Jason Devitt

I first heard about Easter Island when I was ten or eleven years old. An English teacher had us read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki in class. Heyerdahl believed that the island´s enigmatic statues - the moais - were evidence that people from an ancient South American civilization had sailed west across the Pacific to occupy this, the most remote inhabitable island on earth (and not Polynesian people who sailed east from Tahiti, as everyone else thought). To prove that this was possible, he sailed a little wooden boat several thousand kilometers from Peru to Easter Island. Millions of romantics and armchair explorers were enthralled.

Later I remember a show on British TV called Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, a series of documentaries on ´unexplained phenomena´. This show had a ball with Easter Island. Why were many moais half buried in the hillside? How were they moved around? They weigh many tons, but there are no trees on the island to make equipment, and no large animals. What happened to the people who built them? When Europeans arrived the moais had been abandoned, many of them had been torn down, and there were just two thousand poor and badly nourished people living here, who could only offer folktales about how they were built. The segment ended with a story that the moais were men and women who had been turned to stone. Cue spooky music.

And then was Erich von Daniken, who proposed that aliens got stranded on Easter Island, built the moais for some unfathomably alien reason, and were finally rescued, by aliens.

I have always wanted to go.

In five days we got to see almost every square inch of the island, in a 4WD or on horseback. Even now there are very few trees here, and only one town, so that from the highest point on the island you can see the Pacific stretching all the way to the horizon in every direction. The nearest inhabited land is two thousand kilometers away, and that´s Pitcairn Island.

But this tiny, barren place has more to see than you expect - soft rolling hills, wild horses grazing everywhere, caves formed by lava tubes, cave paintings and rock carvings, a volcanic crater filled with rainwater with a ceremonial village and altar on its lip. And the moais.

There are almost nine hundred moais, half of them mounted on platforms like those in the first photo above, half of them scattered around a quarry in the crater of an extinct volcano called Rano Raraku, in various stages of completion, as if the builders downed tools one day a few hundred years ago and just walked away. Or vanished. It is a haunting place. Damn, now I´m doing it.

We know a lot more now than Heyerdahl did thanks to new techniques in archaeology, genetic testing, and pollen analysis (pollen from core samples reveals what used to grow here). At one point there may have been over ten thousand people living on Easter island, growing a wide variety of crops, catching sea birds, fish, and porpoises, and producing enough of a surplus to support a complex social hierarchy, including a caste of sculptors. The moais probably represented ancestors, and they and the platforms or ahus on which they are mounted are more refined forms of structures that have also been found in Tahiti - from which Easter Island was first colonized around 400 A.D., according to both genetic and linguistic analysis. When they got here the island was covered in palm trees, strong enough for scaffolding and hoists and rollers for moving the moais around, as well for building boats.

And then it all went horribly wrong. The trees slowly disappeared. The soil eroded. Crops failed. Half of the native flora and fauna went extinct, including most of the seabirds. Without large trees, the islanders could no longer make fishing boats and harpoons sturdy enough to catch porpoises, much less go on erecting moais. Remains of weapons suggest that a war followed, for control of whatever resources remained. Most controversially, there is evidence that the survivors turned to cannibalism for a time.

Jared Diamond (here and in more detail I think in his recent book Collapse) sees Easter Island as a clear example of our ability to destroy ourselves through mismanagement of the environment. He may be right, but understandably the people of Easter Island would rather focus on the high points of their ancestors´civilization, rather than the theory of a self-inflicted disaster. And they would rather emphasize the irrefutable damage done later by contact with Europeans: disease, slavery, destruction of the culture, colonial misrule. A theory that the Little Ice Age may have triggered the original collapse lets their ancestors off the hook completely.

Still, on our last day here it was ironic to see a little street fair in Hanga Roa on the theme of environmentalism. Schoolkids mounted exhibits on the evils of litter, and local organizations discussed recycling, marine conservation, and efforts to restore some of the native flora and fauna.

Sadly we saw no aliens.

The stingrays come so close to shore that you can pet them without even dropping your plastic cup of rum punch.

When we learned that in order to fly from Australia to South America, we´d have to stop over in Tahiti, our first reaction was not "oh no, is there no direct flight?"

I always thought that the problem for Tahiti was not that people don´t want to go there but that, as Captain Bligh learned, they don´t want to leave. I was wrong. Only 200,000 tourists go to Tahiti each year, roughly one tourist for each resident. Almost 7 million go to Hawaii - six tourists per resident. (The highest ratio in the world? With 200 visitors per resident, Venice is essentially a theme park.)

What this means is that Tahiti is relatively unspoilt.

I should be precise. Firstly, the name of the country is French Polynesia and it consists of 118 little islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Most people live on the island of Tahiti, which is the largest and most famous - French Polynesia is often referred to as ´Tahiti and her islands´ - but it is not the prettiest and a lot of visitors skip it altogether. Many of the other islands have white sand beaches and are surrounded by lagoons. Of these Bora Bora is best known and it´s covered in luxury resorts as you would expect. But other travelers told us that Maupiti, just west of Bora Bora, is just as beautiful and almost deserted. We spent most of our time on Moorea, a 30-minute ferry ride from Tahiti, but still underdeveloped.   

Secondly, relatively unspoilt means almost destroyed by contact with Europeans, colonized, used as a test site for nuclear bombs, and now desperately seeking mass tourism, but not as spoilt as you might think, because they haven´t succeeded. It means relative to Ko Phi Phi or Ibiza or Cancun or Bali.

It does not mean cheap, which is odd, because when demand is less than expected prices ought to be low. Why I am not sure, but I think the reason is that half of the government´s revenue comes from France.

Tahiti was a subsistence economy until the mid sixties, when France, which had just lost its colony in Algeria, suddenly remembered that it owned a little paradise in the Pacific and could blow that up instead. France started paying a very large amount of money to Tahiti each year in return for testing nuclear weapons on some of the more remote atolls. (Quiz: how much would you ask for?) This went on for thirty years in the face of mounting international protests - you may remember that the French secret service blew up a ship belonging to Greenpeace - until tests finally stopped in 1996. The French decided to go on paying Tahiti a large amount of money, to help them ‘adjust’ their economy.

It appears that a lot of that money has been poorly spent, if not squandered. The tourist market is not as big as it ought to be and other sectors are struggling. I think that much money has to have fostered both corruption and inflation, so that everything costs more than it should. And it can´t help that half of all imports come from France; the next biggest source is New Zealand (less than 10%). Tahiti is effectively a member of the EU, but it´s hard to imagine that getting a lot of cheap butter from the other side of the planet is better than trading with your neighbors. Unless trading with France is the price of getting the subvention.

But it is beautiful. And relatively unspoilt. And it´s only two and a half hours further than Hawaii if you are flying from the US. Go. 

Summer and I are getting addicted to scuba diving. From Sydney we flew to Cairns and spent three days diving off the Great Barrier Reef. The highlight was swimming alongside two beautiful green-backed turtles, the first time we’d seen these animals underwater. This photograph was taken by one of our fellow divers, Don Cantlon.

It was also the first time that we dived without a guide. At the end of our last dive I was heading back in the general direction of the boat, quite happily watching my compass, when Summer tapped me on the shoulder. She pointed in a completely different direction, and then took out a slate and wrote "Are you sure we’re on right side of reef and know where boat is?"

Next time you and your spouse get lost in the car and start arguing, picture yourselves having exactly the same row while 30 feet underwater and running out of air.

To outsiders there is something very entertaining about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. The cities are about the same size and the same age. When Australia federated, Canberra was built and made capital to avoid choosing between the two.

People from Melbourne claim that their city is more sophisticated, intellectual; you know, classy. While we were there a newspaper was outraged to learn how few Melbourne designers had been invited to show at Sydney’s Fashion Week, which of course undermined the integrity of the entire event.

Tellingly, people in Sydney seem more concerned about what the rest of the world thinks of them than anything Melbourne might say: Sydney papers speculated that their Fashion Week may now be the "fifth most important in the world, if not the fourth." But it was a woman from Sydney who made the most condescending remark that we heard: "There was a time when we would never even have considered buying a Melbourne wine."

Me, I like Sydney. It’s partly that Melbourne doth protest too much. ("Sydney hosted the Olympics, but we’ve hosted the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games!" "What are the Commonwealth Games?" asked my American wife.) It’s partly that Melbourne is more European in outlook, and Sydney is more American. But mostly it’s Sydney Harbour, because it is probably the most beautiful harbour - or harbor - in the world.

Harbors occupy some place in the imagination half way between the natural and the artificial. Most are not places of great natural beauty in themselves. A harbor is a tool: a found tool, like a stone with a sharp edge or a long straight stick. Add a little fishing community and a few sailboats and even those of us who can´t tell a spinnaker from a starboard poopsail get all sentimental. Sydney Harbour has all this and is naturally beautiful and seems to go on forever and is topped off with one of the most remarkable buildings in the world.

We walked around Manly Cove, we caught a ferry, and I walked from the Botanic Gardens to the Opera House. But there is no better way to see Sydney Harbour than by climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Click on the image to see a group of people climbing.

There are very few places in the world where someone with no training or experience can climb a structure like this, which was never designed with tourists in mind. When Paul Cave, the founder of BridgeClimb, first proposed the idea to the Roads and Traffic Authority, they wrote back with a list of sixty-two objections. It took him ten years to work his way through that list, but he and his team have been rewarded with more than a million customers since the climb finally opened in 1998.

It takes about an hour to get breathalyzed, walk through the metal detector, suit up, get familiar with the safety lines and other equipment, and practise on a rig that resembles the scariest part of the climb. Once you get out there, it seems almost too easy.

If you want to try this without flying to the other side of the planet, a bridge climb is about to open in the U.S. on the Purple People Bridge at Newport on the Levee, in Newport, Kentucky. From the top of the bridge the promoters promise a spectacular view of the greater Cincinnati area.

Or you could go to Sydney.

Chris Barns´ Kangaroo Rescue Centre is one of a handful scattered around Australia. The kangaroos are rescued from roadkill; even if its mother is run over and killed, a joey in her pouch may survive. If it´s at least one month old, it can be raised by hand.

Guilt-stricken drivers and passers-by bring the tiny joeys to Chris. They are wrapped in swaddling clothes and bottle-fed, cuddled, and kept warm for about twelve months, after which they can be released into the wild. This one is called Albert, and he likes to suck his tail.

Like lambs, kangaroos are not just cute, they taste great too. Kangaroo is a lean, gamey red meat, which I first tried in New York at Aussie restaurant Eight Mile Creek.
The reds and the grays are not at all endangered - they are seen as a pest in some parts. And scientists like Tim Flannery have long argued that it´s better to eat kangaroos than to destroy their habitat in favor of raising cattle and sheep.

But they can’t be farmed economically, because they can jump a three-meter fence.