to board. Serendipity gave us the chance to chat to a(nother) nice Australian couple with whom we’d actually exchanged a few words en route to Easter Island. They were on the last segment of a two-month trip and really looking forward to getting home; it made me wonder what my threshold will be. But we got some useful tips about Galapagos and Machu Picchu, because of course they’d already been there and done that.

The flight back to Santiago gave Jane the opportunity to watch “Thor – Ragnarok” for the third time on this holiday alone, which shows true dedication to watching whatever it is that Chris Hemsworth has to offer. Nope, still don’t get it. I watched “Kingsman and the Golden Circle”, because I like classy entertainment, me.

Anyhoo…the break in Santiago was scheduled to include a tour of Valparaiso (a major port) and Viña del Mar (its neighbouring holiday resort), which meant we had another chance to meet our charming guide with the unusual portfolio career, Ronald. (Apparently, we were his last tour of the season, and he’s going to spend the winter concentrating on finishing and rehearsing a musical he’s writing).

Valparaiso is some 65 miles from Santiago, and lies on the other side of the coastal mountains. So the journey there takes you westwards through a 4km tunnel into the first of a couple of fertile valleys, and then another into the second. The first valley is where a large amount of fruit and vegetables are grown; the second is lined with vineyards, growing mainly chardonnay and sauvignon blanc grapes. As we went along, Ronald explained that Valparaiso was Chile’s capital city in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, capitalising on its significantly important location as a Pacific coast port. However, starting in the 19th century,the important and influential families left the city and the Panama canal damaged its standing as a major international transport route. Its standing has been damaged even further by a recent development which saw another (neighbouring?) Chilean port, San Antonio, win the cruise liner business after Valparaiso’s port workers staged a strike. It has strong French, German and English communities (the local football team is called Valparaiso Wanderers, and Viña del Mar’s is called Everton) and this is reflected in the architecture and the naming of places.

After something over an hour we got to Valparaiso, which was completely different from the completely erroneous picture I had allowed to build in my mind of a relatively dull industrial port. For a start, it is enormously hilly,

with separate neighbourhoods on separate hills, and it makes San Francisco seem merely slightly lumpy by comparison;

it is ramshackle and graffiti-covered;

the wiring has a distinctly South American character;

and parts of it are reportedly very dangerous.

On the other hand, it has considerable charm: lots of the buildings are very colourful;

(above – the Hotel Brighton) many of them are unusual, like the Palacio Baburizza, built by a Croat and gifted to the city in his will;

street art of all sorts abounds;

with innovative use of resources such as drinks bottles

and bathroom furniture;

and the various hillside neighbourhoods are served by funicular railways (some working, some in disrepair).

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Yes, it is an industrial port, but on a sunny Good Friday, with the holiday crowds out

and the entertainers plying their trade

Valparaiso shows that it is unique, vibrant and appealing. (The puppet master shown above had his Pavarotti wander over to the money tin after the last aria, peer in and shake his head in disappointment; a lovely touch.)

Ronald made the visit even more individual by performing some of his pieces in a local café called Columbina for us, on an appallingly out-of-tune piano, which is why I’m not providing the video.

So by the time we’d seen that and got to Viña del Mar, there was really only time for a nice lunch at a decent, busy, buzzy restaurant called Los Pomairinos, where we were served by Ian McShane, or possibly Robbie Coltrane

(actually much more genial than he looks in this photo), and then it was time to go back to base, as we decided that there wasn’t much to Viña del Mar beyond beaches, proms, apartment blocks, sunshine and general seasidery. We had an engaging detour to say hello to Ronald’s sister, which you don’t get on your average private guided tour, and then we were back at our hotel, to prepare for a 5am start to our journey to Ecuador. We will report in on that in due course, but will likely be off-grid for a week whilst filling memory cards with photos and videos of all the Galapagos Islands have to offer.

Laters!

Easter Island 3: The rest of the moai, a volcanic crater and Birdman

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28th March 2018

There are various different estimates of the number of moai on Easter Island, but “upwards of 900” seems to cover it. Some are near platforms and therefore count as official moai, some are in the quarry, some are just any old where and therefore can be presumed to have fallen and broken on their journey from quarry to platform. Ah, well, back to the drawing board. It only takes a year to make another. (And size doesn’t, as far as anyone knows, make much of a difference. The moai appear to have grown over the course of the culture, with later moai being bigger than earlier ones. But bigger ones don’t necessarily take longer, as you can have more men working on a larger statue.)

So, let’s wrap up the moai part of the Easter Island segment of our odyssey with some photos of many of those that have been restored. Firstly, and strikingly, one has been restored with replica eyes being put in place.

This can be found at Ahu Tahai, and the eyes certainly add character to the appearance, although whether that’s an improvement is a moot point.

Another important platform can be found at Ahu Akivi.

The significance of this platform is that it was the first to be restored, through the energy, insight and enthusiasm of Thor Heyerdahl working with American archaeologist William Mulloy. Sort of Thor ~~Ragnarok~~ Restoration.

Jane’s joke, not mine. She has a thing for Chris Hemsworth. Can’t imagine why.

Heyerdahl is most famously associated with his 1947 Kon Tiki raft experiment in which he sailed 5,000 miles from South America to the Tuamoto Islands to demonstrate the viability of long sea journeys as a way of cultural migration. (Anyone of my approximate vintage will remember that The Shadows had a hit with a record called Kon-Tiki, which just goes to show that pop music can have an educational role.)

Heyerdahl first discovered and photographed the moai in 1955, and he recruited Mulloy to drive the restoration work at Ahu Akivi, which started in 1960, and so has significance as the first platform to be restored.

Mulloy ran several archaeological projects on Easter Island and had great influence in the way it appears today, for which he is justly respected by today’s islanders. He is buried at the Ahu Tahai site.

There are several unusual features of the Ahu Akivi platform:

It is inland and facing the coast, whereas other platforms are on the coast facing inland
It is aligned so that the moai exactly face the rising sun during the spring equinox; no other platform is so precisely aligned
All seven moai are of the same size

There is, of course, a legend about Ahu Akivi, concerning the original Rapa Nui King Hotu Matu’s priest having a dream about an island, the king sending out scouts who discovered the island, with seven remaining to await the king’s arrival as he moved his entire people to Rapa Nui. There are several reasons why the experts dismiss this legend, but, hey, it’s a great story.

And that about wraps it up for the moai part of the Easter Island story. But there’s more, and that is to be found at a site called Orongo, in the south west of the island.

The first thing you encounter as you approach the Orongo site is a spectacular view across the Rano Kau volcanic crater, which is a mile wide.

The lake is actually a wetland, bordered in some places by a rainforest. Fruit trees grow inside the crater, and the lake, although essentially stagnant, has had special fish put in it which do not need much oxygen to survive but which eat the mosquito eggs and so keep the island’s mosquito population down.

Turning your back on Rano Kau, you go through the Orongo reception (some interesting photos in it, by the way) and into the site of the Birdman ceremonial village.

The Birdman culture replaced the moai culture on the island, being in existence between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. It was based around a race to the furthest of three small islets off the south-western tip of the island.

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The basic idea is that each of 18 tribes on the island submitted a champion, whose job was to climb down the cliff, swim across to the furthest islet (called Moto Nui), await the arrival of the migrating sooty tern seabirds, procure an egg from a nest and transport it back to the ceremonial village. Intact. The winner was the first to arrive with an intact egg (often transported, we understand, attached by cloth to the competitor’s forehead). His reward was to liaise with three virgins who had been specially kept aside for him; the reward for the chief of his tribe was to become the Birdman for the year, a position of some status.

The village itself consists of several stone houses which were, essentially, used only for the period of the Birdman competition.

Of these, around a couple of dozen – about half of the total number – have been restored. Embarrassingly, some of the originals were damaged by the British, who hacked them about in order to get at some murals inside them. To compound this, the Brits then stole a unique moai, made of basalt and carved with Birdman petroglyphs and this (“the stolen friend”) stands in the British Museum. Just down the corridor, one assumes, from the Elgin marbles.

So, why did the moai culture die out? And why was it replaced by the Birdman cult? (“no-one knows”, but perhaps the deforestation of the palms left the islanders unable to leave, and the migration of the sooty tern gave them the illusion of being able to come and go at will?) Whatever, it’s another of Easter Island’s unusual sites and sights, and part of a wonderful, compelling and mysterious story which it was a pleasure to spend two days discovering.

Easter Island 2 – The making of the moai

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28th March 2018

The lunatic idea behind Stonehenge (“Hey, let’s make a monument of 25-ton stones! And just to make it fun, let’s transport them from 150 miles away!”) seems to have found some resonance in Easter Island. All of the moai, wherever they ended up on the island, were made in a single place, Rano Raraku, and then, somehow or other, transported to their final platform. How? “No-one knows.” But there’s an engaging theory, for which read on.

Rano Raraku is effectively a quarry, fairly high up among the island’s hills.

As you walk through it, the first impression you get is that of heads sticking up out of the ground, and the first descriptions of the moai, such as the one which excited Jane’s curiosity when she was a child, were “the heads of Easter Island”.

It took a while for archaeologists to realise that these were actually just the tops of full statues that were buried. And then it became clear that the moai were actually fashioned in place. The shape was hacked out of the rocky ground (“the ground” is formed by compressed volcanic ash named tuff, sometimes erroneously called tufa). The moai shape was started lying on its back on the slope, and then, as parts of it were completed, the ground was hacked out from beneath it and it was gradually raised upright so that the completed moai was standing in its own depression. What has happened in the picture above is simply that the depressions have been filled in over the centuries.

Evidence for this can be seen higher up, where a moai is just being started.

Look carefully just to the left of centre of the picture, into the cavity hacked out of the stone, and you should be able to make out the chin and nose of a moai that’s lying on its back.

There’s a mystery moai at the quarry called “Tukuturi”, unique in that it’s in a kneeling position

and unusual in the shape of its face, which is less stylised than the ones typified in the Tongariki 15 that you can see in the background.

One legend is that it represents a master moai craftsman, and it’s erected to keep watch over the work being done in the quarry. As usual, “no-one knows”.

So, that’s the story of the statues. But what about the other key part of some moai, the “Pukao” – topknots?

These are made from a different, red-cloured stone, called scoria, which is much less dense than tuff. This rock was mined in a different place on the island, called Puna Pau.

You can tell that the material is easier to work than tuff from this stone.

This is not some mysterious symbolic shaping; it’s the work of a shepherd, who hacked out a cavity to shelter from wind and rain!

So, it’s known where the pukao were made – here’s a pit where some were in progress when work stopped:

What is less clear is (a) how did the islanders get the pukao out of depressions such as this?, (b) how were they transported to the platforms? and (c) how were they placed on top of the moai? As usual, “no-one knows”.

What is known is that completed pukao featured a depression which matched the top of the head upon which it was to sit. We know this from another location on the island, Vinapu.

This is an inverted topknot, revealing the depression. You can see that it will not have sat foursquare on a head – in fact the topknots sit slightly forward on the heads.

Vinapu, by the way, is the site which demonstrates most clearly the amazing stoneworking skills of the Easter Islanders. There are two platforms, both of which show astounding precision in the way that stone was carved in order to align exactly.

You literally can’t get a sheet of paper between the stones, so precisely are they carved. This is workmanship akin to that found on the Inca Wall at Cusco which we (apparently) will see later on in the trip – keep an eye out for the blog post on that – but experts cast strong doubt that there was any explicit cross-fertilisation from Inca culture. There is also a legend that the Islanders found a way to make stone soft, so that it could be manipulated just like cheese. But, as usual, “no-one knows”.

The final part of the puzzle is – how the hell do you move a stone statue that weighs several tons? We know that they were made in one place and then moved to their final destination, and, as usual, there are several theories about how it might be done, but “no-one knows”. Our guide Malena told us of the words of one old woman who asserted that the moai “walked – two steps a night”. This sounds preposterous, but there’s actually a video of this being done with teams of men on either side making a replica (10 ton) moai sway from side to side, while a team from behind stopped it falling forward. In this way, the moai “walks”:

And another thing: assuming that this works (and recent ground scanning techniques have uncovered trails radiating from Rano Raraku that look like they may be tracks along which the moai may have been moved), how did they get the damn’ things up on to their platforms, sited accurately on their stone plinths?

That’s right: “no-one knows”.

For the continuation of this story, and what happened to the moai culture, read the next post – click here.

Steve Walker

Photography/Videography Hobbyist; Travel Enthusiast

Tag Archives: South America

Surprise-o Valparaiso

Easter Island 3: The rest of the moai, a volcanic crater and Birdman

Easter Island 2 – The making of the moai