Islands in the Sun

By Nick Thorpe

There are, thankfully, easier ways to access the world-renowned wonders of EASTER ISLAND than by spending six weeks on a slowly-sinking boat made of reeds. An aeroplane from Santiago will get you there in approximately five hours; a supply ship from Valparaiso takes ten days; even a space shuttle can get clearance to land on this speck in the Pacific, thanks to the specially-improved airport runway.

But for historical authenticity - not to mention nerve-shredding adrenaline - it was hard to beat arriving at the world’s most isolated inhabited island after a 2500-mile journey on a 60-foot replica of a pre-Inca sailing vessel.

I first stumbled on the improbable Viracocha project after overhearing a conversation on a bus during a backpacking trip through South America. A US adventurer, Phil Buck, was planning a Kon-Tiki style expedition from Arica in Northern Chile in an attempt to bolster the unfashionable migration theories of Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl. Hearing there was space for a chronicler, I blagged my way aboard.

As the launch date approached, however, nagging doubts surfaced. Why, for example, did my eight international crewmates include a jewellery salesman, a tree surgeon and a duck? Why had the qualified navigator resigned? Did anybody actually know how to sail? Subsequent weeks confirmed that we were all involved in one big experiment. We learned to catch tuna, accidentally broke a few lee-boards, survived a midnight storm, and narrowly avoided being mown down by a Korean freighter. But we made it, and in the process gave a new boost to an old argument.

While DNA testing has shown conclusively that today’s Easter Islanders, and the bones of some ancestors, came eastwards from Polynesia, some scientists still keep an open mind on Heyerdahl’s contention that an earlier wave of settlers - subsequently wiped out in battle - may have come westwards from South America using favourable winds and currents. Unless someone digs up some new DNA it’s unprovable. But if eight landlubbers and a duck can sail from east to west on a glorified bale of straw, surely it’s not too much to ask to believe that highly-skilled pre-Inca navigators might also have done so, adding their influence to the mix?

Chile’s islands have long been fascinating crucibles of culture - not to mention nature. On Robinson Crusoe Island, 400 miles west of Valparaiso in the Juan Fernandez Archipelago, the isolation which plagued true-life castaway Alexander Selkirk in the early 18th century, has also produced a staggering biodiversity. With regular flights from Santiago to the protected island, ecotourists have access to more than 100 species of plant found nowhere else in the world. Stories of castaways and buccaneers have also left a unique legacy: I met one resident with an old treasure map who believed he was about to make his fortune from buried Spanish gold - though I believe he’s still waiting. Others, like the Indian prince I once met fishing off the end of the jetty, come simply to escape to one of the few places not (yet) irrevocably altered by 21st-century life.

That’s sadly more than can be said for some islands at the southern tip of Chile where the ways of the now extinct indigenous peoples are preserved only in museums. Take a trip from Punta Arenas to Puerto Williams, the last settlement before Antarctica, on Navarino Island, for a view from the end of the earth.

Elsewhere the local culture is so vibrant as to verge on the bizarre. Chiloé, a mist-shrouded archipelago four miles, and half a world, from the mainland, has a centuries-old folkloric tradition to rival anything by the Brothers Grimm. Chilotes are also famous for their seafood - curanto cooked on hot rocks in the ground is a must - and for their idiosyncratic way of doing things. I met a man there who gave a literal meaning to the term ‘moving house’ - he had used oxen to drag his entire home 100 metres down a beach for better fishing prospects.

Admittedly, this is almost normal behaviour compared to the rank eccentricity of setting sail on a bundle of reeds. All being well, by the time you read this the crew of the Viracocha II will be well past Easter Island, on a 6-month attempt to sail 10,000 miles from Chile to Australia. Good luck to them. In future I think I’ll be taking the aeroplane...

Nick Thorpe is a freelance travel writer and author of ‘Eight Men and a Duck: An Improbable Voyage by Reed Boat to Easter Island’. Published by Abacus , price £7.99. See www.nickthorpe.co.uk for more details. For information on the voyage of Viracocha II, visit www.xplorainternational.com