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TE PITO O TE HENUA
Surf Exploration in the World's Navel
By Greg Alder
(Surfer Magazine, October 2002)

If on your wall map a drop of water tracked down the West Coast of North America and off the tip of the Baja peninsula, it would pass directly over Easter Island, called Rapa Nui by natives, and absolutely nothing else before finally running into Antarctica. It rained almost every day during our three-week trip there, the most remotely inhabited land on Earth, but the island’s porous lava bedrock soaks up each drop as if it never existed; it might as well drop all the way to Antarctica. Only inside two volcanic crater lakes does fresh water collect.

Tiny Rapa Nui, ironically translated “Big Island,” is the easternmost outpost of Polynesia. But its original settlers, an intrepid band of ocean voyagers who sailed northeast into the trackless Pacific from the Marquesas around 400 A.D., called this speck of land “Te Pito O Te Henua”: The Navel of the World. After months of wandering the mid-ocean desert in their twin-hulled canoes, any piece of dry land must have seemed so to them.

But to me, standing only in shorts and a sweatshirt in the fierce southwest trade winds that whistled and whipped over the rim of the Rano Kao volcano, it felt more like the tundra. This was the Southern Hemisphere winter and located some 3,000 miles west of the South American continent and approximately 2,800 miles from Tahiti, Rapa Nui is no tropical idyll. It’s temperate, more accurately, and especially chilly standing on Rano Kao, 900 feet up.

I turned around for a God’s-eye view of the island below. Shaped like a triangle, Rapa Nui resembles a crumb floating in the big blue of the Pacific, 14 miles long and seven across with an ancient volcano sitting in each of its three corners.

From my vantage point, looking northeast, I saw Hanga Roa, the island’s only village, surrounded by rolling hills, covered with wild grass and groves of eucalyptus trees imported over 100 years ago. The undulating countryside can be both tawny brown and brilliant green. Banana and papaya trees flourish throughout Hanga Roa. The landscape is both lush and barren. These conflicting characteristics make the Rapa Nui environment unique and hard to categorize. Katherine Routledge, an English ethnographer who came here in 1914 to study the land and its people, once remarked that Rapa Nui “is not a beautiful country nor even a striking one, but it has a fascination of its own.”

But even that fascination is hard to define. In fact, to hold any singular, clear thought about Rapa Nui—its people, its waves or even our sojourn here—is difficult. The weather turned out to be as confounding as the history of the island is fascinating. Every facet of Rapa Nui seems composed of opposites, absurdities, mysteries and things unexpected and hard to explain.

Our presence, however, was easy enough to account for: Greg and Rusty Long, Jamie Sterling and I met photographer Patrick Trefz here to hunt for surf. Not much hard information exists on the waves of Rapa Nui though. We talked to very few surfers who had ever been here, and even then garnered cryptic comments like, “The waves can be really big and really small.”

We brought complete quivers, from 5’6” fishes to nine-foot guns; we wouldn’t sit on the sidelines if it was small and we wouldn’t be unprepared for the big helpings.

Flights between Chile and Tahiti stop on Rapa Nui only a few days each week, and when we arrived at the sleepy little terminal it seemed like the whole town had gathered at the airport. Along with returning islanders and a smattering of tourists, the sight of us dragging giant board bags—28 in all—drew more than a few curious looks. As it turned out we had to rent a separate room just to house all our equipment.

While driving through the town to our hostel, we took in our island counterparts. Young, bronze-skinned men with long hair rode horses or motorcycles down the brick streets of Hanga Roa, with its one bank, one soccer field and lone Catholic church. Stray dogs seemed to outnumber people—the island’s entire population registers slightly higher than an average American high school.

Due to its splendid isolation, Rapa Nui has long been considered a living laboratory for cultural and environmental research—every visitor is an amateur anthropologist, it seems. And I have to admit, sitting there in the middle of the ocean contemplating what it must be like to actually live in a world this small and remote, it was easy to grasp a few hypotheses.

The evolutionary theory of “Punctuated Equilibrium” posits that there were long periods in Earth’s history when certain species changed little or not at all. These periods were then interrupted by short bursts of rapid change, whereupon a new species emerged. By the end of our first week on the island it became obvious that the weather conditions followed this same trend. The winter season here is volatile, full of unpredictable weather patterns and poor winds. When asked for a forecast, local surfer Panda would say, “I think the wind might change in the morning.” Even more frustrating were times when it seemed onshore on every side of the island, a peculiarity fitting of Rapa Nui.

It was early in the morning of our 11th day when the sun climbed over a hill to send blinding orange glare into our windshield. We were on our way to the south shore, hopeful that the arrival of an offshore breeze would have find some swell to comb. To our disappointment the ocean showed itself well groomed, but flat. After our usual breakfast of bread rolls with avocado or jelly and Nescafe, we made the five-minute drive back for a re-check. As we pulled off the road a wave marched in from nowhere. It stood up and tripped on the shallow reef of Papa Tongaroa, sending a shower of spit out its open tube. Surprised but not questioning, we immediately slipped into wetsuits and jumped off the black rocks.

Sometimes a wave is not surfed for its refined shape as much as its ability to provide excitement through power and peril. Such is Papa Tongaroa. The Rapa Nui shoreline has no protective coral reef and no natural harbors. It’s entirely edged by cliffs of jagged lava rock, with only a couple small sandy coves. Tongaroa is only a minor outcrop, but the topography extends out into the Pacific, its urchin-infested bottom causing swell lines to peak and pitch both left and right. The right slings across cleanly, though it has an inside section that does its best to drag you across the rocks. The left, according to our consensus, was better left unridden.

“Our waves have a lot of myth, a lot of devil,” Panda consented.

Before coming to Rapa Nui I could recall seeing only two pictures of it: one of a grassy hill lined with the island’s famed giant stone heads, or moai. The other of Brock Little charging down a very serious, steep right into offshore winds at Papa Tongaroa.

Brock and Laird Hamilton gave the surf potential of Rapa Nui its first exposure during a 1993 trip that was documented for an ESPN special and the pages of SURFER.

“This place was heavy,” Brock said of Papa Tongaroa. “If Laird hadn’t been there I probably would’ve sat on the shoulder.”

Heavy was right. Before we clocked an hour in the water Greg broke his board and Jamie was smashed into the reef, leaving him lacerated and shaken. Eventually the offshore winds that we prayed for grew too strong and our brief opportunity for the kind of surf we hoped to find ended almost as quickly and unanticipated as it had appeared.

In the remaining week we experienced the sort of surfing contrast that we had by now come to expect: daily surfs at some playful breaks near town, a brutal mission at a grinding left reef on the south shore that broke even more boards, and a single, memorable session at Mata Veri, a left point that runs beneath the sky-scraping cliffs of the Rano Kao volcano. But though the sheer variety of waves had been enjoyable, by themselves none seemed worthy of the miles traveled and days we waited. Rapa Nui’s enigmatic reputation had us beat. During yet another small and windy session, Greg asked me in defeat, “Whose idea was it to come to this place anyway?”

But soon he found reasons to ponder how soon he could return.

On our final morning we sat in blankets on a bluff above the sea and watched the sun rise over the sharp horizon. A chilly sideshore breeze hacked the miniscule waves—the whole ocean had gone flat again. Next to us, as clouds marched above through the yellow and blue dawn sky, a line-up of 15 carved moai stood like sentinels, mute witnesses of an ancient world.

When the first Polynesians landed on this island, around the time Rome fell, they began to sculpt these fantastic monuments out of the native volcanic tuff, and didn’t stop for 1,000 years. They hadn’t a single visitor until the wandering Dutch captain Jacob Roggeveen dropped anchor on April 5, 1722, Easter Sunday, and named the island for the auspicious date. Soon after, warring clans had toppled all the moai, which once circled the island. (Those standing today were re-erected during the last century.) These monolithic statues were made in the memory of important ancestors and the ancient Rapa Nui people believed the moai possessed mana, spiritual power, to protect their progeny.

Their size—up to seven stories tall—and piercing stare hold one in awe. Routledge further wrote, “The whole air vibrates with a buzz of ancient energy that once was and is no longer.”

To be honest, we weren’t feeling the buzz. We hadn’t a wink of sleep the night before because Luis, the owner of our hostel, threw us a going-away party. All our new friends came over, and music and singing and dancing lasted into the wee hours. Around 5 a.m. a few of us decided to drive over to the east side of the island, to witness the first light of our last day.

After the morning sky lit up, we motored back to town on the bumpy red dirt road, our eyelids heavy. Thoughts of packing for the flight and sleeping on the plane were all that bounced through our minds. But as we descended the hill near Papa Tongaroa, a deep-blue wall peaked up and unloaded on the reef, the lip held up by a wind that magically turned straight offshore.

Greg began to shout, but I just grinned.

Two action-packed hours later, after packing up hastily, paying our hostel bill and being rushed by our new Rapa Nui friends to the airfield, we climbed into a Boeing 767 and lifted off for the continent.

“That’s all we needed,” said Rusty. “One good day, one hour.”

And then Rapa Nui—Te Pito O Te Henua—the small green rock, grew smaller and smaller, swallowed by the blue vastness in which it floats, passing from our vision like a dream.