MOAIS AND CO
Noeluna en route pour Singapour
Matthieu Vermersch
Tue 23 Mar 2010 06:00
-----Original Message-----
From: Marie-Anne Vermersch [mailto:mvermersch {CHANGE TO AT} gmail {DOT} com]
Sent: lundi 22 mars 2010 20:50
To: noeluna
Subject: MOAIS AND CO
We had an amazing day yesterday. We spent 36 hours on Easter Island,
on our way to Tahiti, and we found a very nice and very knowledgeable
Rapa Nui lady who kindly took care of us from 9 in the morning
until ... 1.30 am, when our plane finally arrived from Santiago and
made a short stop to pick up a few tourists.
Everything started with a breakfast in our hosts' modest wooden house,
located right in front of a few moais with the Ocean as a background.
The kind of landscape that you never think you'll see in your
whole life.
Rapa Nui , the original name of Easter Island, started when the king
of Hiva, an island in Polynesia that doesn't exist anymore, had a dream
in which he was told to look for a place in the East, where he would
bring his people. He sent 7 envoys to explore the Ocean and they found
the island. They brought cattles and plants and settled there.
They were very devoted people and they started to build huge statues
made of lava stone to honor their gods or spirits. The "moais" are all
around the island, but they were made only in one place, sculpted
directly from the mountain very far away from their original place.
Even though there are a lot of theories, nobody knows exactly how the
Rapa Nui people managed to bring the statues (up to 21 meters tall)
from the center of the island to the coast. But this is only one
mystery of the island ; it is impossible to talk about everything, but
if you are lucky enough to go there one day, you will learn about the
competition of the "hombre pajaro", the bird men, who had to
accomplish physical miracles in the biggest "triathlon"
you'll ever hear of ; you will be told about "the long ears" and "the
short ears" who fought for years and which almost lead to the extinction
of the race, about the grape plantations inside the crater of the
volcano, about the dogs which guide the tourists and the wild horses
off the way of the sacred shrines... And you will see the incredible
beauty of the plains, of the mountains, of the volcanoes, and of
course of the ocean, omnipresent on the island.
Every year, Ury our guide attends a big meeting with members of
communities from Tahiti, Tuamotu, Marquises, all the Polynesian
Islands, the Cooks and also Hawai, to talk about their past and their
future, but also about the news of their different tribes. They all
understand each other when they speak their own languages, even if
there is some differences of vocabulary.
Iorana... Ciao,
"Still have 5 days to wait" tribe...