Rapa Nui (IV): The Birdman and the fooled fools

TheTangata Manu or Birdman

The Tangata Manu or Birdman ritual is a central aspect of the Rapa Nui culture. The Rapa Nui were divided into different clans that inhabited different parts of the island.

Probably tired of warring, they reached an agreement on how to share power in a way that everyone would accept: through an annual competition to which each clan presented its best competitor. Whoever won, ruled the island for a year. The competition was very dangerous and often deadly.

In the Orongo area, the Rapa Nui erected a kind of dwelling where the chiefs and the young men chosen to represent each clan temporarily lived.

The main objective was to get the first egg of a tāhoro (tern) or manutara (island gull), a type of bird that nests on the cliffs of the island of Motu Nui, the small island located south of Easter Island. This event took place every year, usually between the months of November to February, at a time determined by when the birds were egg laying.

Participants had to swim from the coast of the island to Motu Nui, which was already a dangerous challenge due to the strong ocean currents. Once on the island, competitors climbed the cliffs, often using rope and other rudimentary tools, and had to take an egg – any egg – without damaging it. The first to return to Easter Island with the egg intact – swimming and climbing back – was proclaimed the Tangata Manu, the Birdman, and his clan reigned until the next ceremony.

Needless to say, the competition was run under the universal rules of “vale tudo”, so it was a mix between the speed of going and coming back, and the skill of throwing rocks on the head of the adversaries, or cutting the rope that saved them from falling off. There can only be one left.

El milagro del Maunga Terevaka: incendios y eucaliptos

Norwegians have a renowned explorer spirit. Roald Amundsen was an excellent explorer -the greatest exponent of the so-called Age of Heroic Explorers of the Antarctic-, winner of the famous race to conquer the South Pole (against the British Robert Scott), and also the first to sail the Northwest Passage (1903-1906), a route that connected the Atlantic and the Pacific through the Canadian Arctic. Norwegians have a renowned spirit of exploration.

To me -who have a tropical thermostat- I think it’s because living surrounded by so much cold 🥶 you have to get out of there as soon as possible 😅. One day my two Norwegian friends -maybe honoring that spirit of exploration- told me that they wanted to climb to the highest point of the island and see it all around. That is, to climb to the top of the Maunga Terevaka volcano in the northwest of the island. They are from Trondheim and of course, if you look it up on google maps, you see that it is surrounded by Norwegian mountains, no joke. They calculated that it would take us about two hours to go up and down, so during our morning excursion we reserved a small bottle of water, and we set out to go up in the afternoon, after eating some sandwiches. It was austral spring-summer, the day was sunny, we were wearing flip-flops and we didn’t even throw a single chocolate candy in the backpack to eat something. So, for what it was going to take us, was not necessary.

So we parked the Jeep that I had rented in the place that we estimated closest to the volcano using one of those touristy, small-sized maps where – roughly speaking – the points of interest of the island were represented. As it is narrow and rustic, the road did not have a proper shoulder. As the car was already full of belongings – backpacks, food, utensils, etc. – I put it in a little farther from the road, inside the eucalyptus forest that dominates the terrain in that area. They are so overgrown and lush that one could see little sky through the canopy. And we started walking.

As we climbed higher, the vegetation changed and the eucalyptus trees gave way to an area of tall grass and bushes. Animals could be seen grazing in the distance, and everything was bucolic and peaceful.

In one of those backward glances to remember visual landmarks -and thus be able to return to find the car-, we see smoke coming out of a place in the east of the island. Some absent-minded person must have had a hand with the barbecue, I’m sure. Anyway, who cares, we kept going up.

The photos I am posting do not do justice to what happened next. On the one hand, I stopped taking pictures because the situation demanded our concentration. On the other hand, it was the year 2007. With a compact camera of the time, when trying to take night photos from a distance -and without a tripod-, you can’t see anything. And, additionally, in some of the photos my companions are recognizable, so out of respect, I am not going to publish them either. Therefore, you will see no graphic document that testifies what I am going to tell, although it is in the memory of the people who participated in the performance – and also in the witnesses from 2000 km away 😅. But I have to tell for posterity about the lady who saved our ass. Insufferably long text to follow, you have been warned.

When we saw that we were not far from the summit, we looked back and saw that the fire not only had not been extinguished, but had grown in extent. And that it had moved further to the west (towards our position). Of course, we wondered if the fire was going to reach the car, of course. In a mini-conference of 3, the Norwegians won because, of course, I don’t speak a word of Norwegian and, on the other hand, the car had been rented directly by me, not by them. So the level of concern was not equally distributed 😅 among the parties. But being such a small island, we were sure that the smoke had already been seen from the town of Hanga Roa, and we guessed the firefighters were already working to extinguish it. Between retracing my steps on my own and, who knows, getting into the fire, or staying with them Norwegians and completing the ascent, the three of us resumed our way to the summit 🤷🏻. By the way, the time calculations were a bit off. It was getting dark fast and there was still some way to go.

When we got to the top, we were happy to have completed the challenge. And -of course- we were so cool that we put our pebble on top of the pile at the summit. If Instagram had existed at the time, we would have been a huge hit.

But once the euphoria had passed, reality set in: we were on top of a volcano, on a practically deserted island -remember that 99% of the population is concentrated in Hanga Roa, about 10 km away-, pitch-black night, with a few sips of water, no food, no flashlights, and with a forest fire that was now rapidly approaching the car. Ah! One last thing: would you be able to locate visual landmarks on a pitch-black night in a terrain that is the first time you set foot on? Well, neither would we!!!! Ajjajaj 🫣

When we realized that the fire already had terrifying dimensions – its size could be seen by the light and the smoke it was giving off in contrast with the night – we suddenly got worried not about the car – well, I was, of course, because they were going to make me pay for it – but about the forest itself, which was going to be burnt to the ground! And clearly the firemen had not come to put out the fire, so in another mini-meeting we decided to try to call the Rapa Nui Fire Service and let them know what was happening. This way we would save the forest, hopefully the car, and we would have someone around when we managed to get -we would see how- to the road.
Again, it’s 2007. Our phones, miraculously, had coverage. But it was 2G coverage – GSM only, voice only, SMS only, AND NO DATA. So we couldn’t use that rustic WAP browser on our Nokia or Siemens bricks. Only voice and SMS… How to find out the phone number of the Rapa Nui firefighters? It was very urgent and very important!!!…

Logic told us that we needed to get in touch with someone who had access to the Internet, who could find the phone number and give it to us so that we could call and explain the seriousness of the matter. So these Norwegian friends started to call Norway, but whoever they managed to talk to could not give them the information -for some reason I can’t remember-. So it was my turn and, of course, I choose to call my non-blood brother RMC, who, given the hour difference between Rapa Nui and Europe, was already sleeping peacefully in Cordoba at that time. When I woked up my poor brother and asked him to look for the information on the internet, he answered me that he had no internet either on the phone or at home; that he only had it in the store, and that he was sorry, but he was not going to go at 2 o’clock in the morning in the middle of a northern winter night to open the store and look for a phone number of the Rapa Nui firefighters. If that was a joke, it was very original, but if this was true, I had completely lost my mind already 😂. Hey Tini, sorry buddy. I was quite off that day… 🙄

So, with the map we calculated more or less where the car should be and we started to descend and once we would find the fire, we would see what we would do. The chief Viking led ahead; but these people live with perennial snow 10 months a year, with all the tracks being marked in the snow when they go hiking. But this was another level in the video game, grass and at night. Who knows where we were heading 🙃. Since we had no flashlights, we were literally walking in the dark through the brush and weeds. We knew that, on the way up, we hadn’t passed any orographic features – a sinkhole, a hole, a gully, nothing – so we were cautious, but we kept moving forward. When we caught a glimpse of something strange in the darkness, we used the light from our cell phones. But not as a flashlight, no, that functionality did NOT EXIST back then 😅 We would take a picture with FLASH! So we would stop in front of it, say 1,2,3! and the three of us would have to look very concentrated to see what we could see in front of us a the flash fired 😂. Imagine that a flash back then could illuminate 5 or 6 meters at the most. No kidding. Holy cow. We could have stuck our ankle in any hole covered by grass. We were extremely lucky.

But of course, we were not the only living beings around who were frightened by the fire. Do you remember those wild horses grazing peacefully? Well, they were already approaching us, heading west away from the fire. And like them, the rest of the animals, of course. And, here comes the terrifying part, dogs. We could hear the dogs barking in the distance. We tightened our pace more and more and approached the edge of the eucalyptus forest; we could already see that it was burning in the direction we wanted to go, making a kind of inverted U shape. Desperate, we started to look at the map and saw that there was a path further east through the forest to reach the road. It was a detour of several kilometers, but as the fire was advancing in the shape of an inverted U, if we went into the forest it could surround us. The other option was to return to the top of the volcano and seek shelter for the night, because as I mentioned before, the slope was steep but flat and the animals were running back and forth around us. So the fire was not going to affect us, but the prospect of being run over by a horse or cornered by dogs was not very flattering. We had to hurry to get to the road before the south end of the fire cut off the trail. So now we started walking at a (faster) pace. Now the scare was more of a scare, and we weren’t so cool anymore.

It had been about 4 or 5 hours since we started walking. And we managed to reach the road well before the fire arrived. So all relatively well; although we were several Km. away from the car, this path led to the road, so it was just a matter of walking. And then see what was of the car. But of course, joys are short-lived in the poor man’s house. At first far away, but then clearly closer, we heard again the wild dogs from before -or others, who knows- that were probably on the same path or on its margins. That was clearly a problem, as we could not take refuge anywhere; we started to trot to try to get to the main road as soon as possible. We were still in the middle of a dense forest of eucalyptus trees. And here we were really scared out of our wits. Water, who has any water left?

After a few minutes of jogging, and without knowing how far we had gone or how far we had to go, the first part of a miracle happened: we came across the metal gate of a house that was isolated, there in the middle of nowhere, on the side of the road. We talked it over among ourselves and, since the canine issue had all three of us with our testicles up exploring the duodenum, we decided to call for help. So we shouted out loud: Hello! Hola! Help! Ayuda! sdiynkdugnljflj! (or however the hell you say “give me a hand bro” in Norwegian 😝). Then the door of the house opened and, by a light on the porch, the Maori version of a sumo wrestler appeared – in a white tank top. The guy’s name translated from Rapa Nui had to be “Mountain Man” at the very least. He approached us – though leaving distance to the gate – and we explained what had happened to us. That we were lost, that a pack of dogs was coming after us, and that our car might already be burned somewhere in the middle of the fire. The guy didn’t even flinch. I suppose it would not be very common to find three broken foreigners at the gate of their house in the middle of the night and begging for help, but he told us that the road was ahead and that we had almost nothing left to get to the crossroads. A true Darwinist, that man was. We asked him to refill our water bottles, which he did, and he said goodbye and went back into his house, leaving us in darkness and silence. Did I say silence?

Twenty seconds after the man entered his house, and when we had already turned around and were getting ready to resume our trot, the second part of the miracle happened: the most heavenly female hurricane scream was heard. The woman of the house started yelling at that mountain of a man at such a volume that the dogs chasing us must had turned around in terror. The “talk” lasted about 30 seconds, and we didn’t move from where we were. The door opened again, and the man came back out and headed towards the gate where we were. He told us he would give us a ride, to jump onto the platform of his pick-up. On top of the driver’s cab he had one of those brackets to put powerful spotlights on, and that’s where we held on as he drove us all the way to our car. I have a selfie of the three of us holding on to that bar which is happiness personified. A thousand thanks, both to the man who drove us -and to the lady who put him back to do it right away. He didn’t even last half a round.

The car was intact, the fire had not reached this part of the road. So exhausted but safe, we buzzed off in search of the Hanga Roa fire station to warn them of the environmental disaster that was occurring so that they would rush out to put out the fire. And there we arrived. Like three assholes.

Sometimes “everything fits together like a sidereal puzzle”. It turns out that there was a confluence of several aspects discussed in previous posts. On the one hand, the island is divided into parcels -almost all of them without physical delimitation- among the members of the Rapa Nui people. And within them, they are sovereign. On the other hand, they still observe obsolete cultivation techniques, such as stubble burning. And even further, the eucalyptus trees. Yes. Eucalyptus trees. It turns out that eucalyptus trees, when they are large and mature, are not seriously affected by fire. They burn, yes, but only on the outside, and it is somehow beneficial, because the fire does burn the bushes around them that compete with them for nutrients.

So that day apparently someone had decided to burn stubble. Since nobody lives outside the village, and since the “plots” are, in reality, land with planted eucalyptus trees that are “immune” to fire, nobody truly pays attention to it. And even less the firemen, that there are not so many, and they have only a truck -well, it is actually a big van-, that reserve themselves to solve a real problem that could happen in the city, not something that happens with certain frequency in the island, that is known to all, and harms nobody.

Well, known to all but the three oblivious urbanites but bumper sticker environmentalists trying to save the world. When no one was asking to be saved 🤨. The foreigners trying to fix the problems that only foreigners see.

When I finally arrived at the Chez Joseph hotel, my man Joseph was very worried. It was already very late and he had tried to reach me – in Hanga Roa there are no more than 3 places to go at night and everything was already closed. Imagine, 7000 people is the stable population, like a small neighborhood. Everyone knows everyone there, and each one of us tourists can be reached in case of need. But neither I nor his Jeep had been in sight. The talk he gave me went as far as his relationship with his client – which was me – would allow. I thanked him for his concern because, clearly, what we did was unusual and, more importantly, inappropriate.

The next day we were sore all over and stayed in town lounging around. In the evening I was taken to a “locals” pub, in a fishermen’s harbor a bit far from the tourist area. There I met a Spaniard, from Malaga I think, who immediately became my idol: he lived alone on a Catalina type boat (one mast) and, as the legal period of visit in different countries is 90 days, he spent his time circulating between Rapa Nui, Galapagos, the Cook Islands and Hawaii. Counting the days he spent sailing from island to island, he never exceeded the legal limit in each country. I don’t know if he was cocky with me in a galactic way, but that way of living is one of those things that makes you think, doesn’t it?

I said goodbye to my Norwegian companions and returned to Santiago de Chile. They continued on to Vanuatu, to enjoy its beaches. Nice people, I kept in touch with good old ET for many years. Considering how poorly I spoke English at the time, they made a great effort so that we could understand each other. I will always remember those extraordinarily large black pupils with which they looked at me. What a great trip (wink wink) they had surrounded by Moais! It had to be anthological! 🤣

Rapa Nui, what a fascinating place.