More moai and The Birdman

We had a tour in the morning and another tour in the afternoon. The morning tour was all about the bird man competitions.

When the clans here were facing deforestation as well as a lack of food, they began losing confidence in the protection they were receiving from the moai they’d erected. They conferred and decided they needed to find an alternate method of organizing themselves. They decided upon an annual competition to determine who would be the governor of the island. This became known as the Birdman competition and involved climbing down a cliff, swimming to an islet, finding a tern egg and returning it unbroken to the top of the cliff. You can read more about it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangata_manu

We visited the site where these competitions were held. It was a head shaker to see the cliff as well as the islet and appreciate what a feat this was. We learned that many died in the effort. (These competitions came to an end in the mid 1800s when Catholic missionaries arrived on the island.)

In the afternoon, we visited more moai sites. We saw the last moai to have been reerected. That was in 2020. Since then, the Rapa Nui government has decided to preserve and not restore. They’ll allow the fallen and tumbled moai to lie where they are.

We’ve now completed our formal tours and have a day at leisure tomorrow to relax and explore on our own.Read more