SET IN STONE

For two long pandemic years, Easter Island (known as Rapa Nui to its residents) kept its borders closed, limiting food supplies and cutting off tourism revenue. But as Mark Johanson learns, the islanders have emerged with greater appreciation for their community and culture and created even more compelling

-  Mark Johanson

I SAW THE MOAI for the first time at sunset, lording over the coast of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, like giant warriors armored in gold.

At an average 13 feet tall and weighing as much as 14 tons, these remarkable figures, set against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, looked more human-like as I walked closer. One was wide-eyed; another stern. Their neighbor up the hill appeared winsome.

There are nearly 1,000 moai (which means "statues" in the Rapanui language) on this Chilean territory. They are thought to have been hewn between the 12th and 17th centuries, after Polynesians voyaged to the middle of the earth's largest ocean in search of new lands, came upon a fertile, unpopulated island, and settled there.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, production of the moai stopped as the islanders faced enslavement by Peruvian raiders, escalating civil unrest, and disease.

By the early 2000s, the moai had created a $120 million travel industry-more than 150,000 visitors from around the world were going to see them each year.

And then, in March 2020, everything stopped. Fearing the island's only hospital (with just three ventilators) was ill-equipped for the pandemic, the island's mayor, Pedro Edmunds Paoa, asked LATAM Airlines to cancel all flights into Mataveri International Airport, the world's most remote commercial airfield. This effectively cut the island off from the rest of the world in a way it hadn't been since the late 1960s, when the first propeller planes crossed the South Pacific from Santiago. At the time, 72 percent of the island's 7,750 residents worked directly in tourism. In an instant, not only were there no visitors but there was little in the way of supplies.