Easter Island

The single biggest puzzle Easter Island still hands visitors is how a Polynesian society without draft animals, wheels or metal tools moved statues weighing as much as 80 tons for kilometres over rough ground. For decades the default answer was rollers and ropes, dragged flat. But the Rapa Nui themselves always said the moai "walked" — and experimental archaeology backs them up: teams pulling ropes attached to a wide, D-shaped base can rock an upright statue side to side and inch it forward, matching the forward-leaning, waddling posture carved into the statues meant for the roads. Look closely at the quarry at Rano Raraku and you can see the evidence of the theory's other half: dozens of moai abandoned mid-carve, including one unfinished giant over 21 metres long, still fused to the volcanic rock its makers never freed it from.

The island's popular reputation as a case study in self-destruction — a society that felled every tree and collapsed into civil war before Europeans arrived — has taken a beating from more recent research. Radiocarbon dates now show statue-building continued steadily for roughly three centuries and that the population was still large and organised when the first Dutch ships anchored in 1722. The demographic disaster came after contact: Peruvian slave raids in the 1860s and introduced disease reduced the population to barely over a hundred people within a generation, a collapse imposed from outside rather than one the islanders brought on themselves.

By the time European ships arrived, the moai-carving era had already given way to a stranger ritual. At the clifftop ceremonial village of Orongo, clans competed each spring in the Tangata Manu — the Birdman contest — sending a representative scrambling down a sea cliff, swimming through shark-infested water to the offshore islet of Motu Nui, and racing back with the season's first sooty tern egg intact. Winning made a chief's sponsor sacred for a year. The stone houses and petroglyphs at Orongo are the physical record of a culture that had already moved past the moai and found a new way to compete for status.

Getting there

2086 km from Adamstown. Mataveri International Airport (IPC) is about 9 km away.