A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald discusses the beauty and history of the South American continent. An increasing mecca for tourists, South America is one of the fastest growing tourism destinations on the planet.

Easter Island Sunset, South America is growing in popularity, and is one of the fastest growing tourism regions on the planet.

To stand in front of the 15 gigantic stone statues at Ahu Tongariki on Easter Island is to marvel at, and be moved by, humankind’s inventive powers. Some visitors weep here and at nearby Rano Raraku. Many more rejoice in the power of the place.

UNESCO described these and other statues in the island’s national park as “a masterpiece of creative genius”. Jared Diamond, the scientist, wrote: “No other site that I have visited made such a ghostly impression on me as did Rano Raraku, the quarry on Easter Island where its famous gigantic stone statues were carved.”

The earth’s most remote inhabited island is full of ghosts. The statues, or moai, are visible reflections. There are 887 in various positions, from defiant, vertical prominence to impassive, horizontal repose. Those standing measure up to 12 metres tall. The longest, 21 metres, known as Paro, still lies at Rano Raraku, in the volcanic rock from which it was carved but never separated.

The moai represent old Polynesian kings and clan leaders. The ghosts of thousands more ordinary people hover here, a small civilisation that virtually committed suicide. The long, prone Paro must have been shaped when the carving had to stop. He was stillborn.

There is a terrible irony about Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, as the islanders know it. Although the moai are the main reason why tourists come all this way – Chile is 3700 kilometres to the east and Pitcairn, the nearest populated land mass, 1900 kilometres west – the moai were most probably the main cause of the civilisation’s collapse. The island’s economy now relies on tourists who witness the folly of the former islanders and of humankind in general. That is why admiration for what was achieved more than 500 years ago so stirs the emotions.

Some trees grow now on Easter Island but none of the Rapa Nui palm that once made a forest. The 15th century, around the time Paro was abandoned, marked the end of the forest. The islanders had cut it down to build canoes, to burn, to plant gardens and to transport their moai.

According to legend, the moai walked from the quarry. Yet, without the wheel or draft animals, palms must have been used to make ropes and sleds for islanders to manhandle the moai into place.

With the woods destroyed native birds, that had pollinated the trees’ flowers and dispersed their fruit, disappeared. Wooden fishing canoes could not be built, good soil blew and washed away, clan wars erupted over the last of the wood and the dwindling population took to caves for shelter and to cannibalism. The stone giants fell over, or were pulled down by fighting clans.

Archaeological estimates of the population at its peak are between 10,000 and 20,000; in 1877, only 111 people lived here and only 36 had offspring. The population is now back to about 5000, mainly Polynesians and Chileans. The legacy of loss has brought the people recognition disproportionate to their population.

The first Polynesians came here in canoes about 4000BC. We come from Machu Picchu, the lost city of another lost civilisation. This journey around South America provokes questions about civilisations, empires and how beauty and nature can endure but do not always do so.

Archaeologists generally agree that the first civilisations were those of Sumer and Egypt, both emerging about 3000BC. The Sumerians lived in city states with the first irrigation systems, invented the wheel and set down the first written stories. Sumer was part of Mesopotamia, the Persians made it part of their empire in 538BC and, through war and the British Empire’s redrawing of borders, Sumer is now in Iraq and the irrigated farmlands have become saltpans.

Ronald Wright, the historical philosopher, doubts in A Short History of Progress whether civilisation is a story of inevitable progress. The civilised British invented the concentration camp during the Boer War, for example; the circuses held by the civilised Romans involved slaughter for entertainment; the Spanish Inquisition, Aztec sacrifices, the atom bomb and Nazi death camps were conducted or invented by civilised societies. Argentina, where the Captain’s Choice journey begins, was a neutral country until World War II was virtually won, after which Juan Peron’s government protected refugee Nazis.

Spanish conquistadors had arrived in the River Plate in 1536, the people of Buenos Aires staved off British attacks nearly three centuries later and General Jose de San Martin declared Argentina independent in 1816, proceeding to free Chile and Peru from the colonial yoke and joining forces with Simon Bolivar, the other major liberator of South America. Travellers in Buenos Aires watch the tango in varying degrees of sexiness, visit the colourful, poor district of La Boca, buy football shirts with the number 10 worn by Argentina’s troubled champion Maradona and eat huge slabs of meat. Yet history is everywhere. The people once flocked to the presidential building, the Casa Rosada, to hear Peron lecture them. Now they stand reverently before the family vault of his second wife, Eva Duarte, who died at 33 but has become at least as famous as her husband on account of the musical Evita. And they still talk about their people – up to 30,000 – who “disappeared” during the rule of the generals between 1976 and 1983.

Such human folly has not touched Iguacu Falls, higher than Niagara, wider than Victoria and one of South America’s greatest sights. Yet the name itself speaks of lost civilisations. The falls are on the border between Argentina, settled by Spain, and Brazil, by Portugal. The name, however, comes from the local Guarani Indians, meaning “Great Waters”. There are 275 falls altogether.

The statue of Christ the Redeemer towering over Rio de Janeiro speaks, too, of the rise and fall of belief systems. Ninety-five per cent of Brazilians claim a religious faith, mainly Roman Catholic. While Catholicism declines in parts of the Western world, 45 per cent of the world’s Catholics are South Americans.

Brazil is one of the world’s four fastest growing economies – one of the BRIC nations, with Russia, India and China. Growing affluence has pushed many Cariocas, Rio’s poorer inhabitants, into favelas, or shanty towns, on the city’s steep hillsides. The biggest, Rocinha, houses up to 150,000 people and is an urban slum rather than a shanty town. Successive governments vow to clear the favelas and move the residents but the people stay.

Living is cheap, only a kilometre or so from the beach, and the infrastructure in favelas includes banks with ramps for the disabled, schools, health services, cable television, fresh produce shops and well-stocked butcher shops. The garbage-strewn streets are unsightly but there is no obvious malnourishment and no begging. An entrepreneurial local offers visitors the wonderful view from his sturdy three-storey home, for a modest fee. Mikhail Gorbachev came here during the 1992 Earth Summit, held in Rio largely because of the threat to the Amazon; Michael Jackson shot a music video for his They Don’t Care About Us. Bono had his hair cut here.

Other travellers are more interested in traditional Rio delights: a mini carnivale with samba show; the cable cars to Sugarloaf Mountain; a lunch of feijoada, the meat stew with black beans; the beaches of Copacabana or Ipanema, although those looking for the mysterious girl from Ipanema are likely to be hustled into jewellery shops.

Manaus, on the Amazon, is accessible only by air or the river. It is best known for its opera house, built by rubber barons early last century. The city decayed when the rubber ran out, until the government made it a free port. Now, apart from the opera house, the only reason for visiting is to explore, at least in a small way, the Amazon, which produces about one-third of the world’s oxygen and is the planet’s most diverse botanical garden.

Manaus is named after the Indians who inhabited the region but Brazilian Indians are a declining population. In Peru, dozens of Amazonian Indians died in June while protesting against government decrees facilitating oil exploration, commercial farming and logging. In Brazil, a guide tells us the annual rise in the height of the River Negro, a tributary of the Amazon, had reached 30 metres, against the previous record of 29 metres in 1953. He blames deforestation.

We arrive in Cuzco, the old Inca capital and the oldest continuously inhabited city in South America, after sailing through half of the Panama Canal and spending two nights in Panama City, where Donald Trump is adding his tower to the growing number of skyscrapers and the traffic makes Sydney’s look free-flowing.

Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1532, captured the Inca leader Atahualpa, held him to ransom and, although the ransom was paid, had him killed. The Spaniard then marched on Cuzco, near the Urubamba Valley, the Sacred Valley of the Andes. He wrote to the king: “We can assure your majesty that it is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would even be remarkable in Spain.” Francisco de Toledo, a Spanish viceroy, wrote that the Incan capital showed the work of the devil because “it does not seem possible that the strength and skill of men could have made it”.

The conquerors built a new city on the foundations of the Inca architecture; temples became churches. An earthquake in 1950 badly destroyed the Church of Santo Domingo, built on top of the Coricancha, which had been covered in gold, but the Inca architecture survived. Cuzco is a UNESCO world heritage site.

The Spaniards didn’t make it to Machu Picchu, high up between the Andes and the Amazon; a cathedral does not sit on top of the Temple of the Sun. We arrive on the afternoon of the winter solstice and the sun shines on the temple. If we had been in place at precisely 7.45am, we would have witnessed the extraordinary sight of the sun’s rays shining through a particular window at a particular angle.

The Incas, inspired by their sun god, built Machu Picchu’s temples, plazas, dwellings and workshops, overseeing agricultural terraces stretching down towards the valley. Although the Incas had no written language, nor the wheel, they knew about the sun and had a sense of engineering that enabled them to carve huge stones and fit them into place on top of a mountain. Yet their empire lasted barely a century.

Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen arrived at Rapa Nui on Easter Island in 1722. When Captain James Cook arrived in 1774, he found the Easter Islanders poor and miserable and the moai toppled. European diseases came later and Peruvian slave raiders, stealing men to work for British industry.

Now the islanders have escaped poverty through tourism. Cheerful staff at the Hotel Gomero offer fine food and smiling service, making the most of their ghosts and asking that we come back to try for deeper understanding.

source: www.smh.com.au

Chimu Adventures offers a host of tours accross South America. From Iguacu and Brazil to Patagonia and everywhere inbetween. Chimu Adventures are proudly associated with Boomers on the go – A travel club for over 45’s, offering discounted tours for baby boomers on tours all over the world.

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