Exploring Southern Easter Island

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WELL GOOD morning. I'm on the southern side of the island now, just on the other side of the airport. This is the first of several structures I've seen today. There's a wall built here as part of a platform for a gravesite. There's another one over here as well. This one here was apparently built by the descendants of the Inca in the 1500s. It has got very much the Incan style to it. Whereas this one was built to the Polynesian Easter Island people's style. There was believed to have been a competition here. When the South Americans arrived, they discovered the Polynesians had already been here for a couple of centuries so they ran this competition where the Incas built this wall and the locals built this one. This is the only example of Incan architecture outside the South American continent. It is really fascinating. Further up the coast here, this was where I was yesterday. Now I'm going to head up to this other wall and keep travelling.

Over here we've got the Polynesian wall. As mentioned before there's the Incan wall over there where all those people are and this is the Polynesian wall. There's a big difference in the construction here.

Well good morning. I'm on top of one of the three big volcanoes on Easter Island. This is at the southern end of the island. Offshore there you can see a little island. There are actually three islands there. You can just see the peak of the first one, then two behind it. The biggest one is called Motunui. There used to be a competition amongst the indigenous people here. They used to go from this little village here. You can see these they kind of look like hobbit houses. You can see their tiny entrances at the start of the houses. They used to climb down the cliff here, around 300 metres. Then they would swim nearly a kilometre across to the island. They used to collect an egg, a tiny egg, then swim all the way back and climb back up. The first person to make it back with their egg intact won this competition. This village was only used for the annual competition around September each year.

Okay I'm now at the edge of a very spectacular crater. There's still some of those houses there and it's quite swampy in there with the ocean separated out. It's about three hundred metres deep. the swamp sheltered down there has its own microclimate and a unique ecosystem. It is really fascinating.

I've now reached the Akivi monuments. These moai are quite unique. They face towards the ocean. I've come to discover that most of the other moai on the island (except the ones on the volcanic hill yesterday) all face inland to the centre of the island. The reason these ones face the ocean is because they represent the original ancestors who came across the ocean probably from the Marquesas Islands, somewhere like that. So, these moai are looking out over the ocean towards their ancestral homeland. This has also been specially aligned to Orion's Belt.

I'm now overlooking the crater where the (moai) topknots were carved out and from here transported to their moai up to 12 kilometres away across the island.