Cave G7, photo: Zbigniew Grzela

Rapa Nui

RapaNui (Easter Island) is a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It formed as a result of volcanic activity over a hot spot under the Pacific tectonic plate. The island has a shape resembling a triangle with the sides measuring, respectively, 23, 16, 16 km. Its land area equals 160 km². This small piece of land has three volcanoes: Rano Kau, Poike and the largest Naunga Terevaka reaching the altitude of 530 m. The hilly landscape of the island is spotted with smaller volcanic cones. Due to its geographical location near the Tropic of Capricorn Rapa Nui has a warm and humid climate with frequent strong winds. Despite good conditions for vegetation growth the island lacks trees except couple of areas with artificialIy i ntroduced eucalyptus.
The island is distant 3700 km from the coast of South America but since 1888 it is a part of Chile. However, its distance from the mainland and Polynesian traditions create tendencies among people to separate. The island was discovered for our civilization on Easter Sunday 1722 by sailors from the Netherlands. The discovery was even more interesting as the island in the middle of ocean was inhabited by the descendants of Polynesian sailors and South American Indians. Moreover, the island has 1000 stonefigures - Naoi - made by locals centuries ago. It is for these figures why the island is worldwide known.
The island returned to interest on the beginning of the 1950ties thanks to the Norwegian archeologist and traveller Thor Heyerdahl. His work concentrated on solving the mysteries associated with the lost civilization that developed on the island. Heyerdahl was the first who got interested in the caves on Rapa Nui. However, he did not leave any documents. In later years two expeditions, French and Spanish, started systematic work in the area.
In November 2001 took place the first expedition organized by Caving Commission of Polish Mountaineering Association and Aeroklub from Nowy Targ. It was led by Zdzislaw Jan Ryn i Andrzej Ciszewski. Due to the short stay on the island it was rather a reconnaissance. The best perspectives from the caving standpoint offered the steep cliffs of the Pioke volcano, falling to the ocean, especially in the area of the known cave Ana O Keke. The other area, of different character, is the lava field Roiho, created by the Hiva Hiva volcano. The lava flowed during one of the early eruptions and it has numerous caves with lots of collapsed entrances. In this maze of passages we quickly found that exploration is pointless without proper documentation. In this short stay, together with the employees of Chile's National Parks (CONAF) we start­ed working on it. In the little time we had, we managed to survey the longest caves on the island: Ana Te Pahu, Ana Vai Teka on Roiho, Ana O Keke on Pioke. We also documented many smaller objects.
Ourwork partially covered what Spanish teams did but we quickly realized that one of most famous islands is very poorly documented not only from the speleological but also from cultural and archeological standpoint. The caves played an important role in human activities on the island for hundreds of years and we decided that in the coming years we will start a systematic study of them, including hardly accessible places like cliffs falling to the Pacific Ocean.