A Moai Statue stood sentinel over the tender pier where we first arrived on Rapa Nui — like it was waiting to greet us! The Rapa Nui say the Moai were carved to honor someone (a chief or leader) who had died.
The Moai were set up on a platform, looking out over the clan, giving them “mana” — good fortune. The most important feature was their eyes. The coral eyes were placed when the Moai was delivered to the clan. The pupils were either red scoria or black obsidian.
The Moai were carved at the quarry, sometimes into the mountain itself. When the Rapa Nui stopped making Moai, the quarry was abandoned.
It now has a LOT of statues — some standing, some half buried, many just waiting for their artists to come finish their work.
To us, with our cars, it is easy to say Ahu Tongariki, the ceremonial platform featuring 15 Moai, is only located about a mile from the Rano Raraku quarry.
Now imagine you are the Rapa Nui, 400 years ago, ready to move a statue that weighs TONS (actual thousands of pounds in stone) most of a mile. Did we mention there was no road at the time? Oh, and if the Moai fell and touched the ground it lost its Mana! It had to be abandoned and a new one made, from scratch!
Suddenly that mile sounds like a long way! Even harder than the 5k fun run that Flat Friends did at school, and this is three kilometers shorter!
In the 1980s the Rapa Nui sent one of the smaller Moai on tour to Japan. It went to Osaka and Tokyo. Thanks to its tour, and the Japanese people working with the Rapa Nui and Chile, these 15 now stand together on one platform! Sounds to us like this guy, standing alone up front in the bottom photo, is a rock star!
It can be hard to decide what to do in any given port. Flat Halena has not traveled as much as Flat Hal.
For her everything we see is amazing, and feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
In Rapa Nui, the Flat Friends chose the tour they hoped would show them as much as possible. We wanted to see as much of the island and as many Moai as we could!
It felt like an added bonus to view the Moai in every phase of their existence. We saw them in the quarry “still being made,” standing tall on their platforms, and even toppled over by natural disasters or past conflicts.
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