Hits

Everyone who accesses the worldwide web finds his or her own pathways through it. We all have our regular sites in addition to the blogs we visit or maintain. I contribute regularly to the photo-hosting site "Panoramio" which is the basis of all the thousands of photographs in Google Maps and Google Earth. "Panoramio" is very good at providing statistics and I can quickly see how many visitors individual pictures have received. In total, my pictures have attracted over 438,000 "hits" or "views".

Currently, my most popular photo is one I took in October 2009, not long after I had taken early retirement from secondary school teaching. It was snapped far from here on the island of Rapa Nui - better known as Easter Island. I had wanted to go there for many years and already knew a great deal about that tiny speck of land set in a vast blue ocean.

Even now, I can hardly believe that I spent six days there, walking amongst fallen moai, visiting the quarry where these mysterious statues were made, talking with present day Easter islanders, scanning those distant Pacific horizons. To be there was of course so different from all the books I'd read and the pictures I'd seen. In my imagination I could feel the presence of that isolated Polynesian community that blossomed and then almost died even before the arrival of Europeans like my fellow Yorkshireman and hero - Captain Cook.

To the east of the island there is a revered stone that legend says belonged to the old ones - the makers of the moai. Nearby, there are the neglected archaeological remains of an old village. The hard volcanic stone is called Pu O Hiro - which means The Trumpet Stone and even today it is possible to blow giant raspberries through the blow holes at the top. They say it was used to call islanders to meetings or ceremonies and I can well believe it.

This photo has on its own received 14,118 hits:-

Why that should be I have no idea, especially as I took many more eye-catching pictures during my visit such as this one:-

It's the "ahu" or platform at Tongariki with the Poike peninsula beyond. This picture has only attracted 226 hits and the spectacular one below of a moai at Hanga Roa with a golden sunset beyond has only attracted 144 hits:-

Anyway, I guess that the only "hits" the original Easter islanders were concerned about were the hits they might receive from their chiefs or those who dwelt on the other side of the island. They lived there for perhaps a thousand years in perfect isolation. They had no contact whatsoever with anybody else on the planet save for occasional driftwood. As far as they were concerned, Rapa Nui was the world and there was nothing beyond those distant horizons. When in situ, none of the famous moai statues looked out to sea. They all looked inland, back towards parochial matters, to daily living and society - not outwards to the rest of the world and the possibility of other ways of living.