Braddah Scottie is alive and well on caving on Rapa Nui...but his laptop is dead...

I suppose some of you may be wondering what has happened since my last post from the airport in Santiago. It’s already old news to me, so I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that I met up with the team around the time of my last post, boarded, flew safely here on luxurious LANChile (seriously—much nicer than any US airlines), arrived at Mataveri Airport, and have been on the sub-tropical, sub-paradise island of Rapa Nui ever since, and after some initial delays (permit problems that were eventually resolved greatly in the team’s favor, a ceremony to ask the Aku-Aku spirits for permission to enter the caves—and which was delayed for an extra day due to a local family emergency, training, laborious Spanish translation, and what-not-all), we did hit the ground and got UNDERground, and I have been doing the kind of underground archaeology that I love so well in some of my favorite caves in one of the places I love most on Earth pretty much ever since.

Our expedition is more than half over now, and I have barely begun to write up my finding and reports on the caves we have visited so far. One of them is Ana te Pahu, which is where I truly fell in love with caving on my first day here almost exactly seven years ago. Te Pahu is the Rapanui equivalent of a tourist cave—it has sort of a trail partway through, and a stone stairway down into the collapse pit at the entrance. Most of the tourists don’t go beyond the first skylight in the north section, and since the south section has a shallow artificial lake, they rarely go very far into that part at all. In addition to the ancient lake and dam to which I already referred, it also has elaborate fortifications, stone sleeping platforms, a second artificial lake in the far north which is dry now—a giant fig tree has sent its roots many meters into the cave and apparently sucked out all the water, and most of all, MASSIVE agricultural features. That’s right: cave AGRICULTURE (Jim Brady, are you out there?). I have a pretty extensive knowledge of the literature related to cave archaeology worldwide, and I cannot recall having seen the phrase “cave agriculture” anywhere before, unless it was in reference to mushroom farms in caves and tunnels in Minnesota, or maybe a pot farm that got raided a few years back in Tennessee...

And yeah, there are still a few skulls, but I will not post photos of those out of respect to the dead whose spirits may still linger in some of these caves...

Anyway, this will be quick, just to let everyone know I am alive and OK and having more fun than you. I am working on a laptop that fellow expedition member Liz Ruther was kind enough to loan me. When I get a chance, I will try to get to one of the Internet places and post this. First I need to go the bank and get some more Chilean pesos, since I spent the last of my pesos at the Mercado yesterday buying some cool necklaces for my daughters. I think they will especially like the shark-teeth necklaces. Internet access here is neither cheap nor easy—nor fast—and I actually have not been online yet since I arrived. After I had been here four or five days, I had a nice big blog post typed up for you all, with a photo or two even, and that night I hiked over to one of the cyber-cafes with Talina Konotchick (who has already flown home). Talina went inside to wait for one of the handful of desktop machines, and I fired up my laptop at a table outside. The computer came on, showed the first Windows screen...and then slowly faded to gray. I tried again and again, pulled the battery, brought it back to the hotel and tried it on electricity. Nothing. Or the same thing: slow fade to washed out colors. Jut said it actually looked kind of pretty. I said it would be goddamn beautiful on his laptop maybe, but not on mine.

So that’s a little part of the story for now...I will try to post this tonight, and maybe to get online at least once more before I leave on 19.July. I dread checking any of my email accounts right now, but if you would like a postcard, send me your mailing address at , and let’s say there’s a 30% chance you might get lucky.

That’s all for now—and maybe until I get home. Time to begin getting my gear ready for today’s fieldwork...