I wanted to visit Easter Island since 1965, when I first read Kon Tiki in fifth grade. Thor Heyerdahl piqued my interest, though only because interest in travel had already been passed down by my father, while watching episodes of Jim Doney's Adventure Road, a Cleveland-area, TV staple. I was often told that if a person wanted an education the best way to get it was to pack your bags and go. Anywhere.
The desire to visit Easter Island was complicated for me over the years by writers like Jared Diamond, who in Guns, Germs, and Steel, argued that the Rapa Nui brought destruction on themselves by poor resource management and infighting. Diamond didn't know what he was talking about, but his "environmental collapse" theory stuck in the popular imagination, discrediting Easter Islanders.
Recent research by scientists from around the world, including the Americans Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo in The Statues That Walked, take Diamond to task, indicating the story is much more complicated. They demonstrate the degree to which the Rapa Nui thrived in extreme isolation, minus any eco-collapse, until Westerners came on the scene, bringing disease, enslavement, and death. They first arrived in 1720 when there were several thousand inhabitants, but by the 1880s the number of natives was down to somewhere around 200, thanks to Western interference.
It's no surprise, therefore, that Easter Islanders today look askance at outsiders. A kind of necessary evil, they're useful for tourist dollars, though they come at a cost. Chile officially colonized La Isla in 1888, and for the better part of a century it treated Islanders as second-class citizens. As everyone knows, colonization is expensive, and accordingly in the 1970s the Chilean government determined that a great way to offset the expense was by turning Easter Island into A Destination.
There are several hundred moai on the island, monuments to exemplary figures in Rapa Nui culture over at least a thousand years. An unimaginable effort went into quarrying, carving, and installing the figures, up to sixty feet tall and weighing up to ninety-five tons; they placed them on ahu, or bases, below which lay the bones of the honored. The problem with drawing tourists to see them originally was that every finished moai, any one not still in production, had been toppled in a plebiean revolution around 1600. Why would tourists make an effort and pay to see a bunch of toppled rocks?
The Chilean government, along with Chilean museums, and with the initial consent of Easter Island elders, began a campaign of moai restoration in the 1970s. They re-erected a few of the monuments, though they didn't get far before Island natives got a bad feeling about it. Ahus were disassembled, the bones removed to museums on the mainland, then filled with concrete; the moai were pieced together atop them.
Without the bones, the newly-erect moai assumed the status of western-style statues, bait for tourist brochures but empty signifiers to the Islanders themselves. On a two-day tour there recently, both of our guides lamented the loss of spiritual power in the re-erected moai. They're for tourists, they argued; they preferred the toppled works, that is living history, with the bones intact.
The population of Easter Islanders has recovered to around 7,000 today. It has a complicated relationship with the mainland and the world generally. Many Rapa Nui youth are sent to Santiago for high school or college, including our guides. I asked one, Was it hard to return after, and he replied, It was hard to stay away. Rapa Nui love for their island is palpable. Though every group is multiple, as a rule they feel no pressing need for the outside world. (Meanwhile my friend and I both commented how freaky it was, to be on a small island, knowing the closest land mass was over 2,000 miles away.)
They say Easter Island is the safest place on the planet. There are no guns and there's no real crime. Anyone can walk around saftely at any time of the day or night. There's also no big money––it's the anti-luxury destination. Electric, water, and cell services are intermittent and unreliable. In a sense the Island exemplifies as much as possible a modern version of bare life, especially because Islanders are aware of what they're rejecting; they have a choice. Savvy and self-aware, they don't clamor for the things Westerners can't seem to live without.
To that end they're collectively putting their foot down. There won't be any more restorations of moai. Only Rapa Nui can tell their story; only they can serve as guides, which wasn't the case until four years ago, going back to the '70s. No outsiders can buy land; no resort developers can buy the place up. Tourists are welcome, but only for a limited stay in locally-owned cabañas. The message is come, learn our history––then leave.
Of the dozens of far-flung places I've visited, the remote island of Rapanui has made an outsized impression for its embrace not of big money, luxury, and development but bare life––as much as that's possible in the world today. Again it's a conscious choice. In so many ways it's the undestination, collectively unimpressed as Islanders are with what Westerners call necessities––they're aware that paradise exists nowhere, but also that the closest thing to it is their own island. Their eyes are on history and restoring what was lost; they venerate not tourist money but hundreds of rocky remnants that deteriorate a little more each day, the bones of ancestors resting beneath.